Hell Clock review - A brilliant combination of genres steeped in dark history and culture
Mashing together two genres can result in a huge success, but it’s a very difficult line to walk. The balance has to be just right, with players getting something from both, complimenting the way they play. Hell Clock seeks to do just this, and I’d say that, for the majority of my time with the game, the two genres of roguelike and ARPG come together like peanut butter and chocolate. Which, for me, is a very good thing.
Were I to personally pitch this game to you, I’d use the tried and tested technique of saying that Hell Clock is X meets Y, and in this case, it is Diablo meets Hades. There are two major reasons to play this game; the backdrop, and the gameplay loop. We’ll start with the former.
Made by Brazilian studio, Rogue Snail, Hell Clock is the company’s first attempt at creating a game around a darker topic. Their past games have been colourful, almost saccharine, with bubblegum visuals, and cute characters bursting to life. Here, Rogue Snail’s latest game is set with the real world history of northeast Brazil in mind, and the War of Canudos, also known as The Canudos Massacre.
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While I urge you to read up on The Canudos Massacre, where tens of thousands of Brazilians were slaughtered by their own government, it’s not needed reading in order to appreciate the story Hell Clock tells. The narrative is drip-fed slowly, through conversations with NPCs, cut scenes, and dialogue between our hero, Pajeú, and the various enemies you encounter.
A massacre is already a dark backdrop for a video game, but the fear and horrors of such senseless killing is communicated through Hell Clock’s visual design. The team uses a technique from northeast Brazil, which has been around for centuries, and uses wood block carvings to create bold, comic book motifs, with brash, black outlines. The colour within goes to great lengths to make each creature and character pop from the screen despite the black at the edges, and it conjures a sense of life within the darkness of war.
With that in mind, I want to note that the player is never beaten over the head with the narrative of ‘war is bad.’ Hell Clock, if anything, is a celebration of Brazil, and its art, culture, and people. Something you can tell is dear to the studio, and this shines through in all stylistic choices.
Of course, there is an engaging game underneath the darkness, and one that pulls players in with a robust loop that constantly threatens to take over your evenings. The formula is split into runs, much like every other roguelike, but here, each one has a time limit. You get a set amount of minutes to reach the furthest point possible, utilising your trust revolver and a bunch of supernatural powers. Each run ends with a flash of death, and it’s back to the hub where you can spend soul stones to upgrade your skill tree, unlock new abilities, or tinker around with your equipment and relics.
Because each run is so bite-size, it’s easy to get carried away and play for hours, learning the enemy attacks, testing out new relics that apply buffs like extra XP or increased elemental damage. All the intricacies of an ARPG are here, and I spent several hours focused on how to craft a better character build with what’s in front of me. Did I want to make one ability the core of my build and equip relics to compliment it? Would switching out one ability, like my dash skill that damages enemies, be better replaced by one that conjures a shield around me for several seconds?
The combat feels incredibly satisfying, with movement feeling like Hades. It’s quick and snappy. Paired with the depth of attacks, some runs can make you feel like a God, but this of course depends on the random modifiers you get from trinkets that can only be found and equipped in the dungeon, constantly dropped by enemies, and are lost when you die. This ensures that no two runs are exactly the same, even if you keep the same loadout and skill set.
Statues throughout the dungeons will also bestow buffs, varying in strength, giving flexibility over your build on the fly, by shifting focus to something like defensive knives that spin around you, over the spread of three bullets that ring out from your gun. Hell Clock is malleable at every turn and in every moment, constantly shifting, but always under the player’s control.
There’s a nice amount of variety in the enemies too, from shambling zombies to monstrous insects, and the bosses are hideous in both style and substance, with the latter prominent because some bosses are based on real people who actioned the massacre.
It’s a shame that such variation is missing from the dungeon layouts, which become incredibly predictable after several runs. The theme of the floors in the dungeon change, as you make your way into the bowels of the Earth, facing off against demonic creatures, but the corridors and rooms barely change, leaving the repetition of runs feeling a bit too samey.
Though the action is always solid, and the meta progression back in the hub allows for experimentation, perhaps my biggest gripe is with the power creep. Most ARPGs have this mechanic, where your power creeps up slowly, in order for you to get a little further each time you fight. You see it in bosses, where it takes 60 seconds to kill them the first time, then after a few hours of levelling, it then takes 10 seconds, or less.
Hell Clock creeps so slowly after the first boss is downed that I spent many runs just trying to find incremental damage. A good example of this is the fourth boss. The dungeon corridors leading to the boss were a breeze; every enemy lay in a pile of blood and gore behind me. However, the boss took so long to vanquish that I started to get bored. Their monumental health bar was decreasing so slowly, despite my strength.
This creates an imbalance. The bosses don’t need to be easy, but if I’m tearing through entire floors of bad guys and then slamming into a brick wall, no amount of relic tweaking is going to help me. Instead, I switched to the relaxed mode for a while, which removes the timer, and I cleared out every single enemy I could find, picked up every gold coin to spend on upgrades along my path. And I got further than ever, but still, those big, hulking bosses, were a time sink that wasn’t fun.
This is something which can, no doubt, be played with in future updates, and I hope it is, because after many hours of playing, I was still yet to reach Act Two of the three I could see, let alone get to the endgame mode where things get even harder. Roguelikes are meant to test you, and force you to land on the right build, and Hell Clock offers that, but it feels like we need to turn it down from 11.
Regardless of this issue, I can’t help but love Hell Clock, because it exemplifies the reason I love indie gaming so much. This space offers unique, personal stories paired with enigmatic gameplay that refuses to let me go. It impresses at every turn, constantly surprising me. Even though I opened this game feeling like I’d seen everything within, several times before, I felt that glee of seeing something fresh, and I put my controller down having experienced something built out of passion.
Pros: Moving story, engaging gameplay loop, lovely visuals, fresh ideas
Cons: Repetitive level design, poor balance of character power
For fans of: Hades, Diablo, Nuclear Throne, Path of Exile
8/10: Excellent
Hell Clock is available now on PC (version tested on both desktop and Steam Deck). A review code was provided by the publisher. Read a guide to our review scores here.