There are even legendary sinners and demons you can use to augment your existing flock of unfortunate souls. The gross, edgy, and downright scatological humor of the setting is completely on display, whether it’s every one of your sinners working in the nude with only fig leaves covering their naughty bits, the HR devil who assigns you tutorial tasks while snarking away about how he wants to stop having to hold your hand, or the fact that the usual food and water that survival builders require take the form of “mystery meat” and “sewage water” respectively. You’re given control of your own personal corner of Hell to do with as you wish, gleefully forcing sinners to mine out their own torture chambers and make utterly repulsive food and drink for each other. Hell Architect lives and dies mainly on its atmosphere and setting, so it seems like as good a place as any to start. Along the way, gamers will dig for artifacts, research better structures, and figure out how to run a thriving Hell where they can torture all sinners to their heart’s content. To do this, gamers attend to their sinners’ needs (building them up gives them more hopes and dreams to crush) and eventually bump them off, sending them back to Limbo and giving the player “essence,” essentially soul energy that can be used to make larger structures. This lets players build larger and more efficient structures as a way to increase power and resources. As a junior manager in Hell, players are tasked with guiding a growing band of sinners through various objectives and extracting their suffering. Hell Architect is what’s referred to as a “survival builder” game. With its relaxed pace, wicked humor, and unusual setting, the game draws you in, and then its forgiving attitude towards death and relatively easy to understand supply chains and production lines make it one of the few welcoming entries to the genre. Hell Architect is a standout among survival games. They’re a hotbed of micronarrative and emergent systems, and when you find a creative solution to an issue, you feel really, really, clever. I can’t tell if it’s just an attention span problem, or whether it’s the highly technical details that I just can’t get my head around. I want to get that out of the way immediately.
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