There are plenty of reasons to hate the backwoods hellhole of a hometown that teen tearaway Elena finds herself back in for I Hate This Place, the gaming adaptation of Artyom Topilin and Kyle Starks’ pulp horror comic book series. Inside, it’s the remote shack inhabited by a creepy aunt hiding secrets about the fate of her lost mother. Outside, it’s almost aways night-time in the cornfields, forests and swamps full of ghosts, mutant insects and psychopathic suicide cultists making sacrifices to a giant horned skeleton god. Underground is nothing but mines and industrial bunkers packed with headless monsters and tunnels of guts. And every now and then you’ll pass a cow getting randomly abducted by passing UFOs.
As a player, we could add a few other niggles. Stilted drama from static or weirdly swaying characters. Erroneous speech bubbles. Frame drops, side missions that go nowhere rewarding and vicious bugs that attack you at the least opportune moment. But as a cartoonish distraction, there’s plenty to love too.
Played from above, in isometric fashion, we meet Elena – having lost her best friend Lou and determined to discover what happened the night her mother was kidnapped – as she makes her way back home by stealthing through an industrial underground bunker, lobbing tin cans to distract sound-focussed beasties and solving mildly challenging number riddles to open the digital locks to freedom.
The small open-world map of four main areas that she emerges into is beautifully rendered in retro ‘80s slasher comic style – the sunken swampland graves and tombs, the forest full of bloody altars and the crop circles of sacrificial rite sites are genuinely unnerving to explore. And with gung-ho gameplay discouraged by your limited weapons and strong, noise-attuned enemies early on, you’re encouraged to creep and stalk your way around as slowly and quietly as possible, giving players a real sense of danger and achievement in reaching objectives – the swampland haven of Father Matthew’s church, say, or one of the numerous save-point huts dotted around the landscape.
Once you’ve fully explored, though, there’s little more game to find. The main story takes you through four or five satisfying dungeons – bunkers, mines, underground mazes – hunting for numbers, keycards and documents while navigating monster nests, crunching glass and electrified pools. There are a few side missions, wherein you follow a screaming ghost in search of a portal to a clue-hunting minigame. Here, armed with just a souped-up flashlight, you hunt through haunted hotels, cornfields and forests drenched in otherworldly static for clues to a murder, only to be given no real reward or indication that you’ve got the solution correct – are you being Hercule Poirot here, or James from The Traitors?
Otherwise, I Hate This Place gives you a lot of content you simply don’t need. In a seven-hour campaign swamped with scavenger and ammo boxes to raid, it’s only the most hopeless Farmville addict that will bother clearing their shack’s front garden of rubble and building unnecessary junkyards and water pumps there. Crafting bigger backpacks is useful for weight management, but you can still run around while overburdened. And with the game’s early hours training you in stealth, you barely need all the shotguns, rifles, submachine guns, electrical grenades and flare guns you can gather blueprints for – we reached the endgame with just our trusty spiked baseball bat and some Molotovs to one-shot the bigger guys you can’t sneak by.
There are inventive challenges built in – Elena gets hungry quickly and a shortage of snacks will drain her stamina to zilch. Often, the tension lies in where the next bag of crisps is coming from, rather than the next bandage or ammo cache. Overall, I Hate This Place is an engrossingly dark but frustrating lightweight offering.
‘I Hate This Place is out January 29 for Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, PC and PlayStation
VERDICT
In terms of comic book immersion, the pulp horror style of I Hate This Place does a great job to suck fans inside the cartoon frame. It looks darkly delicious, right down to the KAPOW!-style crackles, snaps and crunches that pop out of the screen to highlight crafting fires, underfoot glass or dynamite fuses. For serious gamers though, it’s little more than an enjoyably creepy distraction with its main story largely a (crouched) walk in the park. Side quests are fun but anticlimactic while crafting and RPG elements are pretty much redundant.
PROS
- You can pretty much outrun everything if you just want to see the sights
- Both the main story and side missions have imaginative puzzle moments – the invisible corn paths, say, or the mine-bound fairytale
- Visually and atmospherically, it’s an involving pulp horror treat
CONS
- Any drama, suspense or sense of purpose is lost in the stilted mechanics
- Crafting, weapon development and home-building is heavily signposted but largely superfluous
- Combat is awkward: aiming guns and lobbing explosives use similar mechanics and are easily confused in battle