HellSign

[h3]General Impression[/h3] Buried in this mess of a game is a winning formula—one that balances combat, sleuthing, deduction, and preparation all into a congruent experience. Each activity feeds into another and ultimately leads you to the climactic showdown with the boss. HellSign leaves a strong impression and comes very close to pulling it all off, but, unfortunately, doesn't quite make it. The general flow of the game is to arrive at a location, use specialized equipment to hunt down invisible "clues," defend yourself against hostile cryptids while clearing the location, use the clues to identify the boss, and then return to your van to prepare for the final fight. Every foe—including bosses—has one or more distinctive weakness and strength that you can adapt to if you have foreknowledge of the situation, which you sometimes do. Progression comes from earning money from jobs and spending that money on weapons, armor, equipment, medicine, specialized ammunition, traps, and information on opponents you'll encounter. The character can accrue skill points to allocate in what I would generously describe as a skill tree (more like a skill shrub). Points can be reclaimed and freely redistributed later. All that said, I had a blast and an overall good experience. I don't think there's enough here to warrant the full price tag, but the game goes on sale for a steal with fair regularity. I recommend it. [h3]Details[/h3] Everything beyond this point will be a more detailed analysis of what's good and bad about the game. The tutorial and early game are strong and leave a good impression—having a few curve balls to throw at the player—but they give way to the grindy slog that is the mid-game. If one can bear with it until the final stage of the game, the experience picks back up again for the tail end. The developers seemed to reserve the most interesting tricks for the beginning and end of the game, leaving little to freshen up the experience of every stage in between. The developers put in a lot of effort to give each boss—and their respective fight—a distinct identity. Unfortunately, not all of the ideas came together. I'd estimate about half of the boss fights in the game are frustrating and confusing while the other half are good or decent experiences. What's good is [i]really[/i] good and what's bad is obnoxious. I suppose this is the natural consequence of being brave enough to experiment, but not having the development resources needed to refine the results. Some fights demand that the player don specific protective equipment, and those protective equipments replace whatever you were wearing in that slot (usually mask/helmet or boots), while also requiring the player invest a skill point into a prerequisite skill to be able to wear the equipment in the first place. I won't complain about wearing specific gear for specific fights—as that makes things interesting and potentially forces the player to shake up their tactics—but it [i]is[/i] a bummer to have to grind up a few extra thousand dollars to afford the gear and needing to dump a precious skill point into a skill you didn't care for. There are three "biomes" in the game: one indoor location and two outdoor locations. The game is way more interesting and fun at the indoor location. The outdoor locations are chores to navigate, hunt for clues in, and fight in. The indoor location mitigates these issues by segmenting areas into rooms and hallways whose boundaries are clearly communicated. The story is trash and the dialogue feels like it was written by an edgy teen who struggles deeply with punctuation and homonyms. However, the story being underwhelming is not particularly a problem, as one doesn't necessarily need an excuse to romp through haunted houses while bearing an EMF reader and a shotgun loaded with silver, Mercifully, the plot points are all thinly veiled excuses to get you to do that anyways. Go figure. The lore is interesting, but there's little to chew on and what's here is not showcased very well. I would have loved to explore this universe a little more (and perhaps hang out with some rough-and-tumble Australians from the safety of my home). A special mention must be made of the fact that traps and specialized ammunition all vie for the same two equipment slots. This is subtly a large shortcoming of the game because the bonus for using the correct ammunition type against an enemy or boss is [i]huge[/i]—I mean double damage huge—while the huge penalty for using the [i]wrong[/i] ammo type means you basically shouldn't be fighting. Meaning you have to tote around all ammo types at all times and forgo using traps or else use strictly the normal FMJ and deal with half damage output in a straight-up fight. Consequently, I never once used a trap in any serious capacity except for a few times against bosses—where you know beforehand which ammo type to use—because bringing traps meant I was at risk of losing a normal enemy encounter. Many of the equipments used to hunt for clues have a lot of charm and personality to them, especially later on—my favorite being the AM/FM radio that's attuned to the dead, requiring you to stand over a corpse to hear signals and use the sound to approximate the direction and distance of clues. Finding invisible clues means you can slot them into certain spaces in your notebook to discover what the boss is, which variation of the boss it is, and what equipment to wear for that specific boss and variation. However, there's no [i]actual[/i] deduction to be performed by the player, as your character does the thinking for you and you're just slotting in stuff into the correct holes. I love how clue-hunting leads to preparation and preparation leads to combat, but I think it's a great weakness of the game that the player never does any of the real thinking. Comments are enabled on this review.