For the past month, I have been in an incredibly hot place full of sinners and devils; a place where there is no mercy and only pain; a place where one’s suffering is turned into currency by one’s overlords to build increasingly absurd things; a place obsessed with resource extraction; a place run by dysfunctional morons; a place where even the Almighty dare not tread. Leaving aside a month in Texas due to Hurricane Ida, I spent a month playing Hell Architect.
Hell Architect
Developer: Woodland Games
Price: $25 USD
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
As I wrote in the preview, in Hell Architect, you are one of Hell’s Assistant Managers. It’s a lot like our world: if you work really hard you get to order your underlings to suffer all to make the guys above you a little bit richer. The game loop is pretty simple base management with a spicy Hellish flavor: you get some sinners that trickle in over time. They do have some basic needs like food (made from poop), water (made from poop), and shelter (does not involve poop as far as I know), but they also love to be tortured because they are dirty little piggies that love being tortured, just like Texans. Each sinner has specific traits and sins and maximizing their suffering provides more income, but if they die, they just go to Limbo and you can eventually get them back. Take THAT, Catholic Church! Limbo is back and it whips ass!
While sinners do produce Suffering as the currency to upgrade your underworld with more and more elaborate torture devices and devil summoning structures, they can also be sacrificed for Essence, another currency that enables you to build fancier things. On the other hand, then you lose their labor as well as all the value you extract from their shit. Just like modern America, you’re left whining about insufficient income even as you sacrifice your workers to build fancy buildings. Capitalism stands eternal.
Hell Architect sports a sandbox mode as well as a campaign mode where you office politics your way through Hell’s hierarchy and face more and more advanced challenges like digging up rare Satanic artifacts and forcing sinners to suffer in increasingly baroque ways. The writing is very Sensible Chuckle, tongue firmly planted in cheek, but you are still listening to a digitized chorus of the damned shrieking in agony and delight as you torment them. It’s like doing BDSM work on Zoom, I expect.
The campaign itself isn’t all that difficult. There are a number of missions easily solved by building a ladder or marking out a place for something to be built, let your sinners do their thing, and sometimes building something to keep them from dying. There is a tech tree and progression of buildings, but the jump in resource cost is kind of absurd. It’s the difference between “200 Suffering” and “2000 Suffering,” the “guess I’ll just go fuck myself for a while” kind of jump. I suspect you’re supposed to min-max everyone’s torture desires to increase your income, but the difference is usually 2 or 3 Suffering per cycle, so effectively it’s “guess I’ll go fuck myself for 8 minutes instead of 10.”
The resource requirements for the missions are also incredibly high. It takes forever to hit them and the payoff is usually something like…great, I can work on the next incredibly high resource requirement that much faster. There is probably an optimization min-max step I’m missing out on, but cranking up the speed and waiting always got me there reliably. It was still a bit of a letdown to get something like The Summoning Portal and then it lets me summon a dude to speed things up for a few minutes. Well, that’s…nice.
It’s rare I penalize a game for being too chill, but sometimes Hell Architect is just too chill. There’s seldom a pressing challenge. The goals are high enough you spend a lot of time waiting for a new sinner to arrive or telling one to actually go to the bathroom instead of complaining. The long-term goals are just more labor and higher resource requirements, just like real life. The higher-end machines and torments and structures do work better than the lower ones, but there’s seldom a tradeoff besides the build cost.
Often, it’s so chill you only figure out something is wrong when all production stops. Your sinners complain when they’re on the verge of death, but when they run out of raw materials there’s a little cartoon icon you may or may not notice. Otherwise, people just stand around not doing stuff, just like real life. I’d frequently wind up in a position where only one person was actually working where everyone else was generating suffering, eating, shitting, and being tortured. Just like real life, one person works and everyone else fucks around.
It’s funny but I feel like it fits the spirit of the game: After Hurricane Ida, I worked on moving somewhere less likely to get slamma-jammed by the fist of an angry god. Part of moving requires sitting on the phone for long periods of time because many businesses still think people would rather talk to a guy in India over a scratchy phone line than send an email. Since being on the phone is torture and I was already doing unpleasant things like talking to insurance companies, I figured why not boss around some hellions. Hell Architect was there for me, so that’s the box quote: the perfect game to play while you do incredibly unpleasant things like deal with insurance companies. Perfect for sitting on the phone for 30 minutes while the robot apologizes and switches to a different music loop every 30 seconds.
It’s not a 10/10 from IGN, but what is?
The Final Word
Not a bad little diversion but there’s so many good pop/city management games now it’s not worth more than a few minutes.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
