In Thousand Hells: The Underworld heists, I’ve sort of taken on the role of the dad in that one tweet about feeding cats to coyotes. But rather than serving up pets to jackals, I’m dutifully feeding bands of doomed adventurers into the psychological, corporeal, and spiritual wood chipper of the “tactical narrative” game’s bespoke hellscapes.
Those hellscapes—from the primordial twilight taigas of the Midnight North, to the melting fever-dream dominion of the Hell of Nightmares—form a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of abyssal imagination. Made by the developer behind the phenomenal King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages games, its pedigree is obvious as each game guides my hand-picked party of hell raiders through encounters rich with the implied culture, tradition, and history of their respective afterlives.
I just wish I weren’t spending quite as much time feeling like my efforts are futile.
A game of Thousand Hells, designed for quicker, more repeatable sessions than developer A Sharp’s prior work, begins in the Eternal City, a metropolis where the thousand worlds conjoin, and from which daring (or foolish) heroes can embark for their thousand associated underworlds. After a quick character creation process, I’m given a task by a benefactor—reclaiming the spirits of two murdered princes, for example—that I’ll need to embark into one of four hells to complete.
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If I hope to have any chance of survival, however, I’ll need a party, gathered through a team-building process in which I’m cobbling together an incomplete picture of my potential recruits’ talents and traits. Those traits will serve as Thousand Hells’ basic gameplay mechanic: As my party and I embark for more demonic climes, I’ll be playing our traits as game tiles during the randomized set of turn-based trials we’ll encounter.
The better those traits match the task at hand, the better my dice roll will be for surpassing a challenge. If my party finds itself being forced to navigate a storm-tossed chthonic undersea, I’ll have better odds nominating our sailor or scout to direct us than our streetwise poet with a profound fear of water.
When I find myself with a well-rounded party, Thousand Hells feels like the unfolding of my own personal mythological epic, weaving together heroics and improvised cunning with a tapestry of otherworldly creatures and crises. My parties have hewed the head from a titanic eel on the banks of an ocean that has never known the light of day. I’ve bartered for my safety with a swarm of brain-bats by offering the pickled thinking organs of a renowned philosopher. I’ve looted the tomb of a tyrant-king after breaking the spell that kept his murdered slaves in ages of spectral servitude.
More often than I’d like, however, starting a new game will ultimately mean watching with growing frustration as my party is slowly ripped apart by a series of consecutive defeats when their randomized traits don’t prove applicable to their particular quest’s encounters.
The main issue is that, despite leaving the Eternal City with a party of four, I can only nominate one of my characters to do most of the work in any given encounter. They’ll be able to randomly draw on one trait from each of their comrades, but it often means an unlucky initial shuffling of talents leave me with the sour-tasting suspicion that a run wouldn’t have been doomed if just one of the skills that was wasted on my shaman was possessed by my cutpurse instead.
Even if I’ve picked a warrior well-suited for a duel with a bronze-skinned guardian demon, that doesn’t mean the talents most crucial for my champion’s victory will present themselves when I need them. He might be combat trained, but if I keep drawing tiles tied to his ugliness and religious devotion when all I need is his sword arm to swing, that demon will be free to dismember him without much trouble. And his injuries will only make his chances worse if there’s something else that needs stabbing later in our quest.
Thousand Hells boasts some truly best-in-class procedural storytelling, but it’s content to subject me to back-to-back miseries without recourse. Its hellscapes are worth the price of admission—but it’s a price with a punishingly sharp edge.
Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is available on Steam now.
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