Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists

Thousand Hells is not a game for everyone—it wasn't even designed for everyone. I'm glad that developers are taking more risks and making games that go against mainstream design philosophy; I want to play their vision, not a shadow of their vision seen through AAA lenses. And simply put, the biggest hurdle for most people playing this is the fact that this game is more a narrative-creating game, less an RPG. Failure and loss are inevitable in here, but who reads a book feeling that the world is fair to the protagonist? Who wishes things could be better for the characters? We all do. Most video games will push you towards that happy end, but not Thousand Hells. Some runs are hopeless, and if you can enjoy the journey of a hopeless crew's demise, this may be the right game for you. It sure is for me.

When I first played D&D, my biggest critique was that it felt randomness was controlling my character more than I was. What changed my perspective is when I saw randomness as the "true enemy" of the game, and my character's sole objective was to overcome chaotic luck. Thousand Hells is very much the same story. The game offers a fair set of tools to control the randomness at times of need, and there's an interesting risk-reward system of balancing when to play that ace up your sleeve. I do still wish some random elements were easier to control. For instance, you *can* card count the different decks to draw from- but it's not always clear what's in each deck. I was thrown off on my first run where I thought I knew exactly which cards were left to draw, but didn't know each character had a duplicate card of their profession, which led to me losing an encounter by drawing the one card I hadn't planned on because I didn't realize it existed. (on that last note, I wonder if it'd be cleaner where instead of the character having 2 cards of their profession, they just always top deck their profession- to make it a reliable draw while also not bloating the deck) But the randomness tells a fun story that you wouldn't get if you knew exactly how everything was going to play out. I had brought along a sailor in case I ever wound up in a boat- yet the one time I was, she failed every check & died at sea. The game expects you to get terrible luck, and the challenge is trying to navigate around that.

If you liked King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages, or Six Ages II's narrative events, and you aren't too wedded to the raid-and-grow-grain loop in KODP, then you'll like this game. If you don't know what I'm talking about, this game is basically a series of Blades in the Dark-esque encounters that use your characters' traits and histories to give you options to tackle them. It's really cool and unique, and you should at least give it a look.

I like this game a lot. It really immerse you into the story.

I pressed my luck, I got so far, SO far, but in the end, I was put into my place, for eternity. It was a quiet, dark, and very still place. Positively fantastic experience so far. I hope it holds to repeated playthroughs because I am going back very soon. edit: I won?! I WON! Holy moly I somehow won and delivered the "cargo". That was super messed up and somehow I survived. 5/5 experience just winning ONCE.

The game does convey the feel of a TTRPG very well. I was positively surprised to see how some mechanics were straight from our own gaming table. Such as, using flashbacks as a method for those "Ha! I was prepared for this after all!" moments. Overall the theme matches how we 'fail forward' through our quests also.

Great game, I've enjoyed playing for an hour here and there as long as there aren't any spiders