Hell Architect Review
Release date: August 18, 2021
Developer: Woodland Games
Publisher: Leonardo Interactive
Platforms: PC
Price: $24.99
I’m bad at survival builders. I want to get that out of the way immediately. 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. That isn’t to say I don’t love them. They’re a hotbed of micronarrative and emergent systems, and when you find a creative solution to an issue, you feel really, really, clever. Hell Architect is a standout among survival games. 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 what’s referred to as a “survival builder” game. As a junior manager in Hell, players are tasked with guiding a growing band of sinners through various objectives and extracting their suffering. This lets players build larger and more efficient structures as a way to increase power and resources. 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. 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.
Hell Architect lives and dies mainly on its atmosphere and setting, so it seems like as good a place as any to start. A lot of the theming is excellent. 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. 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. There are even legendary sinners and demons you can use to augment your existing flock of unfortunate souls. It’s the sort of game where suffering is a resource, and the kind of game where with a single right-click, you can select one of a number of ways to send your sinners back to Limbo, murdering their physical form once again.
And honestly? That takes a lot of the usual stress out of the average survival builder experience. Sure, there are the usual supply chains and the occasional problem where you have to move your base structures around because your sinners can’t move all the way back up through the chambers you dug, but on some level, it’s okay when they die and go back to Limbo. It’s Hell, after all. You’re about as much an administrator as you are a kid with a magnifying glass, playing with ants. In weaponizing the death mechanic, it actually feels a lot less frustrating to play Hell Architect than it does a lot of other survival builders. If someone annoys you, or won’t go where you need them to, just bump them back into Limbo and either pick up a sinner who will, or bring them back when you feel like it. You even get resources for doing so, incentivizing you to zap them to death in a variety of fun ways (seriously, it brings up a wheel with multiple choices). The systems are easy to understand, the writing is sharp, and while the resources aren’t obviously tallied at times, the clean interface allows for enough management that you’re able to figure out what’s what.
The game really needs this catharsis to bridge the gap between its faults, though. Frequently, your sinners will stand around even when there are tasks that need to be done, or complain their needs aren’t being met even if there’s a path back to the base-camp area they’re just refusing to take. It turns managing needs and pathfinding into a slog, one where all your sinners are either too invested in doing the tasks queued for them, or not invested enough, or simply don’t bother to reach the place they need to be. It can get frustrating, especially when you’re forced in some missions and objectives to dig deep into the furthest reaches and your sinners tend to think it isn’t worth the hike. It’s a little annoying at times, and can bog down the pacing. Survival builders tend to be games of urgency and infrastructure, and while Hell Architect is heavy on the infrastructure (there are entire supply chains for sinner needs), it’s a much slower-paced game than, say, something like Oxygen Not Included. This isn’t always a bad thing, but occasionally it can just take a long time to get anywhere.
The slower pace and occasionally nonsensical AI behavior don’t mar the game too much, though. Hell Architect is the kind of slower, chilled-out, forgiving experience the survival builder genre needs. With the reputation the genre has for being unforgiving and obtuse, Hell Architect manages to be forgiving enough to new players and approach the genre with the atmosphere and sharp humor the concept deserves. While it might be occasionally frustrating and the pace (even with the usual time controls speeding things up a little) might be a little slower than the average game, Hell Architect is a must for anyone who wishes to get a good starting grasp on the survival builder genre.
Final Score:
The Good:
- Remarkably chilled-out and forgiving for a survival builder
- Excellent setting and sense of humor, even if it can get a little on the edgy side
-Wide range of things to do without being too obtuse
The Bad
- Incredibly slow-paced even at its top speeds
- Sinners will sometimes completely ignore what they’re supposed to be doing in favor of something else, sometimes to their detriment
- Gross-out humor wears on you after a while