Partway through Shortbreak Studio's new first person survival horror game, Hellraid: The Escape, you will encounter a room wherein you must brew a potion to help you avoid a chained up, fearsome-looking minotaur. You have to get around the mythical beast and open the door to the next room. One hit from the minotaur will kill you, and then you have to do everything all over again.
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This is where my Hellraid experience ended. What had been a mostly enjoyable time up until then quickly became an exercise in frustration. Hard games can be fun. A hard game will test your skills, not your patience. Certainly, one might get frustrated with Dark Souls, one of the most notoriously difficult games released in the last few years, but the game never stops playing by its own rules. A frustrating game, however, will make you toss up your hands and declare defeat. No amount of skill will improve your chances; the minotaur will hit you, eventually, and you will still not be any closer to knowing how to get by it.
Forcing players to rebrew the potion, which involves putting the correct combination of three colored metals into a bowl then heating it, was the thread that broke the camel's back. It was time consuming and frustrating. Every time the minotaur succeeded, it was back to the drawing board. That the instructions to measure the correct combination were vague and I ended up just tossing in rocks until the game said 'good job' was again, frustrating.
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Suddenly, you aren't playing the game, you're just literally throwing rocks at it until it works. This could be more a testament to one's problem solving skills than any difficulty on the game's behalf, but the need to keep doing it over and over again after so much failure becomes rage-worthy.
It's a shame, as there really is a lot to enjoy in Hellraid: The Escape. The game runs off the Unreal 4 Engine and looks it. The claustrophobic, demonic prison is dripping with atmosphere. Traps abound. You'll find yourself dying from something you didn't even know was there and you will die. A lot. The sound is exquisite, too. Chains jingle, the far away distant screams can be heard echoing through the halls and if the Minotaur mechanic is frustrating, the Minotaur itself is all sorts of terrifying to listen to grunting and groaning through a closed door. To see it charging after you will bring a chill to your spine.
There are few creatures and you are not hacking your way to the prison's exit. Hellraid wants you to puzzle your way through monster encounters. You are given no weapons of any kind and must use the environment to defeat your adversaries, who will absolutely annihilate you with one blow if you get too close. Release a lever to shatter a skeleton, use a magic one way mirage spell to avoid a necromancer and, my personal favorite, burn a zombie with a medieval laser made out of mirrors and sunlight. Just be sure to not walk into the beam yourself. Hellraid will not hesitate to kill you.
Players begin the game by dying. In a very tense first person sequence, you witness your own death as a lumbering figure with a very large sword shambles towards you and runs you through. Your character then wakes up in a tomb somewhere else in the prison, your memory erased and the only clues you have are notes scrawled by a fellow inmate who promises a way out. The prison is locked in some place far outside of time and space, a dimension of madness and despair; even death cannot release you. Every time you die, you just come back again. Follow the clues, which contain hints as to how to proceed forward and you just may make it out alive. Sort of.
The controls are standard for a mobile device. There is a mini joystick on the left side of the screen, while the right is partitioned off for object interaction. An infuriating thing about the control stick is that it is not locked down and therefore winds up all over your screen. A minor inconvenience, but one that happens enough as to be a thorn in one's side.
Hellraid: The Escape is a good game that did not entirely work for this reviewer. Those with little patience or time may not be enraptured by the title, but there is much to love. It is a great world filled with clever traps and fun puzzles. The game definitely serves as an appetizer for the upcoming console Hellraid, a much more traditional hack 'n' slash. The game is an excellent example of the power smartphones have, very few things look better. The experience could be made less frustrating, but one man's frustrating is simply another man's difficult.
So, if you will allow, for those about to die, we here at GameNGuide salute you!
