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When I first played the demo of Hell Is Us on PC, I was convinced it would be one of the most interesting gaming experiences of the year. It presented a world without a map, quest markers, or that yellow paint that takes you by the hand to your next location. It was certainly intriguing. While the game was fantastic on PC, with zero hiccups and excellent visuals, playing Hell Is Us on PS5 changed my perspective and made me see it might be the best platform to experience this puzzling and eerie adventure.
Riddle Me This
Right off the bat, you can see Hell Is Us is trying to stay away from the recent action/adventure tropes. As soon as the game begins, after a flashforward of sorts where someone is interrogating our protagonist, you land in a country razed by civil war. From there, your objective is to locate your parents. How will you do that? That’s up to you to discover. There isn’t a mini-map showing the next location or even a larger map full of icons. All you have is a compass and a tablet of sorts that records important details to help you reach your objective.
This is the biggest allure of Hell Is Us, and a system I wish more games adopted. For instance, one of the early optional puzzles in the game involves a locked treasure chest. You find the first breadcrumb under a rock and get clues about other colored rocks where the key and the chest are. Yet, there isn’t a marker to locate these objects. You need to go off the beaten path to find them and memorize the locations. Fortunately, Hell Is Us has a great level design that makes things easier to locate, at least judging by the demo.
On top of that, there’s some souls-lite combat involved. I say “lite” because it doesn’t have the depth of other soulslike, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t challenging. You have a couple of weapons you can use and a Nioh-like ability that lets you restore HP by pressing a button at an exact moment. It embraces a more aggressive approach to enemy encounters, which is pretty engaging, especially since it adds tension to your puzzle-solving journey. There are more things to see in the demo, which I already covered here, if you want to look at them. For now, I want to move on to the PS5 performance, which is superb.
A Smoother and More Beautiful Experience
The demo of Hell Is Us on PC was terrific, but after playing it on PS5, I believe the latter is the go-to platform for this game. I did a comparison and quickly noticed how everything looked better on Sony’s latest console. Just by looking at the intro cutscene, you can see sharper textures and more realistic shadows, whereas the PC sometimes struggles with a few of these details, at least on High settings. Playing on Ultra might be the way to go, but it seems you need a beefier computer, which is odd, as my PC exceeds the recommended specs and still struggles to hit 60 FPS on the highest settings. However, it is an early build; things might be different once the game launches.
Another thing I noticed while playing the Hell Is Us demo on PS5 was the smooth framerate. I never experienced any frame drops. I was expecting a few frame drops when facing more than one enemy, but everything ran smoothly. On top of that, the draw distance was superb, as I noticed a bit of texture pop-in in the PC demo, but the one on PS5 never had any of that. Now, it might be too early to tell, but if you have both platforms, the PlayStation 5 should be the go-to option.
Regardless of the platform, Hell Is Us is brimming with potential. The almost one-hour demo was enough to convince me of its exploration aspect and approach to completing objectives. The combat, on the other hand, didn’t shine much, but it seems there are many systems that Rogue Factor and NACON are saving for the release date, and I can’t wait to try them all. Fortunately, this demo is making the wait a bit shorter, as we’re only a couple of weeks away from delving into one of the most promising action/adventure titles of this year.
