One of the coolest genres in any form of media is the heist. There’s something so compelling about putting together a team of experts and watching their specific skills get utilized and tested as the plot takes unexpected twists and turns. It’s one of the most compelling types of story out there. Now what if you set it in Hell? Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists, the latest game from King of Dragon Pass developers A Sharp, takes this idea and crafts it into a highly replayable, dynamic narrative game with a clever tactical twist.
While Thousand Hells may look like a standard visual novel, it immediately sets itself apart by not just being about telling one branching story. Each time you start a new run of the game, which generally takes about sixty to ninety minutes, you combine one of ten quests with one of four hells.
From there, you’ll create your character and assemble your team of Hell-Farers departing from the Eternal City, a Byzantine-flavored fantasy world with close proximity to the underworlds. On the way, you’ll run into randomized story beats, featuring meaningful choices and impactful consequences, making it feel like a unique tale each time.
While much of the game is about picking between options as they’re presented, which is compelling enough on its own thanks to the game’s sharp writing, there are a few mechanical wrinkles that make this a bit crunchier than your standard narrative game. You have access to a pair of resources in the game, flashbacks and inventory, that will allow you to make specific challenges easier. Worried about crossing through the dangerous forest? Spend a flashback to have a guide prepared to meet you there. Don’t know how to cross the sea? Good thing you can spend an inventory and have a magic boat with you.
It’s a mechanic that I’ve seen used extensively in tabletop RPGs, particularly those derived from the Blades in the Dark ruleset, and Thousand Hells finds elegant ways to make it work in video game form.
Conflict Resolution With a Tabletop Twist
Anytime you run into a challenge, the game shifts into its conflict resolution mini-game, which again feels like it borrows a lot from tabletop RPGs. At the start of the challenge, you’ll pick which of your four party members will lead the challenge, which will then shuffle tiles into two bags. One of them is full of tiles representing all the traits of that character, while the other has a limited set of tiles pulled from the traits of other characters. You can draw four tiles at a time, choosing from whichever bag you’d like.
The game then presents you with a series of three challenges to address that are related to the situation, and your job is to pick which trait tile to play on which challenge. Perhaps it’s as simple as seeing a challenge that says “demon attacks” and using the “Gvuzu is Combat Trained” tile, but sometimes you’ll have to make other intuitive leaps. Will my “Dess is Poetic” be enough to help “Talk to the Plague Victims”? Depending on how well your tile matches the challenge, you’ll have certain odds in the dice roll to resolve it. To see these percentages prior to commiting, you can spend Insight, but it’s a pretty tight resource, maybe to the game’s determent, so you’ll want to save it for critical moments. If you get four wins, you complete the challenge, but if you get three losses, you fail.
Sometimes challenges have little modifiers on them that will change up their difficulty with specific conditions. Certain challenges can be easier if you’ve already completed other ones, or approached the situation as a whole in a specific way. Options can also include supply costs, adding another thing for you to weigh as you make your choices. Occasionally, a narrative beat will add a third bag that has story tiles that represent rewards you’ve received for other challenges, like “Blessed by the Gods” or “Fine War Armor,” which often have better success rates.
Choice, Consequence and Replayability
While all these choices are happening in the conflict, it continues to be narrativized in the game’s text, making it feel like gameplay and narrative are directly intertwined. While it does occasionally feel bad if you don’t draw applicable tiles or don’t feel like you’re prepared for a specific type of challenge, this does help remind you to build a more balanced party. The dice can be a bit cruel, especially when you get a bad roll on a tile selection that you feel is a perfect fit, so I wish there were a couple more ways for you to put your thumb on the scale before rolling. Randomness can be the secret sauce to emergent storytelling, but it’s a fine line to walk without making it feel punishing or unfair.
Fortunately, failing a challenge, which you will do very often, rarely halts progress. Instead, you will continue forward with different consequences that you will have to reckon with. Losses in a challenge will result in negative character traits or injuries being applied to a character, and these can complicate your story going forward. Characters can die if you take enough injuries, and losing your captain will result in the end of your tale, but for the most part, things just move the story forward, even in a failure. The idea of failing forward is another one that’s popular in modern tabletop RPG design, and it’s wonderful to see it translated so well.
The process of putting together your team at the start of a run is an interesting one with more wrinkles than I expected. Based on your mission, you’ll want to try to optimize your party for the type of objective you’re pursuing, but given the long journey, you’ll still need to make sure you have a broad set of skills. As you’re interviewing the cast of characters you can choose from, you can spend a limited number of Connection Points to reveal more of their traits; otherwise, you are only able to see a scant few, leaving the rest to be discovered in the heat of the moment. The traits they have not only give them utility, but they also give them personality, making them feel well-sketched right off the bat.
Recruiting the Right Team
In addition to their positive and negative traits, each person has requirements for being recruited, which need to be navigated if you want to keep your party happy. Some don’t want to work with another specific person, while others want to make sure the journey won’t feature any spiders. I’ve had some real blunders while setting up the party, but they made for some of the most interesting stories. In my latest run, I was proud of how I balanced my team, satisfying everyone’s request, but then the first thing we wanted to do was conduct research at a library. Turns out, no one in my party was literate, so I was forced to make other arrangements, spinning the story out in unexpected directions.
As mentioned, there are ten premises that the game randomizes your story from, though you can actively select it after you’ve played it once. While they all have a similar structure, a journey to a hell followed by a mission in hell and ending with a return trip, there’s enough variation in the setups that all of them feel distinct. Each has its own built-in twists and turns that often present a moral quandary, meaning they can be replayed to see different results.
My favorite tale involved escorting a person who was (allegedly) secretly a killer named the Mangler Man to Soulflense Prison under the guise of pulling a job with him, but my real assignment was to deliver him to the prison itself as their latest captive. It provided a ton of emotional depth as I got to know him while also figuring out when to let my other teammates in on the impending betrayal. Importantly, the setups are not only great stories, but also great spaces for you to make meaningful choices, which is what the game is all about.
Every Run Tells a Different Story
The other ingredient in your tale is the underworld you’re travelling to, which is pulled from a set of four. They each have their own mythology, complete with different environments and demons. Hells in this world don’t always have a concept of punishment, but they are populated by shades of the dead who all have some sort of baggage to deal with. Each of them feels rich and distinct, allowing you to revisit previously played stories with a different twist on them.
On your journey from the Eternal City to the underworld and back, you’ll have a random selection of story beats that will crop up. These can range from encounters with strange and horrific mythical creatures or struggles with surreal and dangerous environments.
Moments in these sections were the ones that I saw repeating most frequently, probably because they aren’t associated with any particular hell and can show up on any playthrough, but for the most part I didn’t mind the repetition because there were at least a couple of ways to resolve them.
I wish there were a few difficulty options included in the game, as I think repeat playthroughs would probably benefit from more guaranteed successes when you’re trying to test where you can push the narrative. You can always replay your previous story right after you complete it if you just want to see the branching paths off that, but the random number generator can still get in your way.
While I feel satisfied with my journey even when my mission is unsuccessful, which happened to me more often than not, having an easy mode that tips the dice in your favor would make exploring different options a little smoother.
Rich Mythology and Memorable Writing
Overall, all these narrative elements have uniformly top-notch writing, with wonderfully surreal mythology that implies so much history through its lavish prose. I’m a big sucker for great proper nouns, and when I read about things like the Locus of Chains, a mobile prison that’s the manifestation of the concept of bargains, or have an encounter with the Audience, a group of unblinking occultists that hosts poetry contests where the loser is torn limb from limb, I’m all in. Even with all its demonic strangeness, there’s a lot of beauty among the horror, and the dialogue between characters captures warm, human moments that make everything feel lived-in.
To go along with the words, there’s a simple yet elegant hand-painted art style, with a different image depicting each scenario. These are often impressionistic enough that they leave some of the details up to the player’s imagination, efficiently crafting a unique visual hook. This is paired with some great music that fits the interesting setting, making encounters feel exciting, even though they are words and static images. While I understand that there’s a ton of words in the script, I do wish there was voice acting in the game, as it would help bring to life the storybook quality that the game as a whole possesses.
One of the best measuring sticks I have for narrative games is how many screenshots I take of great passages, and Thousand Hells has a healthy folder full of odd scenarios and unsettling quotes. Any time I open up the media section on my Steam Deck, I can be reminded of things like the bridge made of toenails and claws or the nine-foot-tall consul of the Infernal Chancery that smells of death and camphor.
The conflict resolution system was extremely clever at closely marrying mechanics and narrative, even if sometimes the dice rolls end up being frustrating when they don’t go your way. While certain story elements may show up a few too frequently, the branching paths help alleviate the repetition, making for a malleable narrative that feels like your own.
Thousand Hells succeeds as an efficient short story generator, giving you the tools to craft surreal and strange tales of hellish heists, full of clever twists and intriguing characters.
Review code provided by publisher. Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is now available on PC via Steam.
