Comic books have been a source for video game adaptations for as long as I can remember. I have core memories of playing games like Batman Returns on the SNES and the X-Men arcade game growing up, which pushed me towards my lifelong love of comics. Flash-forward 30+ years and now comic books are dominating all forms of entertainment. Even with adaptations everywhere, I never expected a strange little 10-issue Image miniseries to end up as the source material for a new indie game.
I Hate This Place takes the concepts and world of Kyle Starks and Artyom Topilin’s Eisner-nominated series and brings them to life as an isometric survival horror game. Given the miniseries’ premise, a ranch that’s smack dab in the middle of the most haunted place in the world, the game’s combination of exploration, scavenging, and base building seem like a natural fit, but the execution leaves something to be desired.
Instead of directly adapting the story of the comic, the I Hate This Place video game tells an original story set in the same world, following Elena, who’s trying to find her missing friend Lou while also figuring out the mystery of what happened to her mother years ago. Along the way she finds evidence of bizarre cults and horrific science experiments, all connected to a being known as the Horned Man. There’s a decent amount of side characters along the way that offer different perspectives on what’s going on near Rutherford Ranch, a location that Elena’s family is tied to which acts as the epicenter of all the weirdness.
The game makes a striking first impression, with an art style that leans into the comic book origins. It’s full of color while still being dark and foreboding, with a cell-shaded style that makes everything pop off the screen. There’s even onomatopoeias that pop up with the sounds of your footsteps, emphasizing every footstep or monster noise.
These onomatopoeias help too, because most of your encounters with creatures are very stealth-based, forcing you to think carefully about the noise you make when monsters are around, lest you be swarmed by the horrors that surround you. The isometric angle of the game mostly works, but sometimes it feels like it’s a bit too zoomed in, causing you to get noticed by enemies that are offscreen. It’s always fun using throwable cans to make some noise elsewhere to distract, but very quickly you get to the point where you’re well-armed enough to take on enemies, provided you’re careful about it.
There are plenty of monsters in this game, each with a different horrifying design, but for the most part their durability is what sets them apart rather than their tactics. The majority of enemies are going to just go straight for you to do melee damage, with only a few doing ranged attacks on you. This doesn’t leave a ton of room for varying tactics, so you’re mostly just prioritizing enemies based on size and HP when in the middle of a heated encounter. Creatures usually have a weak point on their back, which rewards you for sneaking up to hit them from behind with your trusty bat, but I found the steadily upgrading series of firearms and explosives the game gives you to be adequate to deal with the enemies.
The core loop of the game involves using Rutherford Ranch as your home base, then venturing out and exploring the surrounding areas, as you find new bunkers, which act as little dungeons, and receive quests from the many characters nearby. There’s a day-night cycle that encourages you to gather resources during the day, then come back home when it gets more dangerous at night. At your base, you can set up the ranch with things like workbenches and gardens to keep a steady supply of crafting resources flowing.
Unfortunately, even though this feels like a big selling point for the game, it was one of the weakest aspects for me. I didn’t really find the resource gathering that interesting, and even a very small amount of structures on your farm will supply you almost all the resources you need to get by. I Hate This Place has a hunger meter that you need to manage, but it never feels like something that’s really fully integrated. After building a few key things at the ranch, I was constantly overflowing with soup to the point where hunger was never really a problem, just a button I had to press whenever my meter was low.
It also largely negated the need to ration ammo, something that feels core to the tension I usually enjoy in a survival horror game. I would have been more into engaging with the stealth mechanics if I wasn’t flush with ammo by midgame, constantly able to make all the bullets I needed for my various guns. All this combined to make the survival elements feel more like a mod added onto the game after the fact, rather than something that felt integral to the experience.
The map of the game isn’t overly large, but it’s well laid out and dense with varied areas, never feeling like too much of a chore to get around. Smartly distributed fast travel points and save rooms make it so you always feel like you can return to a safe place if things get desperate, which doesn’t feel like a bad thing. I found the bunkers to all be well-designed examples of classic survival horror level layouts, with shortcuts that doubled back and new areas that unlocked as you progressed, but there was nothing that really elevated them above the pack. I wish there were a few more secrets hidden throughout that rewarded exploration, but the level design gets the job done.
Part of the lore of the world is that people who die in the area around the ranch remain as ghosts, which provides a neat set of missions that change up the standard gameplay. At certain times in the story, you’re tasked with finding a ghost, which then takes you to a spirit realm where you’re wandering around looking for clues as to how that person died. Piece by piece, you put together their fate, until you can finally provide that answer confidently and return to the world of the living to report your findings.
It’s a great way to break up the gameplay, but once again some design choices get in the way of it feeling great. These sections usually start with a little trail to follow, but if you get off that golden path, you can find yourself wandering for way too long. Many of these areas feel way too big for what they are trying to do, and getting lost in them is very boring. You’re given a spectral flashlight in the spirit realm, but the only thing you really do with it is point it at ghosts to kill them, which takes way longer than is fun. This feeling doubled in areas where you faced multiple enemies at once, including one of the most frustrating moments of the game that dropped you in a room with three ghostly spiders that you had to fight like this. Some of my favorite storytelling moments are in these areas, but almost every one of them trips up mechanically in a way that sours the experience overall.
While the art style looks sharp, the presentation leaves something to be desired when it comes to delivering the narrative. Cutscenes feel really awkward, with characters just idling in place while delivering the dialogue. This is common with lower budget games and doesn’t always bother me, but it felt like these scenes are often poorly blocked, with characters standing in odd places compared to each other, making it feel more stilted and unnatural. Leaning into the comic roots again, there are word bubbles that pop up with the text of the fully voiced dialogue, but occasionally these would be placed on top of the characters, despite there being more room around them for the bubbles to go.
Despite presentation issues, the story itself is decent, but I find myself wishing it would go into more depth about the various characters and factions. Both the cult and the government agency have enough detail to be interesting, but they feel like a first draft that needs more filling in. The Horned Man himself also feels too vague of a myth to be this important, notable more for the tone with which he’s talked about rather than anything he actually is purported to have done. Every piece of the narrative feels like it needs just one more hook to make it fully engaging, and it never grabbed me in the way I hoped it would, being such a fan of the comic.
Throughout my eight hours with I Hate This Place, I ran into numerous technical issues that also got in the way of my enjoyment. Triggers for specific voice lines felt off, often reacting to something offscreen that I couldn’t see, causing me to miss whatever it was actually referring to. I saw two models of the same NPC in an area, one that was supposed to be there and another non-interactable and unmoving. During the ending, which I’m guessing has a few different iterations based on some choices you make, two separate voiceover lines were playing on top of each other as it was explaining the fate of the characters. Bugs like this added to the generally unpolished feel of the game, making for an experience that’s difficult to fully immerse yourself in.
It was really hard to write this review, because it feels like the fundamentals of this game are there, but it just doesn’t come together. The stealth has potential, but occasionally frustrates. The combat is decent, but feels unchallenging thanks to near infinite resources from the less than compelling crafting portion of the game. The story has a good foundation, but fails to go past surface level and is marred by technical issues. It’s possible that future updates will fix some of the problems with balance and bugs, but right now I Hate This Place fell short of the expectations I had based on the source material.
Review code provided by publisher. I Hate This Place launches January 29 on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and the Nintendo Switch.
The post Despite Having the Pieces, ‘I Hate This Place’ Fails to Coalesce as an Adaptation [Review] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
