Comic book tie-ins are dime a dozen at this point, but it’s rare that they deviate from the superhero framework. There are some real classics out there like The Darkness or The Wolf Among Us but generally speaking all the best ones have you saving people while clad in spandex. I Hate This Place presents a very different proposition: it’s a video game based on the horror comic of the same name by Image Comics. I’m not going to pretend I know much more about it than that, but it’s nice to see a less mainstream take on the comic adaptation, even if I didn’t end up being that keen on the game itself.
I want to kick things off by saying that I Hate This Place is a very cool looking game. I dig the pulpy 80s horror comic aesthetic and the game uses it in some smart ways. Take the onomatopoeic “THUDS” that appear around your feet as you run about: at first I thought these were just a cool effect, a nod to the comic influences, but quickly realised that they make a real impact mechanically, with the red “THUDS” as you sprint making more noise than the smaller green ones you see while sneaking about. Very handy in a game where lots of enemies are blind, right?
The game uses light, or the absence of it, very well too. Your torch seems to be permanently on, and it makes running through the woods at night much tenser than the pulled-back camera angle had me anticipating. Running past thick forests casts shadows between the branches, making it easy to think there’s something lurking in there, especially as the game likes to throw little jump scares in periodically. Ethereal spiders skitter past, or spirits lunge towards you but pass through harmlessly, so it’s easy to think those shadows in the trees are more than just that.
The audio keeps the same cheesy B-movie feel too, with incredibly hammy voice acting which would sound awful anywhere else but is actually quite charming here. I didn’t really care much about what anyone was saying, if I’m being brutally honest, but I enjoyed the way they were saying it. The story itself, from what I saw of it, is a tale that merges the supernatural with government experiments, as well as a bit of family trauma thrown in for good measure. There’s some cool lore in there about The Horned Man, a demonic god who took your mother when you were younger and he felt like an ever-looming presence who seemed to touch the story in different ways. As a set up, it does a good job of matching the tone of the aesthetic.
It’s a shame, however, that this great aesthetic has been squandered on such an obtuse, frustrating and, frankly, generic, survival experience. I really tried to get stuck into I Hate This Place, hoping to get lost in its delightfully camp 80s comic world, and I did, but in a much more literal sense. It’s an incredibly obtuse game at times: following a linear opening section which teaches you the basics of stealth and combat, you’re let loose in Rutherford Ranch and the surrounding area and I found myself lost almost immediately.
The game is very hands-off in its direction: a quick chat with an NPC at the ranch and I was given an objective with a vague location to head towards. In its defense, it’s essentially an open world and you can explore anywhere and everywhere if you want to. Unfortunately, I didn’t really want to but ended up doing it anyway as I simply could not work out where I was meant to go and I genuinely felt like I’d explored the entirety of the available map before finding my objective.
It is, however, generous enough to give you a map; but mean enough to make it essentially useless, with no real demarcations or even clear visualisations of core landmarks like rivers. I basically spent the next hour or two running back and forth across the map, finding all kinds of resources and blueprints but not my objective.
When not running around aimlessly your time is spent between stealth, combat and general survival gameplay. Stealth is mainly based on sound, with those aforementioned footsteps playing a big part. Your enemies, many of which are really quite disgusting (in a good way), are often blind and operate on sight. By keeping low and slow you can fairly easily bypass them, although the game likes to throw noisy spanners in the works in the form of broken glass or squelchy viscera across the floor. I had a few moments where I was able to use empty tin cans as lures and manipulate creatures into rooms before closing the doors on them, essentially giving me free reign over the rest of the space. It was a fun, satisfying way to use the tools I had available and is probably the game’s strongest element.
If stealth fails, which it did for me on a few occasions, then you’re forced to either run or fight. In most cases, at least in the open world, running is the smarter choice as the combat is finicky at best and downright annoying at worst. Gunplay involves using the right stick to aim and RT to shoot, which is fairly standard, but I found the aiming was quite loose and inaccurate unless you were completely stationary. I appreciate it’s a survival game and they wanted to make those encounters tense, but when ammo is that scarce it just made combat feel like a waste of time.
You’ve also got the obligatory survival mechanics, including all the greats: food meter, crafting mechanics, blueprints and the like. I found the food meter quite annoying at first, as when I was let into the open world I had no food on me and despite being on a ranch where fresh food could be found everywhere, I had to find packs of crisps or tins of soup to sustain me. As you unlock more blueprints and resources though you’re able to look after yourself more effectively, but it was never something I actually wanted.
While the game is hands off in the way it handles quests, I’d like to give kudos for some of the more interesting sections the developer has threaded into the open world. While running around trying to work out where the hell I was meant to be going, I bumped into a couple of sections I can only describe as “vignettes”. They were short, standalone sections taking place in a ghostly, abstract otherworld where my guns and equipment were taken from me and I was given a magic torch instead. These areas are separate from the main game and involve small, individual stories about tragedies related to locals in the area and, inevitably, The Horned Man. They culminate with you deducing what happened and you get a nice little reward for guessing correctly, and they’re a really cool little diversion to find off the beaten path.
I Hate This Place is a frustrating experience: I can clearly see some glimpses of things here that I really like, with the slick presentation and 80s horror comic aesthetic that really grabbed me, but unfortunately it’s layered on a game that drove me away due to uninspired mechanics and unnecessarily obtuse navigation, and after a few hours with this game I started to hate the place too.
