Previews
[Early Access Preview] ‘HellSign’ Is a Promising Action RPG Concept, But Needs Plenty of Work
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.
In the past 10 years since the release of DOOM (2016), we’ve seen a surprising amount of evolution on the core concept of the series. DOOM brought the series back with a clever push-forward combat system with a glory kill system that forced you to stay in the fray. DOOM Eternal added wrinkles to the combat by giving you tools that exploited specific enemy weaknesses, while also increasing the focus on precise platforming and narrative.
DOOM: The Dark Ages slowed things down a bit without decreasing the intensity, giving you a shield that added defensive verbs to your arsenal in a way that allowed you to be even more aggressive. It’s very clear throughout all these titles that id Software is very thoughtful about the ways they try to replicate the experience of original games in a modern context.
Recently, id hosted a virtual event to show off the latest iteration of the DOOM series, Revelations, an upcoming DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, which they promise will be a celebration of the entire series. Set after the conclusion of Dark Ages, the Doomslayer finds himself trapped in a purgatory, forcing him to rip and tear his way out of a prison of his own mind with the help of a mysterious ally. While they emphasized that this would be a narratively pivotal chapter for the story of the Doomslayer, they were keeping details under wraps, instead focusing on the level structure and combat feel of the DLC.
A More Demanding Challenge
One thing they wanted to make clear about Revelations is that they are going to be pushing the level of difficulty higher than the base game, challenging even the most seasoned series veterans. Game Director Hugo Martin wanted to emphasize that they’ve been listening to fans, so while it will be more challenging, the ramp-up of that difficulty is more gradual than in the DOOM Eternal Ancient Gods DLCs. The difficulty and accessibility sliders from the base game will all be sticking around, so you’ll be able to customize your challenge level however you want, if you find the game too punishing.
In order to prepare you to meet this challenge, they’ve introduced a new weapon, the chain spear. This can be swapped into your left hand, where you also use the shield from the base game, giving you a new suite of options for your tactical arsenal. Not only does it allow you to parry projectiles like the shield, but it also adds a grappling hook and dash to your toolkit, giving you ways to move around the battlefield quicker than before.
If you’re more comfortable with the shield, that will still be available to you, but Martin said by the end of the campaign you’ll need to be integrating the spear into your repertoire, as upgrades make it essential to your survival.
While id still wants to retain the slower, more brutal feeling of Dark Ages, they’re hoping that the spear will feel like strapping a jet engine to a monster truck, combining the best of the last two games into one violent package. It’s hard to say how this will feel without getting my hands on it, but a lot of the new skills appeared to add a dynamism to the encounters, particularly the clever-looking orbit ability that allows you to attach yourself to a monster and revolve around them, almost like an aerial version of the z-targeting lock-on from Metroid Prime.
The modern DOOM series has always been about finding just the right balance of giving you enough tools to make combat both tactical and reflex-based without making too much complexity as to overwhelm you. It looks to me like the chain spear will be a solid addition that adds exciting ways to close the distance or get around an arena, rather than forcing you to remember the utility of each weapon like DOOM Eternal did.
Six Levels and an Endgame Built for Experts
Revelations will feature six levels, including the hub, and will provide about 10 to 12 hours of content, roughly the same size as the two-part Ancient Gods DLC from Eternal. As Martin explained it, this will be divided between the main campaign and the endgame content, with the main campaign taking up about 60% of the overall runtime. After completing the main campaign missions, you’ll be given access to a wide variety of challenges that will continue to increase in difficulty until you unlock what Martin called the Uberboss. I’m curious to see how substantial this endgame content feels, as it sounds like it will take you on new paths through the previous levels rather than providing completely new content, but id seems confident that the challenge and spectacle of these encounters are going to be worth it.
The team said that exploration is going to be one of the highlights of the DLC, which is a fun prospect for me. The best DOOM levels are the ones that are littered with satisfying secrets, and they’ve promised Revelations will be full of them, including hidden recreations of classic levels. After hearing fan feedback for DOOM: The Dark Ages, they decided not to mark these secrets on the map, allowing you the satisfaction of finding them yourself. Every level is designed to be fairly maze-like, requiring you to retrace your steps as the campaign goes on.
There’s even the promise of Metroidvania-like exploration in the hub level, opening up more and more of the space as you gain abilities. The dragon and the mech will not be showing up in the DLC, but leaving them behind feels like a good decision to me, as they exhausted those gimmicks in the base game.
Smarter Enemies, Tougher Fights
Over the course of the presentation, they showed off a few more enemy options that are being added into the mix. In addition to an all-new Wizard enemy type, there are variants of enemies seen in the base game featuring new behaviors that change up the encounters in meaningful ways. Importantly, they said that there would be a focus on giving more enemies evasive AI, pulling you around the arena space to keep you from hunkering down in one place. DOOM has always been a fast-paced game of tactical chess, requiring you to scan the battlefield and prioritize the various targets, so hopefully adding more enemy behaviors to the mix will make for a fun way to add challenge to their already challenging combat.
In addition to the difficult endgame, id is releasing a 3.0 version of the Ripatorium, the customizable endless mode that was seen in the Dark Ages. This will add new maps, new levels, and deeper customization to the fan-favorite mode, allowing you to run through some particularly diabolical encounters. While I personally would prefer more focus on the main campaign of the game, it seems they are trying to cater to people who want more ways to push the challenge of the series as far as they can, and Ripatorium 3.0 looks like the culmination of that effort.
Final Verdict
The DOOM series is so much about how it feels in the hands, and while I didn’t get to experience that, they closed the presentation with a combat sizzle reel that looked like an exciting evolution of Dark Ages, a game that I thought felt great to play. The new grapple function of the spear allowed the arenas to have a bit more verticality than those found in the base game, and the visual design of the enemies remained consistently readable, allowing you to understand the encounter at a glance. The orbit ability in particular looked fun as hell, allowing you to dynamically move around the environment while still staying focused on offense. It’s looking extremely promising, but it’s impossible to judge until I get to play it myself.
After experimenting with the formula for over the last decade, id is hoping that Revelations is the culmination of the series from both a mechanical and narrative standpoint. They closed by saying that Revelations is to The Dark Ages what DOOM Eternal was to DOOM (2016), which is both exciting and worrying for me. In my mind, there’s a dial they’ve been tuning over the course of this reboot series. The dial felt perfect in DOOM, then turned too far up for me with Eternal, before reaching a great point with The Dark Ages, though not quite as perfect as where it started.
Time will tell where it lands on this spectrum, but the new chain spear seems like it’s going to be just as welcome an addition as the shield was in The Dark Ages. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations will be available for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam on July 7.
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