This game is critically underplayed currently. For a low price, you get a solid and unique multiplayer experience that is among the most tense games I have ever played. It is honestly near flawless. I will say this game is not for everyone. It can be extremely frustrating and you will die to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ often. But the high adrenaline thrills more than make up for it.

There is little information on guides, so I wanted to have some tips here too:

- run away at the start from other players. You're not going to win when you're fresh with a pistol.
- different areas of the map have different types of loot. I'm not going to spoil too much, but the Police Station often has weaponry, the Hospital often has pills/healing items, and the Garden/Park has fungi and bullets
- work on getting stat boosting consumables before engaging in PVP. Fungi and Pills will give you a better edge in these situations. A proper trip to kill Others may involve several scavenging runs prior to increase your stats. NOTE: This has changed of the most recent update. Stats now reset on each day. Not my favorite addition if we are being honest, but I can see some positives to it. Still, focus on stat boosts! Pills now have a massive buff compared to fungi.
- the banking quest (where you gather cockroaches) should be rushed. This allows you to store money that can be accessed quickly at an ATM, important when you get shops opened up and don't want to lose your wad of cash
- shops and banks are often landmined by other players. Tread carefully. It is likely an instant kill if you step on one
- keep at least two load outs in your apartment - an easily replacable "scavenging" one where you have nothing worth losing (a pistol, some food, cheap quest items to deposit) and a "combat" one (high quality weaponry, medkits, expensive items to turn in)
- when you get the ability to expand your apartment walls, you have to hold and click the wall

EDIT: Adding some more tips here!

- explosives are your friend. Carry grenades and mines whenever possible. They are the great equalizer and even if the explosion doesn't kill someone, it really makes them think twice before picking a fight
- equipping your fists gives you a nice speed boost
- focus on crafting better bullets early on. High tier pots let you add more fertilizer. More fertilizer means more effects on bullets.
- most bullet effects are pretty good, I found rotation speed (adds tracking to bullets) and fragments to be must haves, with status effects (bleed, deafen, blindness) to be a very close second.
- I mentioned the importance of stat boosters - consider the following:

1 - Movement speed should be prioritize over everything. It is worth taking fungi that reduces other stats to get this to a reasonable level. I shoot for half way before trying to mitigate stat reductions on other skills. NOTE: with most recent update, which prohibits stats from carrying over, you have to be much more strategic. Focus on what pills you can get in a day.
2 - After movement speed - vitality and endurance should come next
3 - Sight and smell are nice to haves, good, but should be focuses last.

Top down extraction looter shooter with some cool eldritch horror aesthetics and fun mechanics. Definitely worth a try.

People giving this game negative reviews don't understand what an Extraction game is or how it works.

There is no MMR. That is the point. That is the entire point.

You go in with what you have, and see if you can get out something good. You use the good stuff to snowball, but that good stuff is rare so maybe you won't take it out.

Tarkov does not have MMR. Neither does The Cycle.

I really wish the devs would stick to their guns and not bow to people who don't understand the game. The game just needs to endeavor to be better understood, don't take all the tension out of the game because a couple dumbasses don't get what it is.

It's good. I like it. Tutorial is a little obtuse, in the beginning.. the player should be made to understand that not killing anynoe or anything and just grabbing something and getting out, is an acceptable way to play. You are not supposed to have balanced fights. Sometimes you are prey. Sometimes you are predator.

There is an inherent, intentional imbalance in the game. People. Please. Embrace an extraction shooter for what it is and stop trying to make it the same homogenous soup as everything else by whining at the devs until they cave because they're nervous about the game they spent so much time working on won't sell.

You can not like the game, that is fine, but you should understand the premise first.

Hell Is Others is a very stylish, top-down, pixel-art extraction shooter that has charm, but suffers from its PVP roots and some poor underlying game design decisions.

Starting with the good, the art is a very distinctive, art deco, film noir style. Think "it was a dark and story night" except you're also in hell (or is it purgatory?). The game can be very tense, especially in PVP mode, as you loot the city and try to get out alive.

The core gameplay loop of doing a very short mission, getting extracted, and then watering your plants in your base (with blood) is serviceable, but suffers from some bad design decisions. To start, the missions are much too short. With a hard 12 minute timer (or you die), you won't have much time to search, look around, explore, or anything of that sort. This is probably an attempt to deal with the completely static city map, which is also not particularly big. But it means you'll always be in a rush, trying to complete the many quests that the game dumps on you, all of which are collect quests (with a few kill X of Y). Unfortunately, your inventory is criminally small (seriously, make it bigger!), so you'll be dumping important things on the ground with regularity (or worse, just not searching anymore).

Then there is the combat. There is both an MP and an SP option (finally!), which helps prevent the few end game players from destroying new players (there is no skill based matching). That is good. In SP, however. the combat AI is very poor (everything just runs straight at you), and as the difficulty (and their hit points) increase, you will find yourself in a losing arms race. Due to the criminally short timers (12 minutes), you will not have time to search extensively for medicines, as most engagements will take health from you that does not heal without meds/food. You will also struggle to find good guns, as they are looted already highly damaged (think 75% damage), will not last long (a mission or two), and cannot be repaired at all (huh?).

All the while, you're expected to gather a lot of blood (from killing Things and Others) so you can progress the main quest(s), expand your apartment (a different quest line), and water the many bullet plants you can grow. You also need to move around the map searching for items for the various NPCs that want you to gather things, which will greatly tax your very limited inventory space and what little time you have to actually get stuff done.

It's not that this is a terrible game. It has a lot of potential. But the designers have made the game very restrictive in how you have to play to progress. They clearly have an idea what they want you to do (rushing around map, not searching much, trying to finish quests, avoiding fighting), but this makes the game less interesting for those that don't enjoy that exact pattern.

I believe the developers have started to realize this, as they have moved away from PVP and into the SP experience. They still have a ways to go, but doubling the extraction timer, doubling the inventory space, and adding a difficulty slider would go a long way towards saving this game from the hell it is currently in.

Awesome game!

Yeah, it's PvPvE extraction shooter and all, but... I really enjoy its atmosphere and setting in the first place. The plot and characters are as well the reason which makes me keep on playing after another stupid death and losing all my loot. Oh, and being able to upgrade/customize your apartment is a cool feature too.

I really wish for 2 things:
1) Increased session length. 10 minutes is really not enough for exploring, looting, doing quests, shopping and prolonged gunfights. Why not make it 15 or 20 minutes at least?
2) Bigger player base. Dear devs, according to the game's UI I can tell that you are going to release it on consoles as well, right? So maybe consider adding it to Xbox Game Pass or PS Plus because more people will know about this hidden gem, and it will drastically increase the amount of players.

All in all, the game is great, keep up the good work!

Hell is Others is a top down survival horror game with Hotline Miami inspired combat and Escape From Tarkov style PVP and looting. On top of this, it has a really interesting lovecraftian type of setting that is executed very well. The story is very quirky and unique, and has a mix of unsettling moments and downright funny ones as well. I've enjoyed the story thus far and am excited to see how it turns out.

The sound design in the game is excellent, and underlines how tense it can get when you're fighting another player. When monsters and even more players show up it gets very chaotic, but in a good way. Combat is fast and stamina management is key, as it recovers slowly. Having zero stamina while trying to escape a bloodthirsty player with an automatic weapon is not going to end well for you.

This game is very unforgiving. Many of your quest rewards you need to extract with, and if you die doing so, they are lost. Fortunately, no quest rewards are exclusive to quests, and you can still obtain them by purchasing or finding them in the city. In addition, loot you obtain must fit one of 3 in game daily categories to sell for cash, and you have limited storage space at home. Not only that, but you have to physically deposit your cash in the bank in the city, or store it at home and use your precious storage slots.

On top of all of this, you have a great home customizing simulator, where furniture items give you various bonuses and also just look nice as you expand your condo. You can even GROW your own bullets, fertilizing the plants with various different items and changing them completely. Homing, bleed, and deafness inducing bullets are a few examples, and you can change the combinations as much as you like and can afford to.

Oh yeah, and you water your bullets and bonsai tree with collected blood. What more can you ask for?

Good mix of darkwood and escape from tarkov. I have no issues with matchmaking, waiting on avarage around 10-20 seconds for each game (compared to tarkov it's heaven).

This game is being slept on apparently. For the price you get a tense, well designed, and artistically beautiful top down extraction shooter. If you're a fan of Tarkov, The Cycle: Frontier, Hunt: Showdown, or Marauders then this game deserves at least a try. You might find it more to your taste than you expect.

Game has sadly died faster then anything else i've seen before. At the moment of writing this, 24h peak is 24 players. With a game having 200k-500k owners this is just sad to see.

Tho u cannot blame anyone else then the devs really.

Matchmaking was awful, a lvl 2 can spawn with a a lvl 15 at any point. Get obliterated and not get anything done.

Anti-cheat was close to non existent. Per my knowledge that was none i think? Cheats are something every game has to expect nowdays, not sure if they expected it or not, but they got it anyway.

For the game itself, i actually quite enjoyed it, i alpha tested it and went and bought it instantly. After buying it i couldn't play it for more than a few hours, for the reasons mentioned above.

There's no reason that the matches should have to have x number of players.

Also, we're still doing keybind remapping hell in current year, I see. I'm out.