I played the hell out of Hell is Us when the demo launched June 2nd – unfortunately it lasted until June 16th, but the few hours I streamed it felt like a carefully crafted glimpse into something bold and haunting. You play as Rémi, a war journalist dropped into the sealed-off land of Hadea, a region torn apart by a violent civil war and infested with supernatural beings known as the Hollow Walkers. There’s no map. No objective markers. Just your instincts and environmental cues to guide you. Forests stretch out with eerie silence. Derelict homes practically beg to be searched. Every visual beat is loaded with quiet dread and a sense of mystery. It all hits in a way that makes you want to stop and study the world rather than rush through it.
Combat is grounded in weight and timing. Rémi uses melee weapons like swords, spears ect, to fight these Hollow Walkers, who are immune to firearms. Combat feels deliberate. Stamina-based dodging and parrying require actual commitment, and mistakes are punished. You also get a drone that plays a real role in distraction and puzzle-solving. In one encounter, I used it to pull the enemy’s focus while I lined up a clean parry into another for a finishing blow. It’s a fluid mechanic that adds more dimension than expected.
Dialogue That Resonates
Dialogue is where Hell is Us caught me completely off guard. Conversations don’t exist just to dump exposition—they’re expressive, natural, and require diligence from the player to expand on it. Rémi is voiced by the excellent Elias Toufexis (Adam Jensen from Deus Ex reboot) which was a pleasant surprise for me; I went into this game rather blind, so when I stumbled upon a sole survivor, I was impressed by the way the game handles contextual conversation. It expands based on world knowledge and environmental story-telling that is retained beautifully. I can’t wait to see where it goes on full release.
This is a game that respects your curiosity. It asks you to explore, to piece things together, and to lean into the unknown. My stream chat was dialed in the entire time, throwing out theories about the lore and calling out smart details in real-time. There’s something so rare about a game that gives you just enough to feel like you’re discovering secrets that weren’t meant to be found. The dialogue system, in particular, left a strong impression. Every character I spoke to felt like they’d lived through something—something they weren’t always ready to talk about.
Hell is Us is set to launch on September 4, 2025 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. The team at Rogue Factor has something here that could be genre-defining. The removal of the demo only makes it more of a treasure for those who got to play it.
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