The thing I like most about video games is that they become engines to power one’s own imagination, a framework for telling stories. Thousand Hells takes this idea and builds a whole game around it.
In Thousand Hells, you’re putting a team together for a heist—a heist that will invariably involve you and your party members traveling into the realms of Hell. Each adventure is somewhat random. You create a new player character and pick up new party members each time, and they embark on one of eight unlockable quests. Each playthrough doesn’t take much longer than an hour, and all the action is expressed through illustrations and dialogue. What makes the game fascinating to play is the sheer scope of it.
It has a similar quality to Dwarf Fortress, in that it feels like every single playthrough is different in some way. Of the two heists I’ve played through, I returned home from one empty-handed and with two party members dead. In the other, our souls were trapped in Hell for all eternity. Combat encounters, which include actual combat but also negotiating with gods or unlocking a demonic vault, are expressed through picking tiles from a bag and then applying the correct action or demeanor to the right problem, which is then resolved through a dice roll. All your crew members have different skills, as well as negative traits that won’t help you. Crossing the sea in a recent heist created a new crisis I had to deal with: My lockpick was deathly terrified of the ocean, and we had to try to calm her down.
Failure occurs frequently, which only makes these stories feel richer. As members of the crew accrue injuries or negative mental states, they also pick up new quirks. A character who is fatigued won’t be as good of a fighter or as good at navigating the natural hazards of the woods or the caverns of Hell. A dejected seductress won’t be as seductive. You can use insight to get a preview of how likely a given tile will perform in a given situation, but it’s a scarce resource. There are so many ways to lose, and very few ways to win, which makes each success feel not just significant, but almost mythological.
It was the second heist that really sold me on the game. My leader, Chanter, had done a pretty good job of keeping morale high, even when things didn’t exactly go how we wanted them to. Getting to the realms of Hell was the easy part, given that my leader had knowledge of the woods and used to be a sailor. Early on, we lost a challenge from a god, despite the best efforts of our demonologist, and then later we had to impersonate demons in their bank of souls. Badly injured and dispirited, we couldn’t quite perfect our demon act. We failed three labors to prove our worthiness, and then utterly whiffed it when faced with demonic bureaucracy. In the end, we knew we were being led into a trap when we entered the vault of souls, and just before we walked in, Chanter apologized to their crew. It was their fault that they would all lose their lives there, and she urged them to save themselves, but by then it was far too late.
Somehow, it’s just as fun to describe these stories as it is to play through them. Games like this continue to live within me once I’ve exited the game. They linger in my memory and imagination, even the characters who ended up dying in Hell. I can see myself using Thousand Hells to tell weird and interesting stories for a long time.
