Hell Clock

My 12.6 hours of playtime happened in a single session without me even realizing it. The game completely sucked me in. The core loop is extremely satisfying. Finding a strong interaction between relics, getting an important upgrade, and then completely deleting an area that previously gave you trouble feels great. It is easy to create builds with absurd movement speed, attack speed, leech, and damage, and watching those builds come together provides a constant dopamine rush. Unlike some other reviewers, I like the idea behind the clock system, but its implementation needs work. In theory, running out of time suggests that your build is too weak for the content or that you are playing too cautiously, so the timer encourages faster and riskier play. In practice, a timeout is treated no differently from dying, which limits its impact. Death should be more punishing, while persistent rewards should scale more meaningfully with how far you progress. Unfortunately, the game is also very rough around the edges and feels incomplete in several areas. The biggest problem is Act III. The game establishes an immediately interesting setting, then suddenly abandons it for a modern environment. It feels disconnected from what came before. The enemies could also have been themed more strongly around the setting instead of relying on so many generic fantasy monsters. Act III represents a noticeable drop in quality across almost every area. The art, voice acting, balance, encounter design, and general polish all feel worse. The music would sometimes stop playing for large portions of the act, and several bosses felt unfinished or poorly tested. I nearly stopped playing at this point. Thankfully, I pushed through it because the endgame is very enjoyable. Inventory management, especially relic management, is another major problem. Relics found during runs are automatically dumped into your stash. There is no way to star favorites, rename stash tabs, or lock certain tabs to prevent new items from being placed there. As a result, you quickly end up with pages of poorly organized relics, with valuable items mixed together with trash. A simple option to disenchant or star relics from the run completion screen would partially solve this. It would save players from having to search through the stash after every run. It would also help if the relic selection screen showed the relic's tier and indicated whether you already owned a copy. The game's stat scaling creates balance problems as well. Attacking a million times per second and moving at absurd speed feels great when you are deleting content, but much worse when tougher enemies simply absorb it all. A build can look overwhelmingly powerful while still being weak for the content, which makes combat feel spongy rather than demanding. These extreme stats should be harder to achieve or depend more on luck during a run. That would preserve the dopamine rush of occasionally creating a broken build, while weaker runs would feel appropriately slower and force more reactive play. The game encourages experimentation through relic sets, but the rest of your progression is not saved in the same way. There are no equivalent loadouts for constellations, skill points, and other systems. Because changing everything is inconvenient, I ended up pushing the same build and ignoring many potentially interesting rewards. A mode where relics can break after runs could address both problems. It would stop players from relying on one permanently optimized setup, make extreme builds less consistent, and force more adaptation and experimentation. To be fair, ascension mode in endgame does give opportunity for build experimentation, and I haven't played that mode too much yet since I prefer the idea of long term progression and nightmare dungeons over a roguelike mode and repeating acts. The story and writing are weak. The game introduces a novel setting, then quickly moves away from it without making good use of its potential. However, the music is excellent, and I enjoyed the overall art direction outside of the weaker sections. Overall, the game is satisfying, addictive, and built around a very enjoyable core loop. At the same time, it feels more like an open beta than a finished game that should have expansions and DLC. There are numerous UX and balance issues that need to be addressed, and Act III in particular lacks polish. Despite those problems, the endgame was strong enough to keep me playing, and the basic experience of creating an overpowered build remains extremely fun.