Hell architect review12/24/2022 ![]() ![]() It can get frustrating, especially when you’re forced in some missions and objectives to dig deep into the furthest reaches and your sinners tend to think it isn’t worth the hike. It turns managing needs and pathfinding into a slog, one where all your sinners are either too invested in doing the tasks queued for them, or not invested enough, or simply don’t bother to reach the place they need to be. Frequently, your sinners will stand around even when there are tasks that need to be done, or complain their needs aren’t being met even if there’s a path back to the base-camp area they’re just refusing to take. The game really needs this catharsis to bridge the gap between its faults, though. The systems are easy to understand, the writing is sharp, and while the resources aren’t obviously tallied at times, the clean interface allows for enough management that you’re able to figure out what’s what. You even get resources for doing so, incentivizing you to zap them to death in a variety of fun ways (seriously, it brings up a wheel with multiple choices). If someone annoys you, or won’t go where you need them to, just bump them back into Limbo and either pick up a sinner who will, or bring them back when you feel like it. In weaponizing the death mechanic, it actually feels a lot less frustrating to play Hell Architect than it does a lot of other survival builders. You’re about as much an administrator as you are a kid with a magnifying glass, playing with ants. Sure, there are the usual supply chains and the occasional problem where you have to move your base structures around because your sinners can’t move all the way back up through the chambers you dug, but on some level, it’s okay when they die and go back to Limbo. It’s the sort of game where suffering is a resource, and the kind of game where with a single right-click, you can select one of a number of ways to send your sinners back to Limbo, murdering their physical form once again.Īnd honestly? That takes a lot of the usual stress out of the average survival builder experience. There are even legendary sinners and demons you can use to augment your existing flock of unfortunate souls. ![]() The gross, edgy, and downright scatological humor of the setting is completely on display, whether it’s every one of your sinners working in the nude with only fig leaves covering their naughty bits, the HR devil who assigns you tutorial tasks while snarking away about how he wants to stop having to hold your hand, or the fact that the usual food and water that survival builders require take the form of “mystery meat” and “sewage water” respectively. You’re given control of your own personal corner of Hell to do with as you wish, gleefully forcing sinners to mine out their own torture chambers and make utterly repulsive food and drink for each other. Hell Architect lives and dies mainly on its atmosphere and setting, so it seems like as good a place as any to start. ![]() Along the way, gamers will dig for artifacts, research better structures, and figure out how to run a thriving Hell where they can torture all sinners to their heart’s content. To do this, gamers attend to their sinners’ needs (building them up gives them more hopes and dreams to crush) and eventually bump them off, sending them back to Limbo and giving the player “essence,” essentially soul energy that can be used to make larger structures. This lets players build larger and more efficient structures as a way to increase power and resources. As a junior manager in Hell, players are tasked with guiding a growing band of sinners through various objectives and extracting their suffering. Hell Architect is what’s referred to as a “survival builder” game. With its relaxed pace, wicked humor, and unusual setting, the game draws you in, and then its forgiving attitude towards death and relatively easy to understand supply chains and production lines make it one of the few welcoming entries to the genre. Hell Architect is a standout among survival games. They’re a hotbed of micronarrative and emergent systems, and when you find a creative solution to an issue, you feel really, really, clever. I can’t tell if it’s just an attention span problem, or whether it’s the highly technical details that I just can’t get my head around. I want to get that out of the way immediately. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |