Hadea is a hermit state.
Yet, when they arrive at the mountain range surrounding the country, the Peacekeepers are refused entry.
Here in the forest, Hadea feels peaceful.
Water laps at the riverbank and the wind rustles through the leaves.
It didn’t take long for the effects of the civil war to seep in either.
Not so long into my journey Remi reached a destroyed farmhouse.
All I had to do to find them was follow the sound of wind chimes.
I mean this literally too.
Hell is Us has abandoned maps and quest markers.
You don’t even have a compass.
Instead, you navigate Hadea by gathering directions or hints about the landscape from the characters you encounter.
(I always found this kind of navigation intrusive: GPS is for cowards!
And we certainly don’t have massive arrows in the sky telling us where to go in real life.
We’re not living in a Philip K. Dick novel.
Here some, but not all, of the information you’ve gathered is displayed mind-map-style.
Well I guess you better remember it.
Since the details it holds are sparse, it never becomes a distraction from exploring Hadea itself.
The opening forest area I explored has clearly been designed to ease you into this form of navigation.
Though, in these woods, there is only one destination.
I’ve read enough fantasy to recognise one on sight and enough horror to know nothing good resides inside.
(The soldier’s eyes being gouged out was a pretty good warning too.)
Yet, it wasn’t people I found down there.
There’s something stranger, something darker, something older than mankind walking its fields.
They remind me of Control.'
At first their pure white bodies and unnatural stillness may lead you to mistake them for marble statues.
That is until you notice the dark, empty, holes where a human face and torso should be.
When this happens, it’s time to get slashing.
Sewn together, the hack-and-slash combat and tactical drone usage create battles where precision can lead to victory.
But it’s that twist on navigation that brings the real magic of a chilling atmosphere.
