Hell Clock draws its inspiration from many sources, then blends them to create a mixture of AARPG and rogue-lite. A little like Diablo, a bit like Hades, a smidgen like Path of Exile. Playing it feels familiar, a warm blanket of stacking upgrades and finding that perfect mix of abilities so that the screen is covered in numbers, colours, whirling balls of light and gory explosions. What’s going on amidst all that chaos? I’ll be buggered if I know, but the health bar says I’m still kicking, and I am not letting go of the button that lets me do the spinning-knife thing. Wait, what do you mean I only have 30 seconds left!? Why is there a stopwatch in the corner of the screen?
Available On: PC
Reviewed On: PC
Developed By: Rogue Snail
Published By: Mad MushroomReview code provided by the publisher.
The titular hell clock ticks away in the background, a timer that will end your latest run whenever it strikes zero. You can and absolutely will need to upgrade this over time, otherwise you’ll struggle to progress through the game. Having this time limit is an interesting choice and makes you push forward, especially since taking special portals which skip entire floors can mean losing out on levelling up. You need to be fast if you want to push out a few extra floors and maybe make it to the next boss. Sometimes that means running for the exit like that Taco Bell from last night has finally worked its way down.
It’s also optional. A quick trip to the options menu lets you turn on Relaxed mode, disabling the clock so that you can take your time, smell the roses and dismember more bad guys in the name of coins and XP.
Before you embark on a run, you’ll need to consider what sort of build you’re going to run. First, you select the abilities that you’re going to be spamming for the next 5-20 minutes, whether that’s a simple hellfire of bullets delivered by a rifle, a giant bell that drops from the sky or a pack of ghostly Catholic Guards. There’s a pretty reasonable selection of stuff to mess around with, although I do think some of them are far stronger than others.
Then you have Relics that you slot into your inventory like a simplistic version of Tetris. These provide big stat buffs, but can also change how abilities work in major ways, like converting bullets into fire damage or making a meteor storm follow you across the map rather than hit a targeted location. These things cannot be altered while you are battling through the denizens of hell, so you’re committing to a strategy at the very start of a run and hoping luck favours you along way. Each floor offers a new core stat upgrade at the end like increased health, more mana and higher elemental damage, while levelling up gives you a chance to select upgrades to your chosen skills. Meanwhile, randomly dropped trinkets also grant even more numbers to add your numbers. It’s all numbers, all the way down.
This also means you’re locking yourself into a strategy before you embark, unlike other games where the strategy evolves and changes as you play.
The rogue-lite elements are exactly what you would expect: you die, and you lose your stuff, like you’ve been hit by a tax bill sellotaped to a speeding truck. Certain things stick around, though, like a special currency that you use to permanently improve your stats or buy better gear.
With all of this comes the usual foibles of the rogue-lite and AARPG genres, namely that progress will sometimes be halted like you’ve just downed a can of Monster and ran headfirst into a wall. The only way past is to grind out some stat increases or maybe have a quick look at your build. For some people that’s annoying, and for people who love the genre that’s the whole damn point. Battles are often won in menus, although sometimes the more action-orientated nature of Hell Clock will let you squeeze through on pure stubbornness.
I do think the game, at least for me, struggled to find the right difficulty balance. “Bosses aren’t meant to be a grind,” the game informed me on the tip screen after I had spent 10 minutes battling a single foe before he smashed my face into the dirt. When I began my review, there was a single difficulty option, and it definitely favoured the grindy rogue-lite elements over the ARPG bits and pieces. Some people seemed to be flying through it, while other folk on Steam were struggling to make much progress. I was in the second camp and starting to get a little annoyed.
The lower difficulty that was introduced in the middle of writing this review was intended to fix the balance issues, but it does that by going quite far in the other direction. It turns Hell Clock into more of an ARPG, one where you get to feel like a powerhouse stomping through legions of peons. Progress became almost too fast as I successfully murdered my way straight into act II on my second run, whereas in the regular mode I was still banging my head against act 1’s final boss 20 runs into it.
There should be a nice balance in-between these two settings that marries the rogue-lite grind with the ARPG power fantasy a little better. Given the insane rate that the developers are updating Hell Clock at, I wouldn’t be surprised if they introduce that new difficulty anytime now. But with that said, I actually much preferred the new difficulty because while it’s arguably a bit too easy, the pure power-fantasy of it is excellent. The carnage that I was inflicting by act 2 was fucking glorious to watch, my build consisting of magical orbs spawning out of each one of the 7 Catholic Guards I was summoning. For every 14m I ran, more orbs would spawn, while I rained down meteors from above. It was no longer about winning, it was about trying to crash my own computer.
I also ran into a very familiar issue, one that tends to pop up in a lot of games like this, and that’s the random named underling who spawns with a healthbar made entirely of fucking sponges. Seriously, these guys will somehow soak up more damage than the actual bosses. Killing them usually nets permanent resources, but sometimes it’s better just to leave them and make a run for the exit because hanging around to gradually drain their health just ain’t worth it.
Repetition is an issue, again a common complaint within this genre. The environments are always the same and have the same layout, for example, so that becomes boring quickly – and it’s not like they are visually interesting, either. Enemy variety is lacking too, and even the relics began repeating themselves quite early on.
There’s some endgame content as well, but it’s currently in beta form. I didn’t experiment too much with it, but boils down to a progress reset and the introduction of a whole new set of mechanics like Constellations, a new version of The Oblivion Bell and Penances which affect the challenge. It’s a little light at the moment, but the developers already have a solid roadmap of content they want to add, so expect it to become more robust.
I haven’t talked much about the story, so let’s talk about that. The game’s background is the Canudos Massacre which occurred in Brazil back in the late 1800s, resulting in 25,000 deaths. It’s a rather grim background for a video game, especially one that also hands you a bunch of bat-shit crazy supernatural abilities, features demons and lets you spin around in a circle while holding two knives.
You play as Pajeú, a warrior and former slave who descends through the levels of what seems to be Hell in a quest to save his mentor’s soul. Each run depicts another journey into the realm, another attempt to get just a little bit further as Pajeú battles against hordes of tormented souls and faces off against demonic and horrific versions of people who were involved in the massacre.
It’s a fascinating idea for a story, and as far as I can tell the use of the Canudos Massacre is unique within videogames. It makes me wish there was actually more emphasis on the narrative because what we get is intriguing. Mostly, though, the story is told through the visuals as you venture through hallways and desert canyons, and the occasional exchange of dialogue.
In Conclusion…
Hell Clock might not break the mould, but it gleefully smashes its way around inside it, splattering the walls with chaotic builds, upgrade spam, and more particle effects than your GPU probably wants to deal with. The repetition and uneven difficulty tuning can chip away at the fun, but the constant developer updates and sheer spectacle of its combat make it easy to keep coming back. Whether you’re here for the rogue-lite grind or just to watch your screen become an unholy fireworks display, there’s enough hellish charm to keep the clock ticking a while longer.
