New Hell Is Us Review (2026)

Hell is Us' rich world and gorgeous design prop up its uninventive structure and simple combat.

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In Rémi Letam's defense, I don't believe he thought wandering into an active war zone in search of his parents was going to be a walk in the park. Still, I don't think the guy deserved to end up kidnapped, tortured, and hooked up to a truth serum drip: he did save the world, after all.

What is it? A creepy action-adventure journey through pseudo-Yugoslavia

Reviewed on: Windows 11, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS, 16GB RAM

There's a lot that happens before this. Hell is Us plays out as Rémi tells his story to an unpleasant representative of the Ziel Council (not the IIlluminati). He tells them about how he became an ON Peacekeeper (not UN) in Hadea (not Yugoslavia) only to break away to search for his parents, a quest that ends abruptly as he instead battles horrifying monsters called Hollow Walkers and ends the apocalyptic Calamity. A fun vacation for anyone.

As Rémi arrives in Hadea, it’s broken into civil war between the Palomists and the Sabineans, two ethnic groups that share the territory but have a long history of violence. The most recent eruption of violence has triggered the appearance of timeloops and these Hollow Walkers, or "lymbic entities," which have occurred throughout Hadean history.

The supernatural elements are creepy and effective, but it's the setting's roots in our present reality that make Hadea work: legacies of ethnic conflict, religious strife, nationalist manipulation of politics, and the ineffectiveness of outside forces to interrupt the cycles of violence.

Whether Rémi is also perpetuating cycles of violence by attacking everything he sees with a large axe is up to interpretation.

There were a few games last year that we didn't have time to review, so we're kicking off 2026 by rectifying some of those omissions. Sorry we're late!

Source: PC Gamer