Hellslave

"Smoke swirling quickly towards mystic clouds

Offering of this blood

Into the flames and without shame

Consumed with howls and screams"

 

Type O Negative - All Hallows Eve

 

 

After a quick glance at Hellslave's screenshots on GoG I was about to close the tab, dismissing it as yet another half-assed pixelated throwback to the '80s - not an entirely unfair accusation. Luckily I scrolled to the bottom and caught a hilarious user review: "Sick, satanistic game. This game shouldn't be sell." ... well, if it gives superstitious Christian hicks* the vapors, it can't be all bad, right? So I took a second look, allowed myself to be tempted by Hellslave on sale and was not... well, yes, I was initially disappointed but gradually came to appreciate its better points.

 

Darkest Dungeon seems to have kicked off an overdue revival of gothic horror themes in indie games, and I for one could not be happier about that. Stylistically you could compare Hellslave to a mix of that and the first Diablo, though really its basic gameplay is just standard turn-based roguelike/roguelite. Advance your character along a linear series of dungeons triggering random encounters until you hit boss fights. Grab tha lewt, mostly pointless vendor trash. Invest in more or less redundant buffs and nukes. Nothing special so far, right? Like Tower of Time, Hellslave tries to make good on a trite and simplistic routine, while lacking even ToT's sparse mid-grade production values. Within five minutes I was ready to bash and uninstall it for fumbling even its mood by stilted, stumbling, dull as dishwater writing... until I realized I was looking at a babelfished** or naive amateur translation, in retrospect hard to miss:

And that's the other thing. Though judging by user reviews, Ars Goetia has been feverishly fixing bugs since launch last year, some persist. (The "impious light" spell for instance doesn't go on cooldown as advertised, letting you insta-AoE-nuke with life leech to your mana bar's content.) Add inexplicative tooltips (I still don't know what some of the demonic altar blessings do) and a clumsy interface. It does offer some unexpected quality of life features like gear comparison tooltips but lacks some basic ones like hotkeys, which would come in especially handy since you tend to spam one attack overwhelmingly every fight.

 

Crafting is particularly pointless, both for requiring specific (but unmarked) weapons, forcing you to flip back and forth between your inventory and log... and because the mysterious results prove consistently weaker than easily looted pigstickers from dungeons. Allow me to reiterate the pointlessness of crafting in all but the sandboxiest cRPGs, and wonder why indie developers presumably on a shoestring budget waste work-hours on this half-assed feature which they desperately need to instead invest in their interface, bug hunting and translations.

 

Also, while I'll praise the visuals in a second, what the hell(slave) happened to graphic design when it came to armor pieces?

 

The flouncy skirt really ties the ensemble together

I would appear to have mistakenly sold my soul to the demonic patron of macaw pimps, tho' I could swear I chose Leviathan to suit my usual spellcaster preference. Strategically, Hellslave's only real draw is building your character for effect procs off crits/dodges/poison/bleeding/etc. Tactically it revolves around managing the global cooldown incurred by most abilities (making instant casts like the above-mentioned impious light somewhat overpowered) with the twist that some spells can only be re-cast after scoring a kill or being brought to the brink of death, encouraging a bit of brinksmanship - albeit to a lesser extent than Darkest Dungeon.

Overall, Hellslave reiterates French developers' usual stylistic panache marred by inattention to mechanics.

 

I generally sneer at games praised for a "comic book style" (if you want that, make a damn comic) but Ars Goetia manages to sell it. Your adventure lacks much in the way of intrigue (demons=bad; go stab 'em) and I was disappointed to find my choice of patron held no plot relevance, but each dungeon nevertheless has its own flavor, the mood remains consistently dark while narrowly avoiding self-parody, and bosses strut into their appearances frame by frame dripping with perverse, sadistic menace befitting their infernal status. And if, like me, you sauves a minimal comic book level of Fransays, you may find the original French flavor texts more expressive. As the cavalcade of grotesqueries wears on, the story takes a bit of a gnostic twist, and the ending... well, what can I say, it's a classic. One bit even sneaks in some amusing meta-commentary on game-making and gameplay itself, on the joy of entering a world of ugliness to create a marvelous spectacle by its own rules and constraints.

 

Roguelikes, as a rule, shoot for replayability, and Hellslave does include multiple classes (a.k.a. demonic patrons) you can pick, plus an official hard-mode replay after your first run. To be honest it fails to entice me to make use of them. Nevertheless, for a single playthrough its recherché theatrics (look up the phrase Ars Goetia) put a nice spin on the tired old demon-stabbing routine. A more focused production effort would've suited it better, but still, Hellslave punches hard enough within its weight class to be worth picking your favorite devil and wrapping yourself in the world's inherent darkness.

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* Possibly also Jewish hicks and Muslim hicks and Pure Land hicks and primitive superstitious hicks in general. Let's not be accused of cultural bias against the rich tapestry of hickdom this world has to offer.

 

** OK, probably Google Translate, but "babelfished" just sounds better. See what I mean about expressivity?