Rémi finds himself in a forest, with his peacekeeper suit on his back, but with his mission in mind: to reach Jova, his hometown of Hadea, a fictional and dictatorial European country at war, to find his parents and understand why. why they abandoned him. But nothing goes as planned. Everything is devastated, populations are on the defensive and strange creatures are spreading terror.
welcome to hell is usa game developed by the Rogue Factor studio and published by Nacon, behind games like Robocop EITHER Fall of Greed 2. A graphically ambitious game that sets the tone from the first images presented to us, but also in its approach as a third-person action and adventure game. The hero himself is already a case in himself. Rémi was taken from his country when he was five and grew up in foster families in Canada before joining the army at 18.
In 1991, when war broke out in his native Hadea, a hermit country with difficult access, he joined the ON forces, a kind of Blue Helmets called Peacekeepers here, but with the same colors and equipment. So, he ends up crossing the border and joining Hadea. This is where your lonely quest begins.
No information or help: “The player is tied with the hero”
Intelligent, but traumatized by abandonment, Rémi developed a “dysfunctional, withdrawn and emotionless sociopath profile,” explains Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, game creative director at Rogue Factor. Information that may seem strange, but that says a lot about the approach of the game desired by its designers. The hero is solitary, detached and driven by his only quest. Because one of the specificities of hell is usIt is their absence of visual information, of compasses to orient themselves, of an immediate map.
“We opted for the players dishes. The player will not have the elements brought on a board, it is up to him to create his own board,” he adds. “The player is the same as the hero who has very little information regarding the world that awaits him. He only remembers the name of his town and does not understand what is happening. The player has no more information than Rémi and the game develops on this point. “We did everything we could to take that into account.”
Therefore, no excessive explanations or easy help to the player is provided here. The studio explains that it wanted to go back to the basics of the adventure game by encouraging reflection and exploration. “Contemporary adventure games and role-playing games are often based on a theme of the unsaid, but it is a trope that comes from all these games: exploration, discovery, geographical location,” emphasizes Jonathan Jacques-Belletête . “None of the discoveries really belong to us. We have the objective markers and the ones we can place ourselves, a superpower to detect interesting elements at a certain distance. The rest, we have tried to get rid of to try to put the player really in the game “
Observe, investigate, think for yourself
Here is our hero discovering the environments, the people, the chaotic situation (a civil war with corpses of civilians and soldiers everywhere) and a mystery to solve about strange headless creatures. To help you, a tablet-shaped logbook with the stages of your mission, a progressive mini-map and your own markers. Throughout the adventure, you will also upgrade your equipment with a weapon and a drone to aid you in your fights against waves of enemies.
But lacking an actual map and list of points of interest, you’ll have to be resourceful and clever. And to do this, don’t forget to talk to the different characters you meet to collect clues and know how to move, and being aware of your surroundings will also be essential. Thus, you will learn that to reach the next point of your search, the farmer placed bells so he could orient himself and find his way. A little further on, a wounded soldier explains to you that the entrance to an ancient devastated citadel is made by following marks of a certain color.
It’s up to you to open your eyes in the forest. A smart choice to also stand out and attract players looking for difficulty, but that also immerses you more in the story by having to be more attentive, more observant and memorize the information.
After having been able to test it for almost 1h30, it is pleasant to see that, despite its very dark soulsThe game has neither the difficulty nor the approach. There is an atmosphere very close to the last of us with this hero facing an apocalyptic situation that seeks itself as much as it seeks itself. Here, the zombies have been replaced by supernatural creatures, but he must eliminate them anyway to find out what’s going on. The first hours of the game suggest a heavy atmosphere, in an environment as beautiful as it is devastated. The story is yet to be discovered, but the combat sequences (sometimes elevated), the search for clues everywhere without help – as interesting in the approach as it is sometimes annoying when you can’t find and have no support -, and the puzzle The upcoming games provide a wide range of possibilities for Hell is us. A dark side that is so seductive and stressful that it leaves one wondering.
The bet on the freedom left to the player is as daring as it is risky at a time when patience is not necessarily required to enter the game. The game is knowing how to captivate your player enough to make them stay and not frustrate them.
HELL IS US: available in 2025 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC
Source: BFM TV
