I Hate This Place Review

Player(s): 1
Extra Features: N/A

I Hate This Place is an isometric survival horror developed by Rock Square Thunder. You can build your own base with craft supplies and survive the day and night against the twisted mutant enemies in the outside world. The game is based off of a retro horror comic book with the same title. I’ve played a few craft-based survival horror games and this one has good potential, but it is unfortunately lacking in a variety of areas.

Players take control of Elena, who is searching for her lost friend Lou while trying to figure out what happened to her mother years ago. While searching, she stumbles upon a cult and science experiments gone wrong. You’ll run across several side characters and try to help them out with their own problems as well. The game centers around a ranch (Rutherford Ranch) in the middle of a haunted world.

Visually, this game looks quite good. It very much has the appearance of a comic book with its colorful cel-shaded style. Whenever you move, the game forms words as you make each step just like a comic book. It also forms words to highlight other sounds as well, such as “Ka-boom” when a big explosion goes off. The open world that you explore has a good amount of variety in scenery and it has areas that lead to in-door dungeon places as well.

For enemy encounters, this game focuses on a stealth approach. You have a sneak button that will allow you to sneak by enemy encounters with little noise and you have objects that will cause more noise if you interact with them (broken glass, etc.). Starting from the beginning, the game holds up well with this stealth approach. I can’t say the stealth system is solid, but it’s good enough for the starting area. Starting out, enemies are definitely something to fear since your weapons do so little damage and you’re basically forced into the stealth option. Once you start to get good weapons, the stealth system becomes an afterthought however.

After getting out of the first area and making your way to the ranch, you are introduced to the game’s crafting system. Besides using a workbench to create items and weapons, you can build contraptions that give you crafting resources over time. Starting out, I was scavenging for supplies and just couldn’t create enough but as the game went on, I had WAY too many supplies and my character was a total powerhouse with all the items and weapons that I had access to. The game allows you to create way too many contraptions to where the most vital resources can be overflowing. There is also no threat of an enemy attacking your base or anything like that. Some resources cannot be created, but you’ll find plenty of them out on the field.

The game has a day and night system and keeps track of time. Every second in real time is a minute for in-game time. You can sleep at a bed to fast forward time. Night is a bit more challenging than the day since more enemies are out in the field, but, besides the reduced visibility, it isn’t that much different than daytime.

Elena has a health gauge, stamina gauge and food gauge. Running and performing melee actions will drain the stamina gauge, but it will replenish in time. Your food gauge is constantly going down. The food gauge can only be replenished by eating food. Once the food gauge reaches zero, you’ll start to lose recoverable stamina to where you won’t have any. Your weapon swings will tire out Elena and you can’t run at that time. Filling your food gauge back up will make your stamina return slowly. Just like everything else, food starts out scarce but after a while, you’ll have all the food you need.

You have one melee weapon and several gun weapons to choose from as you progress. A pistol, a shotgun, a rifle and other weapons can be used. My favorite weapon is the flare gun that you get very early on in the game. You can create flare ammo at your base as well. The flare gun is so overpowered that I used it the majority of the game. The flare gun takes down normal enemies in one hit and you can get near infinite ammo for it, so why switch? One problem that I have with the weapons is that sometimes they simply fly over an enemy’s head when I aim and fire at them.

All enemies are a type of mutation. The mutations stem from organic growth that can be found in the environments. You’ll fight mutant humans, spiders, wildlife (male deer) and a few other creatures as well. This game needs some more enemy designs. It repeats enemies way too often. Besides having an open world with enemies, the game eventually goes to a sort of dream world where you only have your flashlight to protect you. These sequences are a good break from the usual open world. You’ll have to explore and figure out a mystery then report your findings in a questionnaire at the end of each dream world.

Besides main missions, you’ll take part in side missions that you get from characters you run into while out on the field. It can be easy to get lost in the game. The game doesn’t give you any help in trying to find a specific location and some of the goal areas are not that obvious. The map is very bare bones and doesn’t highlight many important areas. This game could definitely benefit from a mini-map in one of the corners of the screen instead of having to open the big map constantly to figure out where I am.

The voice acting to this game is dull. I didn’t care at all about any of the characters and was actually skipping through voiced dialogue quite often. The characters make dramatic pauses quite often, but the acting feels so very wooden the majority of the time. I sense no concern in character voices when things get scary. The shotgun-wielding preacher is a cool thought, but he’s just as dull-sounding as everyone else. There are times where it sounds like actors are simply reading off a script.

I Hate This Place is a decent craft-based survival horror, but it doesn’t truly excel in anything. It’s such a mediocre game overall that isn’t worth its asking price. There is a lot of potential in the game, but it just needs more in many areas. The way it is, the game looks way better than it plays. I Hate This Place is not a bad game, but in the end, it comes across as very “meh”.

The Good:
+ Nice stylized cel-shaded look and overall comic book feel
+ Decent craft-based survival

The Bad:
- The game needs more stuff to do (side quests, main quests, etc.)
- The flare gun is too powerful
- The entire game starts to feel boring very early on
- Resources for crafting are too easy to come by as the game progresses
- Hit detection with guns is an issue at times
- The voice acting is boring