I was late to the party on Hell is Others, in part because I had no idea what to make of it. When I finally got around to giving it a go, not long after it launched in October, I still wasn't sur
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Personal Picks
(Image credit: Future)
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2022 (opens in new tab), each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
I was late to the party on Hell is Others (opens in new tab), in part because I had no idea what to make of it. When I finally got around to giving it a go, not long after it launched in October, I still wasn’t sure what to think: It’s a top-down extraction shooter about a hard-bitten tough guy living in a ramshackle 1950s city, but the city is infested by vaguely insectoid monsters from another dimension, and there’s a yawning chasm in your bathroom wall dispensing advice and prophetic caution. Not your usual noir yarn, to say the least.
It’s definitely weird, and a tough nut to crack, too. There’s very little in the way of gentle onboarding: You’re mostly just thrown into the world and left to figure it out. That plays well to the game’s deliberately obtuse fiction, but unfortunately much of that «figuring out» time is spent in the company of other players—many of whom, as the saying goes, do not wish you well. Developer Strelka Games dropped an update in November that, among other things, made changes to matchmaking to queue newbies and veterans separately, and that helped smooth things out—it’s a lot easier to finish up the entry-level quests when you’re not being mercilessly hunted by people already well-versed in the art of murder, after all.
You play Hell is Others as Adam Smithson, a «fixer» who lives in the eternal nighttime of Century City. The people of the city—the banker, the baker, the pharmacist, the gunsmith, and so on—need your help to complete particular tasks (mostly fetch quests) in exchange for useful rewards and the opportunity to trade with them in the future, for things like medical supplies and better weapons. Mechanically, it’s pretty straightforward stuff: You descend to the city streets from your tiny apartment, search mostly-abandoned shops and buildings for equipment and loot, complete the jobs given to you, and call an elevator for a ride back up—easy peasy.
But the streets are crawling with otherdimensional creatures of all shapes and sizes, none of them friendly; worse, and far more dangerous, are the other Fixers in the streets with you.
