It looks like ceaselessly in the past (cue up a cigarette drag), however trying again, 2025 was an uncharacteristically stacked year for new video games. Kirby Air Journey received a decades-overdue sequel! Battlefield 6 was actually good! Blue Prince redefined puzzle games! Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — are you able to imagine that solely simply got here out final yr? (Cue up one other cigarette drag.)
The under-the-radar video games of 2025 had been additionally working on one other degree. In a yr stacked with shiny new entries in long-running AAA sequence, we additionally received indie gems like And Roger…, Ball x Pit, Despelote, Is This Seat Taken?, and Wheel World. Although the true story of 2025 was the emergence of AA games — reasonably scoped tasks that however are inclined to take up a number of GB of your onerous drive. One such recreation, Hell Is Us, is getting a second lease on life a yr after its launch.
Hell Is Us is a must-play Soulslike on Sport Cross
Developed by Rogue Issue, Hell Is Us is a semi-open-world motion journey recreation with heavy Soulslike influences that was saddled with some severely unfortunate launch date timing: Sept. 4, 2025, a date those that lived by way of bear in mind as Silksong Day. However Hell Is Us is seeing a resurgence one yr on. As of this writing, it is presently the third most-popular recreation on Xbox Sport Cross, having been added to the service in July. (Microsoft doesn’t publicly share further numbers for what number of streams or downloads a Sport Cross recreation has acquired.) The studio announced in early August that Hell Is Us has been performed by 1,000,000 folks up to now.
Hell Is Us is a couple of peacekeeper who returns to his homeland to seek for his mother and father — a refreshing twist on a narrative construction that usually revolves round rescuing a misplaced lover or no matter. Whereas there, he discovers stated homeland has been overrun by supernatural horrors. Hell Is Us options most of the hallmarks of the style (parries, so many parries!), however the primary gimmick is a minimalistic UI that pressured gamers to discover the world to uncover its missions; the sport actually opens up with a message informing you there are not any maps, quest markers, or different conventional navigational instruments to information. Hell Is Us is really for the exploration sickos.
Critics had been blended: It is presently sitting at a 77 on Metacritic based mostly on 60 evaluations. However Polygon’s personal Soulslike champion Austin Manchester gave it a largely positive review, praising its tightly balanced but deliberately frictional mission construction, although criticized the dearth of enemy selection, which he discovered repetitive. “Whereas the sport has the appear and feel of a Soulslike, fortunately it does not lean into all the trimmings of the style,” he wrote. “Hell Is Us remains to be a splendidly gripping recreation. Over the course of my 25 hours in Hadea, I incessantly spent whole afternoons scouring its ranges or stayed up well beyond my bedtime so I may hold exploring additional.”
And here is a really deep minimize of a promoting level: Hell Is Us is directed by Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, the man who served as artwork director for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. When you’ve been lacking Adam Jensen’s richly realized sci-fi world, Hell Is Us is an sudden salve.
Hell Is Us is out now on Xbox Collection X as a part of the Sport Cross library. It is also playable on PlayStation 5 and Home windows PC, and a Nintendo Swap 2 model is deliberate for an Oct. 8 launch.