No Map, No Problem – Hell Is Us Trusts Players To Discover Its Wartorn World

Where the player falls on this conflict is—mercifully—left in their hands. As more of Hadea’s past is uncovered, heinous atrocities committed by both Palomists and Sabinians are revealed. While the game’s narrative is far from neutral, there are shades of moral complexity that many games would shy away from. Yes, there is something to be said for a strong moral stance against certain issues presented in the text. Yet as evidenced in this week’s immigration protest-tinged thriller One Battle After Another, a work does not need to look at the camera and decry its evils to understand what the intended takeaway is. 

But where titles like Bioshock Infinite have been accused of false equivalency when it comes to juxtaposition of political opposites, it’s a conversation worth having when a game attempts to cast a conflict with both sides at fault on a long enough timescale. This can be a short-sighted and reductive critique more often than not—one demandant of partisanship—but there is some truth to the idea that mainstream gaming narratives often favor moral ambiguity if not overt neutrality. These are still toys, after all—designed by investors to be bought and played with, in hopes of breaking even. 

How Hell Is Us handles the overarching conflict, then, is a clever subversion of expectation. The structure of the game is tied to plot, narrative, and exposition alike. Players are not handed a map, told the stakes, then set on a linear story track to save the day. Remi takes on the role of an inquisitive wanderer as opposed to that of a savior. His in-text sociopathy gives the player a deliberate level of remove and distance from the world. Meanwhile, his total lack of navigation outside of a compass and a few hand-drawn maps (usable items – not menu tabs) makes each path, roadblock, and everything between a genuine mystery. 

Without waypoints, the player is forced to learn not just coordinates, but topography, trail markers, and the desolate streets of occupied villages. Its opening area boasts a natural park, with designated trailheads and landmarks. The game never tells the player, “learn to follow the land like you would a forest trail—and use the same caution as you going off of it.” Because, quite simply, it doesn’t need to. Light, sound, and worn grooves in wet mud are what the player needs to piece this together. Hell Is Us expects a baseline level of competence from the player to not just follow directions, but to engage its world with curiosity. 

A game like The Last of Us Part II uses cinematic techniques to guide players to these sorts of moments—Ellie walking into the abandoned museum at just the right second, for instance, or Abby being given a moral lecture meant to drive home the game’s themes. These moments are the game stopping itself to tell us what we are meant to look at and what we are meant to think about. Hell Is Us is a fair point of comparison, as both games position players in a large-scale civil conflict meant to parallel real-world violence and occupation. 

But where Naughty Dog displaces the players—putting them in linear sequences not dissimilar to a long-form theme park ride—Rogue Faction throws them face-first into the trenches, then forces them to figure it out. In order to learn the larger narrative, to glean vital insight and context, Remi must find and talk to people of his own volition. Players must memorize which attic an orphaned girl is hiding from occupants, for instance, as they navigate a town in which the colonizing force does not distinguish between “women” or “girls.”

Rape is a major theme in Hell Is Us, not just to coerce cheap gut churns. It is—perhaps—the most pervasive type of violence in the game outside of outright genocide. Multiple maps have either traumatized survivors or perished victims. But where sexual violence is often played up in more linear narratives to elicit shock or dismay, it’s used here to take up space and give context. Women’s trauma of being utilized as sexual utility is not just an ancillary symptom of a larger conflict—it is one of the main conflicts. Contrast this to, say, the punitive, player-sanctioned off-screen rape of Lady Boyle in 2013’s Dishonored.

In a room just a few houses down from Rebecca—that’s the orphan—a horrific aftermath is being cleaned up. A woman is sprawled across a table; a few feet away, a young girl lies on the kitchen floor. Both are dead. Also in the room is a soldier, who complains to Remi that he always gets the worst clean-up jobs. 

Outside, another soldier standing watch gives wretched context.

“I’ve seen Enzo and Dannel do some fucked up shit,” he says, “but this takes the cake. Almost retched when I walked in.”

Across the village, a woman who sold out her village—including her childhood friends—weeps alone in her living room, her floor and furniture littered with empty bottles. She tells Remi that every night, the soldiers “make her pay” for her decision. 

The implication is clear. All the player can do is bring her an old class picture—to remind her of better times, as she hopes and prays for the occupying Sabinians to leave. The player’s own path, thankfully, clears one major obstacle for her—one worth discovering on its own.

This is another way in which the game’s lack of a traditional map works in its favor. Remi enters buildings to investigate, speaks to people for context, and jots down each relevant detail. It is then up to the player to determine the most important elements of the narrative for themselves. For some, the houses in the game’s second major area I mentioned won’t bear mentioning.  Neither will the decrepit barn in Marastan, in which the town’s women have been starved and kept as sex slaves by Palomists. These will be set dressing to another incident that unnerves or provokes them even more. 

Hell Is Us allows this sort of honest exploration without ceding its precious ground to an open world. The fact that each area is allowed to stand on its own, and can only be traveled to by APC, brings the game to life more than complete dominion would. This economical use of space and art not only leads to fantastic technical performance, but also evokes distinct feelings unique to each region. 

Talju, a town in which players arrive several hours too late, is etched in my mind as a hazy, orange hell with gutted corpses strung from various structures. Through organic conversation, Remi learns that troops came through with flamethrowers and laid waste to the town. It stems from the state’s opposition to a peace festival—a Palom custom that has been outlawed by fascist decree. The festival was held, then reported; what happened next was blamed on the populace, who were slaughtered for daring to attempt religious and racial unity. 

Remi—if the player so chooses—can give flares to survivors and help prepare an escape vehicle. This is what teaches players the layout of the town itself. Each side street, shortcut, and back alley is necessary to traverse if every stone in the town is to be turned over. A persistent player will do this, as well as slaughter the marauding, apolitical spectres of violence that have taken hold of Hadea. 

The one repetitious “checklist” present in Hell Is Us are “time loops”— distorted monochrome domes that house the negative psychic, karmic, or otherwise ethereal memory of a traumatic moment in the past. These involve civilian slaughter, religious sacrifice, and any number of unpleasant wartime atrocities. By destroying these enemies and finding specific named items, Remi can enter these space-time distortions and dispel them. This clears the warped, violent souls from the area and makes it safer to navigate. 

This is the part I’m still figuring out. Just about all of Hadea’s surface is open to me. Most of the pieces are on the board to start the game’s last act, if some of my most recent boss encounters are anything to go by. But I may have a dozen or more hours left in Hell Is Us. If there’s one thing Remi can do before he’s apprehended and interrogated, it’s clear this cyclical trauma. To root out and dispel the lingering traces of karmic energy soaked into the very blood of the land. I can’t leave Hadea in the rear view until I know—in my heart—that I’ve done everything I can, as the player. 

My past thirty-plus hours with Hell Is Us are etched into a Naruto notebook, sitting open right next to me. The last time I used it was to take notes for a Sega Genesis retrospective, when this place was Paste Games. In working on this piece, I’ve realized I want this experience more often. Drawing pictures of new locations, inscribing in-game symbols to define them, making sketchy maps with a PaperMate ballpoint. I want a game to take me over so utterly that to just hammer words into a Google Doc or LibreOffice feels ineffectual. 

Because Hell Is Us has changed how I approach this medium, and writing about it, for good. It’s forced me to reevaluate how I navigate games—how I use maps, fast-travel, compasses. How many notes I take before I just wing it, and just how much time I’m willing to waste before I realize a game is spoon-feeding me for 50 hours. I don’t want another map to fill, or a list of chores to check off. I want to be trusted to learn, to discover, to solve a work of art on my own terms. 

This is no longer an antiquated approach of a bygone era, or one restricted to modern-day puzzlers like Blue Prince. Hell Is Us demonstrates that this trust in the player may be a vital tact for developers to take if higher budget games are to be considered an art form of genuine innovation, and not the domain of home theater tech demos.

Madeline Blondeau has been writing about games since 2010. She’s written for Paste, Anime Herald, Anime News Network, CGM, and Lock-On, among others. In addition, she has written, hosted, and recorded film criticism podcast Cinema Cauldron. Her published fiction debut is due out between 2026 and 2027. You can support her work on Patreon, and find her on BlueSky @mads.haus.