How Hell is Us Holds a Mirror Up to the AAA Scene

Open-world games remain a dime a dozen in today's market, and Hell is Us has arrived to show most of them up. While some major companies continue to double-and triple-down on the most bland, repetitive, and boilerplate conventions of the genre, Hell is Us developer Rogue Factor takes leaps that make it feel novel, refreshing, and above all, engaging.

Rogue Factor is a relatively small studio, whose catalog includes obscure releases like Necromunda Underhive Wars; Hell is Us is the company's most ambitious project by far.

The elevator pitch for Hell is Us' gameplay is rather simple: it's a semi-open-world adventure that rejects common mechanics like minimaps, waypoints, and immersion-breaking hints. It's not an open-world game in the same way that, say, Far Cry is, instead opting to present players with an obtuse and uncooperative world to solve, like a massive, dense Rubik's Cube. It's still stylish and action-packed, but players are forced to leverage their critical thinking to progress, solve puzzles, and locate points of interest, which puts it in stark opposition to its more expensive, paint-by-numbers counterparts. In this way, Hell is Us shines a light on the AAA scene's gravest sins.

How Hell is Us Puts Most Big Open-World Games to Shame

Hell is Us Turns Away from Most Open-World Design Tropes

The tropes and cliches of open-world design are well-known, but it's worth addressing some of the genre's most egregious pain points:

Exploration driven by map markers rather than organic discovery
Too many variations of straightforward fetch quests
Neutered puzzles with too many hints

Take a game like Horizon Forbidden West— a title that's generally considered to be one of the better incarnations of the standard AAA open-world formula. In that game, players have a seemingly endless amount of activities to engage in, areas to explore, collectibles to dig up, and NPCs to chat with, but none of these elements are incorporated in a way that actually requires the player to think. Completing a quest is often a simple matter of following a waypoint, completing an objective, and then following a different waypoint to the "turn-in" location. There's little room for surprise or emergent gameplay in this formula, since the game just tells the player where to go and what to do in almost all cases; Forbidden West's wealth of open-world activities can start to feel more like a list of chores to tick off a to-do list.

This is where accessibility rubs up against good game design. Of course, a game being difficult or confusing doesn't automatically make it good, but video games are unique in their ability to spark players' creativity, critical thinking, and curiosity—these are the facets that make interactivity worthwhile. When a game like Horizon Forbidden West or Assassin's Creed Shadows refuses to let go of the player's hand, its world loses its mystery, allure, and magic. Hell is Us seems to understand this, and it subsequently keeps its magic intact.

In Hell is Us, seeing a building or strange natural formation in the distance has the power to ignite real, tangible excitement, since it's never clear what exactly this point of interest will hold. This means that Hell is Us is able to offer a true simulation of exploration and adventure, wherein players don't know what's around the next corner. Such a template is essential for the sense of wonder and expansiveness that open-world games wish to evoke, and yet so few open-world games take the steps necessary to set the template up. Hell is Us may not be perfect, and many players will naturally prefer some of the aforementioned open-world titles on the whole, but it's hard to argue against its bold vision, which makes it at least more interesting than so many other, safer games.

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Action

Adventure

Open-World

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OpenCritic Reviews: Top Critic Avg: 78 /100 Critics Rec: 79%

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Released: September 4, 2025
ESRB: Mature 17+ // Blood, Intense Violence, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Use of Drugs
Developer(s): Rogue Factor
Publisher(s): Nacon