Personal Choices
In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2022 (opens in a new tab), each member of the PC Gamer team highlights a game they loved this year. We’ll be posting new Personal Picks, alongside our main rewards, throughout the month.
I was late to the party on Hell is Others (opens in a new tab), partly because I didn’t know what to do with it. When I finally decided to give it a try, shortly after its launch in October, I still didn’t know what to think: it’s a top-down extraction shooter about a badass living in a ramshackle 1950s town, but the town is infested with vaguely insectoid monsters from another dimension, and there’s a gaping chasm in your bathroom wall dispensing prophetic advice and precautions. Not your usual black thread, to say the least.
It’s definitely weird and hard to break too. There is very little smooth integration: you are mostly thrown into the world and left to figure it out. This plays nicely with the game’s deliberately obtuse fiction, but unfortunately much of that “discovery” time is spent in the company of other players – many of whom, as the saying goes, don’t wish you well. Developer Strelka Games released an update in November which, among other things, made changes to matchmaking to queue newbies and veterans separately, and that helped smooth things out – it’s a lot more easy to complete entry-level quests when you’re not hunted down mercilessly by people already versed in the art of murder, after all.
You play as Hell is Others as Adam Smithson, a “fixer” who lives in the eternal night of Century City. The inhabitants of the city – the banker, the baker, the pharmacist, the gunsmith, etc. – need your help to complete particular tasks (mostly quests) in exchange for useful rewards and the ability to trade with them in the future, for things like medical supplies and better weapons. Mechanically, it’s pretty simple: you take to the streets of the city from your small apartment, search for equipment and loot in mostly abandoned shops and buildings, complete the tasks assigned to you and call an elevator to going back up is easy.
But the streets are teeming with creatures from other dimensions of all shapes and sizes, none of them friendly; worse, and far more dangerous, are the other Fixers on the streets with you. They are the other players, and as the title suggests, they can make your life in the game miserable. Some want to be left alone to go about their business, but others are brutal killers, and when you find yourself on the street, you only have a split second to decode everyone’s intentions: usually , that means at least a few balls will fly.
Matches in Hell is Others are brief. After descending into the streets of the city, you have 10 minutes to do your business and return to an elevator that can take you home. If you miss your deadline, you’re stuck, which means you’re dead. But only a few elevators are working, scattered at random places all over the city, and they have to be called when turned on. This makes for quite a racket, alerting everyone nearby that someone is looking to get out, and as is the case with extraction shooters, this is when things can get really hairy. Summoning an elevator isn’t yours: whoever goes inside and presses the button when the door opens goes up, and one of the most rewarding stunts you can pull off – not in terms of gameplay, but just for the absolute rush – is to walk into the room at the last second, swipe someone’s vehicle and leave it hanging.
(Another rewarding stunt: calling an elevator and, instead of riding it, leaving a landmine inside. Unless you’re the one stepping on the mine, of course, in which case it’s less rewarding and more enraged, and yes that also comes from experience.)
The top-down perspective of street excursions gives Hell is Others a bit more of a tactical feel than an FPS. But it’s still incredibly tense. You can hear (technically smell, but it’s hard to convey in a video game) other players when they’re close, but are they just passing or are you being stalked? Some bonuses will temporarily mask your presence, allowing you to close in on your prey undetected (or more effectively hide, if that’s how you ride), but others will enhance your senses, and so maybe that you’re not as sneaky as you think.
Weapon choice is also vital: right now I have an assault rifle that will illuminate anyone who comes near me, but that damn thing also takes 10 seconds to reload, which, d ‘after an unpleasant experience, is more than enough for an enemy with a sword to cut me into small pieces.
There are times when you need to hunt your fellow repairmen, or at least get rewarded for it, but one of my favorite things about Hell is Others is that for the most part PvP combat isn’t not essential: Bloodshed is always possible but very rarely needed, and in fact I only have one fixer under my belt so far. And that works really well for me, because it’s not the action that I enjoy as much as the exploration and weirdness of Century City.
And it’s deliciously weird. Hell is Others begins with a bonsai tree left on your doorstep and a note asking you to care for it for 10 days in exchange for an unnamed reward. It must be watered every day, but not with water — with blood.
The blood-drinking bonsai turns out to be one of the least weird things about Hell is Others. That toothy chasm in your bathroom wall warns you of a dark path ahead. The superintendent of the building, a rabbit, engages you in endless puns. You need to speak to management, but the elevator operator refuses to grant you passage until your credit rating is high enough. Balls grow like plants. There are monsters living nearby, and you might be one of them.
All in all, it sounds vaguely Lovecraftian, but it’s really more Cronenberg than Cthulhu, in a roughly 50-50 mix with Raymond Chandler. I still have no idea what’s going on, and it’s entirely possible that this whole dark and gloomy narrative is just a superficial facade – a Potemkin Halloween village that will crumble as soon as I look from too close behind the facade. But the more I play, the more I feel like I’m moving towards Somethingand it’s a lot of fun chasing that mystery.
The only big knock against Hell is Others right now is that very few people are playing it. A recent maximum concurrent player count was only 21; its all-time high was 937. That’s hard to top, especially for a multiplayer-focused game that relies on a healthy player base. It’s still easy to get in and play, but encounters with other players seem a lot rarer than they were even a month ago. It’s definitely less stressful, but stress is kind of the point, isn’t it? Hell is other people, after all, and just like in the real world, despite how annoying they are, it’s better with them than without.