Sixteen Tons
I love management sims and have lost far too many hours of my life to them. Hell Architect seems a visually appealing management sim where you get to preside over Hell itself, so I was intrigued from the outset.
Sadly, I have come away somewhat disappointed. It looks great, the art is the perfect blend of cutesy and horrible, but the gameplay left a lot to be desired, and felt repetitive and pointless quickly.
I am the sort of person that always reads the instructions and always plays the tutorials, but the tutorials for Hell Architect were decidedly unhelpful – they failed to cover the basic movement physics, especially ladders, meaning that I spent quite a lot of time with my sinners trapped in a hole that they had dug themselves into.
You start with a couple of sinners (a new one gets added at set intervals) and use them to obtain resources; coal and metal can be dug out of the ground and then used to build other facilities. These are then used to attend to the needs of the sinners; they need food, water and somewhere to sleep. These needs are initially met in a basic way (water requires a toilet, which produces excrement, which is then squeezed in a machine to provide dirty water which is dispensed in a bucket for example), and you can research ever more complicated ways of satisfying these needs.
There is also another currency; that of Suffering. This is generated by torturing the sinners in various devices (you start with an iron maiden and work upwards from there). Torture depletes the sinners’ various needs, so you need to make sure you have enough resources (food, water, beds) to keep their strength up. If a sinner’s needs are not attended to for long enough, they die (but can be bought back if you have the relevant building and enough Suffering to spare).
There is yet another currency, that of Essence. This is gained from sacrificing your sinners – the more in the green their needs are at the point of death, the more Essence you earn.
To buy more advanced buildings you need Essence, Suffering and a suitable quantity of raw materials, so the core mechanic is about balancing all these needs for resource extraction. This is not a terrible idea, but it quickly gets a bit stale, as the reasoning for getting more and more of the stuff is just… You need to get more and more and more stuff.
Each level is a “Scenario” with defined goals, but these are very poorly explained, and I found myself having to ask the internet what the hell it wanted of me on more than one occasion, which is frustrating and really breaks the immersion.
You also research new and improved buildings to better meet your sinners needs. But every scenario wipes your progress, and you must start research from the beginning each time. This just feels like unnecessary padding and removes any real feeling of development.
A later scenario inverts the controls to make it harder, but this just made it unplayable for me and gave me a migraine – there doesn’t appear to be any way to turn this off, so I just had to stop playing at this point.
All in all, it was an interesting concept with good visuals, but let down by overly grinding gameplay with no real sense of achievement as you advanced through the levels.
Much like many jobs I have had, Hell truly is doing the same pointless stuff day in day out. Maybe that is the overarching point the developers were hoping to make.
