A History Lesson Disguised As A Bombastic Roguelike ARPG
A vital but under-used ability of games is to take something that too few people know about, and then shine a light on it. I didn’t expect Hell Clock – a Diablo-tinged ARPG that’s also got some Hades influence – to be one of those games, but it very much is. It immediately sent me scooting to the internet to find out more.
Hell Clock takes place in the aftermath of the War (read: massacre) of Canudos in Brazil in 1896-1897. Canudos was a settlement in north-east Brazil, led by the pastor Antônio Conselheiro, where drought-stricken peasants could survive and begin to make a life for themselves. But they were deemed to be royalists and slightly too independent by the Brazilian government of the time, so they were routed and killed over four invasions.
Doling Out A Massacre Of Your Own
Hell Clock picks up immediately afterwards, offering a kind of cathartic justice to the people of Canudos by casting you in the role of a warrior-spirit, Pajeú, who is both hunting for the spirit of ‘The Counsellor’ Antônio Conselheiro, and bringing justice to those who massacred his people. This takes the form of a Dante-esque journey through Hell, as Pajeú builds a deathcount in the hundreds of thousands.
The background and setting are fantastic, if only because Diablo is always going to be a looming elephant in the room with any ARPG, and the Brazilian inflection positions it away from Blizzard’s series. The hub location of Quixeramobim is a shanty oasis in the middle of Hell, and it just feels refreshing to play a fantasy RPG that doesn’t lean on European-medieval touchstones.
Plus – and this hits you round the head as soon as you begin playing Hell Clock – it’s a lavishly realised version of Hell. The production-quality is sky-high, and that’s huge because there are few genres that benefit from it more than an ARPG. Every attack and death is soaked in VFX and SFX, making the screen a riotous Bonfire Night of gunfire, huge bells falling from the sky, day-glo lassos and hulking behemoth summoned spirits. Hell Clock looks as fantastic as any pretender to the genre.
A Bit Of A Campaign And Roguelike Hybrid
The game structure is slightly more Hades than Diablo, even if the combat feels more towards the latter. The game is broken into four ‘acts’, and they unlock linearly as you defeat the act’s boss. But you can return to each and exhaust them for additional feats and resources if you want.
In each act, you have two tensions. The first is the obvious one: you need to stay alive. That’s easier said than done on the first few visits to a given act, as you tend to be under-powered for them. Mostly, you are just making as much headway as possible through the dozens of semi-procedural levels, minibosses, wave encounters and – eventually – boss. Once you die, it’s back to the hub level with all the relics, tools, loot and skill points that you have accumulated, hoping that you can make headway in your build so that you can make more progress next time.
The second tension is the Hell Clock of the title. You’ve only got a set amount of time in Hell before you are sucked back to the haven of Quixeramobim, so you need to manage the minutes that you have. That’s a constant tug-of-war between risk and reward. If you search every corner of the levels, you will be rewarded with chests, XP and little trinkets that drop off larger enemies and give you automatic stat-boosts (Hell Clock makes you feel like a Katamari as you swallow up fantastic, power-surging trinkets). You might even find extensions to the clock timer. But most of the time exploration will cost you time.
Time Is Very Much Not On Your Side
Hell Clock has fun feeding into this ‘waste time or not?’ question with portals. Red portals let you skip a random number of levels, but the risk is that you will emerge into a sea of enemies without the accumulated strength to defeat them, or at least not defeat them quickly. Nightmare Portals give you an absolute deluge of rewards (gaining three Hades-like perks in a row never fails to feel good), but they’re not only difficult by themselves, but they chew into your clock timer.
If it sounds like an arbitrary limit (and an annoying wall that you have to slam into every so often) then you needn’t be worried. You have plenty of control over its length in a skill tree, a Constellations system and more, and – most of the time – you can level yourself to a degree that time doesn’t factor in. There is always the ability to steamroller a level by outgunning it.
Combat is crunchy and satisfying, and the builds are so diverse that it can have whatever flavour you want. I found myself gravitating to a kind of support class, as I created a wall of summoned spirits to fight for me (poisoning enemies), as I buffed and regened them from behind, while firing Repeater bullets over the top. It wasn’t the fastest build, but it survived the waves well, and let me skip through a run through a frequency of red portals that I had tuned higher through the skill tree. You can bet there are a multitude of other builds to be found.
Perhaps I’ll Make A Plague-Bearer Build Next
That build-breadth is great to tinker with. A large skill tree will often be your first visit after a run, as the permanent, build-spanning benefits are here, and they’re transformative. You will be wanting to improve the general level of your skills and expanding your relic inventory here. Then it’s over to your various inventories to disassemble unwanted loot, so that you can do the next big step: socketing relics into a Resident Evil-style physical inventory (better relics are bigger and take up more space), before upgrading them through five tiers with your tools and resources.
The depth of Hell Clock is initially daunting but hugely exciting for min-maxers, as you can see the build ideas emanating from the relics and their special effects. I was lured into my build by a single Repeater relic that caused enemies to explode and chain other enemies like popcorn. It was too tempting to pass up.
Most Of The Road-Bumps Are In The Thinner Endgame
If there are criticisms here, it’s that it’s difficult to shift from one build to another, and Hell Clock likes to create stopping points through bullet-sponge enemies in the endgame. The latter was perhaps inevitable: Hell Clock wants you to stick with it for tens of hours (and you will likely want to stick around that long too), but the only way it can really make that happen is through HP-hikes on the enemies. There’s a slight dissatisfaction that comes from the late moments in the game where you’re pumping bullets into a boss and watching the health bar go down slower than the clock. The only real solution is to go back home and fiddle with the build. But that involves some grind for resources.
And once you have sunk all your resources, skill points and constellations into one build, it can feel onerous to create another. Hell Clock is brilliant in one sense, in that it offers loadouts for you to switch on a dime, but actually creating those loadouts is a ball-ache, mostly because you rarely have enough resources to create two or more fully functioning builds. I didn’t quite enjoy the true endgame as much as the progression through the acts for this reason.
But these niggles don’t stop me from being a bit of a champion for Hell Clock, because it’s as deep, lavish and overblown as any of your favourite ARPGs, and it whisks you to an unusual and illuminating historical setting. While I fell off slightly in the 20-30 hour range, I still had a hell of a fun time getting there. If Diablo is losing its grip on you, or Hades is running out of runway, then Hell Clock should be the next ARPG roguelike on your list.
Important Links
Hell Clock’s Diablo-Style Action Lands On Xbox And PlayStation – https://www.thexboxhub.com/hell-clocks-diablo-style-action-lands-on-xbox-and-playstation/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/hell-clock/9NWCMBF3JZ2Z
