Hellpoint Review
Like many before it, this week was eventful, but not in the fun way. As the protests against racial injustice and authoritarian violence continue, so too does the violence against protesters and attempts to silence them. It’s deeply saddening to me that this resistance to social change has persisted through at least ten weeks of sustained protesting. I know cynics throughout the ages have said that humanity is rotten but most of those people didn’t have toilet paper so I have hope. But, on the subject of humanity’s inherent darkness, this week I looked at Hellpoint, a game about humans journeying to the stars but being unable to leave their worst aspects behind.
Hellpoint is set on the space station Irid Novo. A triumph of engineering and funding, Irid Novo is a new home for humanity among the stars. However, building a space station wasn’t apparently enough of a challenge, so the creators of Irid Novo took the extra bold step of building the station in orbit around a black hole, because if a task is going to be dangerous, it might as well be as dangerous as possible. Unfortunately, like Citadel Station, Rapture, and so many others before it, Irid Novo soon falls to chaos and violence. By the time the player awakens on the station, nearly everyone is dead or twisted thanks to the efforts of demonic cults and vile gods from the darkness between the stars. So, at the command of a disembodied voice belonging to someone calling themselves “The Author,” players must brave the fallen station, slaying abominations, stabilizing breaches in space, and bargaining with the malevolent forces that destroyed Irid Novo.
Like many games before it, Hellpoint is a Souls-like game, meaning the game mostly revolves around the player moving from safe zone to safe zone, battling against extremely dangerous foes and collecting resources to level up and will lose all of these if they die, though they can be retrieved later. But what makes works inspired by others isn’t their similarities, it’s their differences and Hellpoint brings some interesting ideas to the table. The first and most immediately noticeable is The Clock. At all times, there is a sun-dial style clock in the upper-left of the screen with four noteworthy features: a gold ring, an iron ring, and two wedges outlined in silver. The iron ring represents the relative position of the black hole to the player’s current location and the wedges represent the accretion streams, the constant streams of celestial debris being pulled into the black hole. When the gold ring, representing the station’s position, intersects with either of these features, the game changes. When the station passes into an accretion stream, the station is infiltrated by both more numerous and more challenging foes, as well as events called Hordes, special challenges the players can take on for exclusive prizes. When the station aligns with the black hole, the game enters a hyperbolic mode, where all enemies are heartier and do more damage, but also drop additional rewards when defeated.
I liked these ideas in theory, but in practice both didn’t do much to impress me. The areas the accretion storms can manifest additional enemies are so few, I rarely encountered them and most of the time it was an additional enemy or two. I did manage to find and defeat one horde, but before I could claim my prize, a non-horde affiliated enemy ambushed me and punched a hole in my chest. I rushed back to where the prize had been, but apparently my dying had made it disappear and I was unable to challenge the horde again, making the whole thing basically pointless and deeply disheartening. I liked the effects of the black hole alignment more, but it still didn’t feel that interesting. The fact that it applies to all enemies was good, but the increased danger and rewards just weren’t that noticeable, except when it came to the game’s boss enemies. Hellpoint’s bosses, like all Souls-like bosses, are terrifyingly effective powerhouses and the black hole enhanced that well. I never managed to beat an enhanced boss, but my hope is that there is special gear or trophies awarded to players who manage it because not doing so would be a huge let down.
The next, and I think best, difference between Hellpoint and it’s contemporaries is the player’s ability to speak and bargain with the various demonic entities infesting Irid Novo. This isn’t true of all the bosses, only the few extremely powerful gods whose cults have led to the devastation of the station. If approached normally, the player will have to throw down with these titanic creatures, leading to, in my opinion, the toughest fights in the game. However, if players can find a nearby Dark Monolith, they can slip into a mirrored shadow universe where these gods sit, not awaiting challengers, but supplicants and will converse with the player when they approach. Players are given a few dialogue choices and, if they choose the right ones, are allowed to pledge themselves to a task for the god. Choosing the wrong options only leads to the player getting temporarily booted from the shadow dimension and players can easily go back in and try again. I don’t know what completing these tasks gains the player, because in 20 hours of play I only ever found two of the gods and their quests both involved killing a specific kind of enemy repeatedly, hoping they left behind a piece of themselves to use as proof they had been slain. I hope the rewards are worth the frankly uninspired tasks, or that at least the other gods set the players on more interesting quests, because what’s currently on offer doesn’t match the expectations of making a pact with a dark cosmic diety.
I think Hellpoint is a great representation of my favorite kind of flawed game. The developers aimed high and had lots of great ideas, but never quite matched what they promised. I can’t say I’m surprised, since their development team looks like it’s about 10 people and had less money to work with than it takes to buy a house. Like West of Dead, I like Hellpoint enough that I’m likely to keep playing it through the year, but for those of you looking to get in to it, I’d suggest waiting until you can get it for less than $35.
Buy this game on sale
It’s worth playing, just not at the price they’re asking
