High Hell

Developer: Terri Vellmann, Doseone | Publisher: Devolver Digital | Release Date: 23 October 2017 | Genre: Action / First-Person Shooter / Indie | Website: Official Website | Purchase: Steam

High Hell wastes absolutely no time pretending that it is a sensible videogame. You are an unnamed masked woman armed with a ridiculously powerful shotgun and apparently tasked with dismantling the satanic corporate empire of Pitchcorp. This involves kicking down doors, shooting cultists, murdering brainwashed animals, destroying drug labs, rescuing sacrificial goats, vandalising corporate property, sabotaging Wi-Fi, burning enormous piles of money and eventually taking the fight directly to the organisation’s increasingly absurd leadership. The developers sum it up as a “neon-soaked, arcade-action first-person shooter,” which sounds about right to us.

There is technically a story connecting everything, but High Hell very deliberately does not take itself seriously. Nonsensical interactive cutscenes appear between missions, characters have names like Professor Meth, Beelzebot, Doberwoman and The Bo$$, and objectives regularly seem designed around whatever ridiculous idea the developers found funniest at the time.

That silliness is important because underneath it all is an extremely simple shooter. After a short opening sequence, the player steals the Soulshot, which becomes effectively the only firearm required for the entire game. It behaves like an enormously powerful shotgun with unlimited ammunition and, importantly, no need to reload. The result is a combat system stripped of almost every interruption between seeing an enemy and killing them.

There is no weapon wheel to manage, no ammunition scavenging and no elaborate upgrade tree. You aim, shoot and keep moving. It sounds almost too basic, but that simplicity is exactly why High Hell works. Combat is very fast-paced. Most normal enemies die immediately to a well-placed shot, while the player can only survive a few hits. Killing enemies restores a small amount of health, encouraging aggressive play rather than sitting behind cover waiting for an opportunity. It’s accurate to say that survival comes from shooting first, moving constantly, and clearing rooms before enemies have much opportunity to retaliate.

There is technically room for caution. It is possible to sneak around looking for a tactically useful position instead of charging directly through the entrance. In practice, though, slowly leaning around corners feels almost contrary to the entire spirit of the game.High Hell wants momentum. This is where the comparison to Hotline Miami becomes difficult to ignore. The games obviously use completely different perspectives, but they share a similar rhythm. Rooms contain extremely dangerous enemies that can kill the player quickly, so success comes from entering decisively, remembering where threats are located, and executing a route more efficiently each time.

Dying restarts the current level rather than sending the player back through a long campaign section, and because most missions are extremely short, failure rarely feels devastating. That creates the same addictive “one more attempt” feeling that made Hotline Miami so effective. A run might fail because an enemy was hiding behind a corner. Next time you know they are there. Then another shot comes from above. Next attempt you deal with that first. Eventually what originally felt chaotic becomes an almost rehearsed sequence of door kicks, snapshots and movement.

The campaign consists of around twenty missions, and a total first-playthrough length of roughly one to two hours. Each stage usually provides a main objective beyond simply killing everybody. These range from destroying equipment and eliminating bosses to freeing animals or vandalising corporate property. Most missions also contain optional secondary objectives, which contribute to the final score. These objectives help prevent the campaign from becoming twenty identical shooting galleries.

One stage might ask you to raid a building, another takes place around corporate offices, while later missions introduce increasingly bizarre architecture, dangerous machinery and larger enemy encounters. Vertical spaces, rooftops, and alternative entrances can provide shortcuts or advantageous routes, rewarding players who stop long enough to explore rather than simply following the obvious path. That said, stopping to explore is almost psychologically difficult because everything else is encouraging you to move as quickly as possible.

Every completed mission awards a score influenced by factors including completion time, accuracy, enemies killed, and money burned. This is where most of the replay value comes from. There are 21 Steam achievements, and several specifically demand speed or score mastery. QUICKIE requires completing a level in under five seconds, GOTTA GO FAST asks for a combined best-time total of fifteen minutes or less, THREE POINT THREE demands a global score above 3,300,000 points, while SPEEDRUNNER requires completing the entire game in under twenty minutes.

Those achievements dramatically change how the levels are approached. The first time through, the goal is simply survival. On repeat runs, every unnecessary hallway suddenly matters. Finding a quicker entrance, lining up shots more efficiently, deciding which enemies can safely be ignored, and learning exactly when to jump from the stage become much more important. There are also hidden DMEN dolls scattered throughout the levels, with achievements for finding one, ten, and eventually all of them. These collectibles encourage exploring areas that a pure speedrun would completely ignore, which provides a nice contrast to the time-based challenges.

Boss encounters appear periodically and provide the largest departures from the standard room-clearing structure. They are generally built around specific attack patterns or gimmicks rather than simply throwing a massive health bar at the player.  The final encounter is where the game’s difficulty escalates most noticeably. By that point the screen can be filled with lasers, homing projectiles and other hazards while the player tries to maintain the same frantic movement that worked throughout the campaign. It is considerably messier than the ordinary missions and can feel like a sudden wall after relatively brief earlier encounters. Still, finishing it feels satisfying precisely because the game has spent the previous nineteen levels training the player to react quickly rather than cautiously.

The funniest thing about High Hell, however, may not even be the missions. The loading screens are fantastic. Instead of displaying a conventional progress bar, the game frequently gives players some strange interactive nonsense to mess around with while the next stage loads. These can involve poking, drawing, vandalising or otherwise interacting with deliberately crude images. They are completely unnecessary but also undeniably brilliant. It is one of the rare games where we occasionally wished the loading process lasted slightly longer simply because we had not finished playing around with whatever ridiculous thing appeared.

Visually, High Hell has an unmistakable style. Everything is drenched in aggressive pinks, reds, oranges and purples, combined with stark black shadows and deliberately ugly low-detail geometry. Characters have exaggerated proportions, environments look vaguely industrial but increasingly surreal, and the whole image has an intentionally eye-searing, colour-bleeding quality. It has the same abrasive visual confidence as Hotline Miami. Neither game is interested in looking conventionally attractive. Instead, colour is used to make the world feel hostile, artificial and slightly nauseating.

Despite all the visual insanity, enemies remain reasonably easy to identify during normal encounters. The simple geometry also prevents environments from becoming cluttered with irrelevant detail, which matters tremendously when enemies can remove most of the player’s health in seconds. Animations are deliberately ridiculous. Bodies fly across rooms, objects bounce around, and defeated enemies collapse with exaggerated physics. Kicking someone through a doorway is as entertaining as shooting them.

The soundtrack by Doseone is arguably even more important than the artwork. Electronic beats, distorted percussion and abrasive rhythmic tracks push constantly forward, making every level feel slightly more frantic than it actually is. The angry and energetic music is perfectly suited to the high-speed shooting, and without it the game would not be as intense. Playing slowly almost feels wrong partly because the music makes standing still uncomfortable.

Weapon audio is similarly effective. The Soulshot has enough impact to make every blast satisfying, doors crash open aggressively, and enemies respond with suitably exaggerated noises. There is little subtle about the sound design, but subtlety would be completely inappropriate here anyway.

Controls are extremely responsive with mouse and keyboard, which is important because the developers specifically designed the game around what the developers describe as a “no gamepad compromise.” That decision makes sense mechanically. Rapid mouse aiming suits the snap-shooting combat beautifully, particularly while chasing better times. 

The campaign’s biggest weakness is simply its size. One to two hours is enough to see essentially every mission, and players interested only in reaching the ending rather than improving scores may feel like the credits appear almost immediately after the mechanics click. The flip side is that there is almost no filler. No weapon upgrades need grinding. No story sequence drags on for twenty minutes. No identical arena is repeated merely to extend the campaign. You enter a mission, cause enormous amounts of damage, jump from the building once the objective is complete, and immediately move on to the next ridiculous assignment. For players who enjoy achievements and score chasing, that brevity actually becomes an advantage. Replaying a forty-second mission six times while shaving seconds from the route is far more appealing than repeating a ten-minute level. And that is really where High Hell reveals what it wants to be. It is not a conventional FPS campaign. It is an arcade game wearing an FPS costume. The first completion is merely learning the stages. The real challenge comes afterward, when chasing scores, finding collectibles, experimenting with alternate routes and eventually trying to turn the entire campaign into one ridiculous speedrun.