Finding a random key card that grants access to crucial new zones five hours later is par for the course. Every single boss I fought, essential item I found, or critical path I discovered, was entirely by accident. Granted, it’s more or less standard for Souls-likes to not have a map screen, but here that omission makes Hellpoint seem more aimless than usual. More so than is typical for this type of game, the station is an absolute labyrinth of interconnected passages and regions that are dizzying to explore and there’s little to no indication of where you should be going.

“During my approximately 20-hour playthrough I kept swinging back and forth between adoring the surreal, occultist-inspired atmosphere and getting utterly frustrated at the sheer lack of direction and communication. Much like Dark Souls, it’s a world rich with palpable tension and mystery that lead you to pose questions constantly, even though it seldom gives you answers.' There are some books you can skim over, message terminals to read, and a handful of prompts at control stations here and there to peruse which add some flavor, but the majority of Hellpoint’s storytelling is suggested by its environments and enemies. That’s the entire plot, basically, which feels like a waste of the potential for this immediately intriguing sci-fi universe. It’s all here, for better and for worse, but its elaborate sci-fi setting gives it some character of its own and a strong combat system made suffering through the extensive bugs largely worthwhile.At the very start you’re plopped into a cloned body on a massive space station with zero explanation, left to fend for yourself against demonic entities and godlike beings. If you were to create a checklist of what makes a game a Souls-like, meaning it follows in the footsteps of FromSoftware’s massively popular Dark Souls series, you’d get bullet points that look nearly identical to Hellpoint: respawn checkpoints in a labyrinthine world, the loss of all currency on death unless you can retrieve it, slow and methodical combat with light and heavy attacks, as well as challenging encounters punctuated by enormous boss monsters.

Hellpoint fearful effigy