I Hate This Place – PS5 Review

I Hate This Place is a survival/horror game from ex-Bloober Team devs, Rock Square Thunder, who are based out of Poland. But when we say survival/horror, we don’t mean it in the Resident Evil kind of way. Instead, this is a mixture of straight up horror gameplay but with survival aspects such as hunger-management and base-building.

The game is loosely based on a series of comic books and uses an isometric cel-shaded look to capture that comic feel, and it focuses on Elena, a young lady who has recently met up with her childhood friend Lou. However, Lou’s idea of fun is try to summon the Horned God. During the ceremony, Elena loses consciousness and ends up in a bunker which is full of mutated monsters looking to kill her. From there the focus is collecting supplies, escaping the bunker, getting back to her family’s ranch and exploring the local area to solve various mysteries including the disappearance of her mother ten years earlier, the Horned God and the cult that worships him, a whole side story around Elena’s ability to follow ghosts and determine how they died and why almost every creature and person outside of a few key areas wants to kill anything they come into contact with.

There’s a lot to figure out, for sure, but first you’ll need to get to grips with the basic mechanics of the game, something you won’t get much help with. Initially, the game leans into a kind of A Quiet Place kind of thing where enemies can’t really see you, but they can hear you. This, as you’ll come to discover, is the first of many ambitious ideas I Hate This Place fails to deliver on.

Indeed, I started and gave up on the game twice because of how poorly-implemented this all is. The game warns you to keep quiet and has a cool little XIII-style onomatopoeia thing going on, where you can see noises as words. So you crouch down, gently push forward with the analogue stick, and then get chased by whatever monster it is, and you die. The bigger the monster, the quicker the dying.

I actually quit the game twice. I wasn’t going to review the game. But I watched a couple of YouTube videos where it turned out that running full-speed past monsters is basically the way to go. The noise doesn’t matter. If you want to live, run. So that whole mechanic is immediately broken.

Between that and the general mazey faff of the first bunker, I Hate This Place didn’t impress, but when you get to the ranch and start heading out on story and side quests, the game actually picks up. Sure, the entire interface is just about adequate enough to function, but never intuitive, slick or enjoyable, but when you start making progress and uncovering the story, there’s enough here to like.

The campaign has you discovering new characters, unpiecing mysteries, exploring other bunkers and caves, and, yeah, it’s not bad. The game has a way of breaking a little when it comes to keeping track of what objectives you’ve completed, but it never locked me out of progressing at least.

While this is all fairly compelling, there’s just a real lack of polish and quality that threatens to ruin every element of the game. For example, there’s a whole crafting thing where you can make structures in the front yard of the ranch. These can produce materials for making more buildings, weapons, ammo and food. Great. But, no, not great. Most of the buildings are useless. Why? Because you’ll find more than enough ammo and food out on your travels. I never had to make food. I did it to do it, but I only ever ate bags of crisps, and that was enough. I didn’t need to make medicine because I always had enough bandages to heal myself. I never had to make ammo because I always had enough of that. Oh, and to make things worse, there’s a weight limit that eventually stops you being able to run. Not great if you’re in a bunker at the time with no way to offload any of it.

Also, and it’s not important, but it’s just weird, once you’ve placed a structure, you can’t move or destroy it. It’s there forever. Yet you can clear build spots by demolishing the unusable structures and junk there. That’s strange, isn’t it? That’s different from basically every game that’s ever had a building element to it since Sim City, probably.

One thing you might make will be better weapons and the occasional explosive. Weapons require blueprints, and these are found all over the place although I never found the blueprint for the initial pistol you get, but I did somehow find at least three of those pistols anyway, so there was never any need for the blueprint. Well, apart from there being a trophy for finding them all, which was annoying to discover, as you can’t re-enter that first bunker where it was located. Locking players out of a collectables trophy in a game with an open world. What is this? 2008?!

Once you get better weapons, that whole stealth thing goes out of the window, even for bigger enemies. Make sure you’re at full health, throw a molotov, blast the thing with your shotgun and watch it die. If you do get hurt, don’t worry. You’ve got bandages. Combat stops being a big deal until maybe the very last part of the game, where the number of enemies means you might have to do a bit more kiting and healing.

What’s more of an issue is wayfinding. Out in the world, you’ve got a map that does a perfunctory job of showing you where to go. There are no pathfinding indicators, and the map and the real world are aligned differently, but it’s all doable. Getting around the bottom area of the map, the swamp, is less intuitive, but you’ll figure it out. However, indoor areas are more of a faff with maze-like corridors, endless locked doors and switches and no map (apart from ones that you’ll find on the wall very sporadically). I don’t feel like it’s adding to the survival-horror experience but rather just inconveniencing you.

You’ll also get coded doors that require a number, and often, I just ended up googling them because otherwise, you have to check endless corners and read poorly written notes to try to find the clues. Intriguing at first, but insufferable eventually.

Which reminds us about another niggle. The game has a day/night cycle, but it’s nearly almost dark out. You get a bit of daylight, but it’s like they set this game in the middle of Winter or something because you nearly always need your torch apart from in the short window of time where the Sun comes up.

At this point, the flaws are starting to mount up. Add in a frame rate that often tanks for no reason, the clunky controls (especially in combat but also with the menu interface) and the fact that enemies might not be able to see you, but if you silently throw a molotov at them, they somehow know exactly where you were when you threw it, and it all starts to fall apart.

Then the bugs come in. For example, going into an area and finding three versions of the same NPC there. One that you can, and need to, interact with and two that are just there. Or the game’s occasional refusal to load up one of your saves. You’ll need to close the game out completely to get past that. And it happens a few times in a complete playthrough.

It can even affect the story. At one point, a character gets killed during a ritual. Now this could have been a big moment except that they stop talking mid-sentence, totally telegraphing that when the next part of the scene plays, they’re going to get killed. It happens exactly as you’d expect, killing any power that scene had. And all scenes have that sort of slow load-in, even when the setting and view don’t change at all. This is a load buffer between audio recordings. We’re playing on a PS5, and the game can’t even seemlessly deliver dialogue.

That’s not the only issue with the story. It’s like there are three things going on. The scary Horned God, who essentially is treated like no big deal, the mutated monsters and the whole ghost story thing. It’s not woven together particularly well. That said, some of it comes together towards the end and leads to what would have been a pretty good ending, especially as the mystery resolves in a fairly satisfying way.

However, technical and writing choices spoil that party too. In terms of the writing, you’re given a huge ultimatum at one point with what feels like an impossible choice, and there are trophies for both versions with a save spot just outside, so you can easily try both. Cool.

The thing is, it’s not an impossible choice because the character with you at that point allows you to do both things. Easily. Barely an inconvenience. The alternative choice trophy then just involves you walking away for no reason. It’s hard to explain without spoiling it, but you’re going to do the same thing either way and then walk away from the reason for doing it for no reason.

And regardless of which choice you pick, the moment is spoiled because we had two dialogue tracks playing over each other, which sort of killed the impact of the whole thing. To the bitter end, I Hate This Place found a way to spoil things.

It’s a shame because I kind of enjoyed the exploration, combat and mystery-solving. Elements of the story are intriguing and resolve in an interesting way. There are things to like, but the game just gets in its own way in silly ways. Like nothing is particularly well-implemented.  There’s promise here, but it’s just badly delivered. Poor programming, unintuitive design. The game achieves what it set out to do, but it just needed more time or, at least, a more honest playtesting. There are dozens of elements that feel like proof-of-concept ideas, but none of them are executed well and yet there does feel like there is heart behind this game. It doesn’t feel like caring about the game was the issue; we believe they did. Instead, it’s more of a problem of competency, and, unfortunately, that’s harder to fix.