Video Game / Hell is Us

5 Following

Hell is Us is a 2025 open-world action-adventure video game developed by Rogue Factor and published by Nacon. It is notably creatively led by Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, the art director on Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

You play as Rémi Letam (Elias Toufexis), an ON peacekeeper who goes absent without leave to return to his homeland of Hadea, which is torn apart by civil war. When he arrives in the country, however, he discovers that a mysterious supernatural event known as "the Calamity" has occurred, causing significant problems throughout the land and worsening the situation.

A demo for the game was released on June 2, 2025. The full game was released on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S on September 4, 2025.

Promotional Material: Teaser Trailer, Gameplay Reveal, Extended Gameplay, Release Date Trailer, Investigation Gameplay, Demo Trailer, Diving into the Dungeons, Story Trailer, "This is Hell is Us" Overview Trailer, Launch Trailer

Hell is Us displays the following tropes:

• The '90s: Documents found throughout the game show the game takes place in 1993. The Pocket Watch Research Item reveals it's been 26 days since January 1, putting the game's events around January 27.
• Ancient Conspiracy: Hadea has been host to three different secret societies who have been dedicated to understanding and battling the threat of the Lymbic Entities: The Order of the Eye, the Phol Guards, and Vigil. As of the modern day, only Vigil is still active while the former two have long been defunct.
• And I Must Scream: Timeloops are caused by particularly violent or hateful killings. Those within, both murderers and victims, relive the moment over and over again. Some of them have been trapped for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
• Anti-Frustration Features: While the game takes several inspirations from the Souls-like RPG genre, it adds several elements which make things easier:
  • Connections created and mysteries solved persist after death.
  • Enemies respawn thanks to timeloops, sites of particularly horrible murders and atrocities. If you defeat their Guardians found throughout the map and have the right item, you can close the loop and shut down the respawns. Some smaller areas also don't have timeloops, so you can return to them and finish side quests or solve puzzles without having to redo every fight.
  • One of your rewards are "tuning stones," one-use items that add XP to your weapons, letting you upgrade your loadout without having to farm enemies.
  • The game provides you with a compass with many puzzles giving you a landmark and direction to travel.
• Arc Number: 4. There are four types of Hazes, pickups have four different colors, puzzles usually require you to perform four actions, during the second act you seek four Keystones, and so on. Even extends to your weapons, which each upgrade raises the upgrade ceiling by four levels.
• Army of Thieves and Whores: The Palomists' Deimos Division is filled up with prisoners that are not only used to fill in numbers, but to commit war crimes against Sabinians.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Subverted with the Limbic Entities and the Haze. As demonstrated by the red-masked woman, defeating the Haze does not stop Limbic Entities, it does no damage to them and only renders them temporarily vulnerable before the Haze respawns after a short time. Either failing to realize this, or losing track of time while dealing with the Haze and not paying attention to the Walker, is what leads to her death.
  • Also inverted; Hazes are more dangerous than Walkers.
• Backtracking: Advancing the plot usually requires reinterviewing subjects about new information you've learned, or returning to a map with new keys or other items to open up new areas.
• Beware the Silly Ones: As goofy as the movements of the Walkers may seem with their tendency to pose more often than Jojo's Bizarre Adventure characters while moving about, the Haze they release are as dangerous as that of any other Limbic Entity, and the Walkers themselves are just as capable of killing someone if not taken seriously, as demonstrated by the death of the red-masked woman.
• Chicken-and-Egg Paradox: The Limbic creatures can only be killed by weapons made with Limbic steel, which is made from their bodies. It makes Gildas Brom wonder how they discovered it in the first place.
• Civil War: Hadea has been torn apart by a sectarian civil war between the Sabinians and the Palomists. Rémi can find several people suffering due to the war as shown in the trailers, such as a mother who cannot feed her child and a little girl who is traumatized by seeing several people massacred.
• Closed Circle: Hadea has rigidly closed borders, with no one being able to enter or leave the country; Rémi's mother got him out of the country by placing an young Rémi in the back of a truck, even telling him to "never come back". It's so strict that even when Rémi took his opportunity to go there with the ON Peacekeepers, it "backfired" after the Peacekeepers chose to withdraw, forcing him to infiltrate on his own. Ernest Caddell notes that this was the policy of the previous president in an effort to control sectarian conflict, though once the president killed himself, the Civil War he was holding back was all but inevitable.
• Colour-Coded Emotions: The Lymbic Creatures and Weapons have different colors depending on which element/emotion you fight against/with. Rage, Grief, Ecstasy, and Terror.
• Door to Before: Both standard in dungeons and the key to solving several puzzles.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The interrogator admits that he usually enjoys killing his subjects at the end, but states that this time, it feels different since Remi isn't the sort of person he usually has to deal with. While not outright stated, it implies that as terrible as he is, he agrees with the decisions that Remi made in dealing with the Limbic Entities.
• Fat Bastard: The interrogator is a somewhat exaggerated example. He looks extremely fat, to the point that his second chin is nearly the size of his face, and he has few qualms about torturing Remi, saying that the only reason he isn't being tortured is because his employers want to use the truth serum instead.
• Fictional Counterpart:
  • The Organized Nations, whose refugee aid office ONAMHA is seen in the gameplay deep dive trailer, are a fairly blatant one for the United Nations: they even have a very similar logo, with the equidistant projection replaced by the Mercator projection and the olive branches replaced by wings.
  • By the way their priesthood dresses, it's quite obvious that the Palomists and Sabinians are meant to be stand ins for Orthodox Christians and Catholics respectively, especially since they both ostensibly worship the same deity.
• Framing Device: Remi's story in Hadea is framed around him being forced to recount it to the interrogator. Any time the player fails and Remi dies, the reset is explained as Remi making a mistake in his recounting and the interrogator having him try again.
• Gene Hunting: As stated in the Extended Gameplay video, one of the reasons why Rémi returns to Hadea is that he wants to find his parents; although he understands why his mother smuggled him out of the country to be raised in Canada, he still wishes to confront them and gain some closure.
• Genre Mashup: The gameplay is half hack and slash combat, half detailed investigation to advance the plot.
• Government Conspiracy: It's heavily implied OMSIF is a secret organization set up by a number of world governments and private interests to study the Lymbic Entities and find ways to exploit them. It's also heavily implied OMSIF was behind the civil war to begin with, since they have standing neutrality agreements with both sides not to interfere in each others' affairs so OMSIF can study the Hadean ruins freely.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: Both the Palomist and Sabinian sides have their share of saints and sinners, and both sides have legitimate grievances against each other. In the past, the Sabinians have traditionally been heavily discriminated against, often being the victims of Palomist inquisitions and pogroms. In modern times, the Sabinians are hell bent on getting payback against the Palomists and start initiating pogroms and ethnic cleansing of their own. For example, in Jova, the Sabinians invaded the village and wiped out its Palomist population in response to its populace lynching their Sabinian neighbors. They also don't shy away from using incendiary weapons on Palomist cities like Lethe. Meanwhile, in the still Palomist controlled city of Marastan, the majority Sabinian population is ruthlessly oppressed in response to the civil war, to the point where the Palomist garrison regularly rapes Sabinian women as a pastime. Despite all this, there are still bystanders on both sides who are doing their best just to survive the conflict.
• Guide Dang It!: The game is specifically designed to be this way, deliberately omitting map markers and UI elements that would otherwise lead players to their objectives and trusting that players are able to piece together clues and directions from NPCs to find their way around.
• Hanging Around: In the Acasa Marshes, you can find a tree with several villagers from Jova hung on display, some of them even being children. It's known in the country as a "Sabinian Family Tree."
• The Heartless: Suggested to be what the pale-white "Hollow Walkers" are. The young narrator of the Gameplay Reveal trailer says this as it first reveals these monsters:
  Mother always said monsters didn't exist. I thought they lived under my bed. We were both wrong. They live inside our heads.
• Immune to Bullets: When Rémi encounters his first Hollow Walker in the cave, he empties his entire gun into the creature, only for his bullets to pass through it, causing him to huddle behind a pillar. However, a warrior carrying a special Lymbic sword is able to fight the creature and its Haze, managing to kill them at the cost of her own life; Rémi picks up her sword and uses it to fight against the creatures.
• Interrogation Flashback: The game opens with Rémi being interrogated by a large man, being administered truth serum so that he reveals what occurred in Hadea.
• Late to the Tragedy: This tends to happen to Rémi, as he always seems to arrive at a location right after some major event has happened, whether it be Jova's military occupation, the firebombing of Lethe, or the numerous OMSIF camps that have been wiped out by Lymbic Entities. In all fairness, it makes sense in this context, as Rémi is no hero or chosen one, and the same war that has been going on for decades before his arrival was never going to wait for him to show up before kicking off the next atrocity.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Ernest Cadell, a Palomist farmer you meet in Senedra Forest, loses his three oldest sons to Sabinian soldiers. His youngest son, Atticus, nearly meets this same fate being in a prison camp but manages to escape.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Lymbic Creatures are one for everyone caught up in the civil war, having appeared suddenly and attacking Sabinians and Palomists alike, though only do so unless provoked.
• Permanently Missable Content: Good Deed quests can be failed if you advance too far ahead in the plot, or finish one quest without resolving another (for example, completing "Heart of Gold"^note Which involves closing a timeloop in Vyssa Hills and giving Atticus Cadell the keys to an ON truck to bring his refugee camp to his father's farm. before "Death's Door.")^note Which involves finding medicine and bringing it to Diana Kos at the refugee camp.
• Police Are Useless: The ON Peacekeepers who were present in Hadea utterly fail to prevent the civil war from breaking out and escalating, and they opt to completely evacuate the country. The few remaining ON Peacekeepers the player comes across are so out of their element that neither side even considers them a major factor in the war.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: It's sometimes hinted at and sometimes all but outright said that both sides of the civil war commit all sorts of sex crimes to the other side's women. In Jova, a woman who was involved in the lynching of Sabinian children remarks that she was "spared" by Sabinian troops who "remind her every night" of what she did. In Marastan, the Palomist garrison keeps a number of Sabinian women prisoner in a barn for "sexual relief" purposes, and aren't afraid to beat or even kill any woman who resists.
• Ruritania: Hadea is a rather clear analogue of a war torn Balkan country that struggles to find stability.
• Sequel Hook: After Remi shuts down the final Timeloop that caused the Calamity, he escapes the exploding lab, only to end up arrested by OMSIF, leading to him explaining the game's events. The Interviewer is upset he destroyed the timeloop, wanting to use the Hollow Walkers for technical and medical advances, though Remi is pissed that they had to throw Hadea into a civil war for it. Just as Remi's about to be executed, it's revealed the agent running the polygraph is Remi's mother, Aribeth, who shoots the Interrogator in the head, killing him, and rescuing Remi. The post-credits Stinger reveals the explosion revealed the Eye of God.
  • During the Keystone of Rage questline, you discover that the Timeloops can only come into existence on a 33 year cycle, implying Hadea is due for another round in 2026.
• Sculpted Physique: The most common enemies seen in the game are Hollow Walkers, stark-white humanoids that have large holes replacing the face and torso, with any form of individual identity being absent.
• Shout-Out: When asked who he is, the first soldier Rémi meets says that he is "OMSIF 0451".
• Sociopathic Soldier: After Remi finds his father Vitalis, the Interviewer reveals Remi had been diagnosed as a high functioning sociopath. Remi considers it practical, he never has to second guess his decisions.
• Souls-like RPG: The game takes several aspects of the genre, such as stamina-based melee combat, Story Breadcrumbs and environmental storytelling, and a very minimalist UI without quest markers or logs.
• Super Drowning Skills: Falling into water is an instant kill, although Remi can wade through water.
• Truth Serums: Remi is injected with an experimental truth serum during his interrogation. Notably, it is indicated to cause him severe pain if he doesn't respond accurately to the question he is being asked.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Remi's side quests are called Good Deeds, and many are life or death for the quest giver.
• War Is Hell: The first person Rémi meets in Hadea is Ernest Caddell, a Palomist farmer whose sons were killed by a Sabinian militia, who bitterly says that he would have joined a Palomist militia in revenge had he been younger. He later goes to the town of Jova where the Palomist population lynched their Sabinian neighbours including several children, and in return were massacred by the Sabinian military with the few survivors in hiding or abused. One regretful Sabinian soldier mentions his superiors check everyone's magazines to ensure they all participate to the ethnic cleansing or else be shot.
• The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): The red-masked soldier who saves Rémi from the Hollow Walker is fatally wounded in the process by the Walker attacking her offguard after disposing of the Haze though she still manages to take it down with her.