Hell Clock

Sure, we’ve been to hell in plenty of video games. And yeah, we’ve died many times there. But with a clock? I mean, maybe, but not like this. Hellclock is a meticulously designed isometric action roguelike that has one of the best implementations of a timer I’ve seen in a video game. What usually feels like a vice, here feels liberating. 

Hellclock is about speed. It’s tempting to play it smart, like Hades or Diablo, the two games that it will inevitably be compared to. While those games aren’t necessarily slow, they allow you to study a room of enemies and think through your best build to forge ahead. But in Hellclock, with the clock ticking away in the upper left corner, it puts a certain level of pressure on you, but if you stop to explore every corner before you take the floor’s portal to the next level, you will never get there in time. 

For folks worried about a time crunch, Hellclock offers a Relaxed Mode in its settings menu that essentially turns off the timer. This changes the experience to feel much more like Diablo or Path of Exile. Flipping through the different settings, I was shocked to see just how much control the player has over the game feel, although more standard accessibility features are absent.

As someone who is hot and cold on roguelikes, being told to just blitz to the end is one of the greatest reliefs that Hellclock could provide. The general design from moment to moment streamlines your runs. For example, you automatically pick up passive bonuses, called trinkets. If you come across a trinket that goes in the same slot, it will swap those out without you opening the character menu. Levels run crooked A to B paths, with a few false leads and one-off rooms to loot extra treasure chests or fight a mini-boss. 

Not everything is automatic. Upon levelling up, you’ll have to select one of three ability upgrades, or when you get to specific statues, you similarly choose from a trio of purchasable passive boosts. This all reads fairly straightforwardly, with the exception of increasing your ability ranks. Above each ability icon at the bottom of the screen, there is a diamond with four numbers in each corner. If you upgrade an ability, say a 40% damage increase, it’ll increase the ability rank, and one of those numbers will change. 

This wasn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things and wasn’t ever clearly explained. What mattered more to me was that each upgrade was palpable in the heat of gameplay. You’ll unlock access to a batch of new abilities upon completion of each act and accompanying items to equip to modify or enhance those abilities. While this all sounds like a lot, well, that’s because it is; it never felt overbearing. I felt much more in control over my build than many other roguelikes, and it helped propel me through the game. 

The momentum is undeniable. And then you’ll hit a boss. The first one, The Merchant, will first greet you fairly soon at level 7. The first few attempts will take some manoeuvring and build tweaking. Once you’ve taken him down, he becomes nothing more than a blip on the road when compared to the other bosses. These health bars are no joke. The fight becomes much less about dodging and more about maintaining your health, mana, and conviction. This final passive meter will activate with certain abilities, and it functions as a type of shield. As much as Hellclock emphasises speed, these tanks become gatekeepers of your patience. 

For example, the Head-Cutter is the final boss of Act 1, the third main boss of the game. His mechanics aren’t too wild: you dodge a cone-shaped attack, a few massive horizontal swipes, and some area-of-effect bombs. He’ll summon two pillars that spawn corpses that crawl at high speed towards you. After my first few encounters with him, I figured that a build that would regenerate health and mana on my Double Knives attack, an ability that allows me to spin in a circle and hit close by enemies quickly, should keep all my defences up. But the Head-Cutter did not relent. I spent over my total game time up to the Head-Cutter just on runs to him before I finally beat him. 

This would be the cadence for the remaining acts, which are easily segmented into 7 level bunches for a total of 21 levels per act. Levels 1-14 would go by fairly quickly, with a boss capping each section at levels 7 and 14. The pacing of the final push from levels 14-21 was a slog. Hellclock helps mitigate this by having an unlockable red portal in the passive ability tree. Before upgrading it, the red portal has a 15% chance of spawning in any given level to jump you forward. Thankfully, you can put points into this to increase that percentage, as well as increase the number of levels you skip per portal. The wild bit is that sometimes you could wholesale skip over a mini-boss or a boss level on a run, depending on your luck. I welcomed this gladly and ended up blitzing levels 14-21 by rushing to the end to create a soft checkpoint for future skips to mitigate the slow grind toward the final boss.

Hellclock additionally motivates players via engaging story beats. It’s refreshing to play a game from a culture and country that aren’t commonly represented to get different storytelling. Rogue Snail, a Brazilian studio, uses the historical event of the War of Canudos that took place in the remote northeastern state of Bahia. I did some light reading out of curiosity, and the late nineteenth-century conflict is extremely charged with political and religious overtones. It makes for a ripe setting for a supernatural twist of demon hunting. You play as Pajeú, who is given another chance at life several years after the Canudos massacre. Your primary goal is to find Antonio Conselheiro’s soul, the Canudos community leader killed during the war.

The Brazilian Portuguese voice acting elevates how Hellclock recounts this history. It’s sharp and indignant, resulting in a powerful revenge tale of resistance against the newly formed Brazilian Republic’s attack on the religious community of Canudos. Story beats that happen within a run are the most striking. Without spoiling too much, in Act 2, João Abade joins protagonist Pajeú for a while to help investigate how to continue beyond a roadblock in level 10. The company is more than just a mechanical bonus, although it’s nice to have João take some of the enemy fire and to gun down monsters on his own. There’s an excellent plot turn that got me invested beyond the quick gameplay and build crafting.

Upon release, Rogue Snail posted a roadmap to set expectations for what’s to come in Hellclock, which includes a post-game mode and Act 4. The commitment to the game’s future is well-founded with a base game that inspires a lot of confidence with its polish, historically influenced story, and snappy gameplay.