The archetypical investigation in horror is a couple of hollow-eyed, unshaven guys in loosened ties and raggedy trenchcoats, reeking of both inexpensive bourbon and post-traumatic stress. Even if they don’t have British accents, they sort of look like they should; they’re often academics, detectives, or some kind of law enforcement, hardened by human depravity to tackle the unknowable terrors of the night.
Then there’s HellSign.
You get missions in a bar from sleazy bikers, investigate poltergeists on what amounts to a dare, and buy your ammunition from a crazed survivalist who’s treating a knockoff Lament Configuration like it’s a Rubik’s Cube. The tutorial of the game is two guys in a van who send you in to investigate a haunted house with a flashlight and a meter reader, because if they went in, one of them would have to interrupt the story of his last drunken night out. You get intel from a mad cryptozoologist who has no internal monologue. Throughout, every single one of these people is so innately, determinedly Australian that I’m not sure how or why it’s allowed off that continent. This much local flavor, when present anywhere else but there, has got to violate some kind of zoning code. Some cop’s gonna show up at my door to inform me that they’ve traced my IP and determined that, should I continue, I’m at real risk of throwing shrimp on a barbie.
This is paranormal investigation in the gig economy, where you don’t pick up your next lead from an ancient tome of forbidden lore or some half-crazy professor who’ll get killed at the end of the conversation, but from some half-gassed dope on the next barstool who definitely did not give you his real name, is almost certainly full of shit, and who dresses like he’s about to get his pants stolen by a time-traveling T-800. It’s all so determinedly blue-collar that it almost feels like a deliberate parody. It’s Call of Cthulhu with a GM who’s six beers in and has decided he doesn’t feel like being murderous tonight.
HellSign, to pin its genre down, is an action-RPG with a heavy investigative element. You enter the game as a novice hunter, doing scut work for slightly more experienced guys who somehow make a living off of paranormal investigations. You do penny-ante haunted houses and run silly little errands, in a bizarre unnamed Australian city where it’s always half past midnight and every house in the residential zone appears to be the site of an unsecured murder scene.
Naturally, this is the kind of story that begins when something goes wrong. One of those low-paying, horrible jobs sticks you with a HellSign brand out of nowhere, which means you’re now a big deal whether you like it or not.
Each job you undertake drops you into a scene, where you slowly clear a house of monsters and/or search for clues to fill out your crazy handmade journal. You’ve got a specialized meter that helps you close in on active areas in each zone, letting you hot-and-cold your way to clues rather than simply left-clicking on everything in your environment. Each clue you find is one more data point in the local community’s understanding of the supernatural, which in turn makes it a potential commodity.
Right now, HellSign is an early access game on Steam, which means it’s basically a playable beta. It’s got a lot of atmosphere and its world is a really fun alternative to the typical warmed-over Lovecraft pastiche; I get the feeling that if Cthulhu rose from the river nearby, the local investigators in HellSign’s Australia would just pelt him with empty beer cans until he went away again. Yeah, they deliberately seek out the supernatural horrors of the world for a living, but that doesn’t mean they have to take it seriously, and frankly, they’re offended by the concept.
It’s got two big problems right now, though. The investigation is entirely playing hot-and-cold with your reader, rather than deducing anything from your environment or figuring anything out from context. It’s just a question of walking around with your meter out, putting in the time until you click on the right object.
Also, the gunplay is terrible. HellSign feels like a decent action-RPG that does not yet have a functional lock-on, or some other way to rapidly acquire fast-moving targets. The giant spiders that serve as the game’s entry-level monsters are actually really hard to beat, because it’s a complete crapshoot whether or not your character will actually target them. Anything larger is even worse, particularly early in the game when you’re using a bunch of equipment that, to go from what the NPCs are saying, you may have found in a dumpster somewhere. Later acquisitions like sawn-off shotguns, grenades, and bear traps can even the odds, but HellSign is one of those weird games where the small-fry enemies are actually the worst things in it. I should be able to just plink these things with my starting revolver, as opposed to running like hell and mainlining stims to survive.
These are fixable issues, of course, but they’re going to have to be fixed before HellSign is worth even a cursory look. It’s got personality to spare and I really do like its setting. After playing through Cyanide’s Call of Cthulhu earlier this year, I’m in exactly the right mood for a sleazy piss-take of supernatural investigation, as run through the lens of a giggly tabletop campaign. There just needs to be more and better gameplay here, or nobody’s going to stick with it long enough to see where this setting’s headed.
HellSign Early Access code provided by the publisher.
HellSign is out now on Steam PC.