Hellpoint

I originally got this game as a giveaway on GOG. I played through most of it alone or with random online players, trying to convince my friends to join me. Eventually I did convince a friend to join me, but he got the game on Steam, so I also purchased the game on Steam to facilitate playing together.
The fact that I paid money for the game after I got it for free should say enough that I really enjoyed it. But my playtime is another testament to how much I enjoyed this game. Consider also that my actual playtime is even higher if you count the time I spent playing it on GOG. I really enjoy this game!
Yes, there are bugs and glitches and jank. If you can get past those, I think there's a lot to enjoy. And if you can play it co-op, you can play through basically the entire game together, unlike Dark Souls which kicks your co-op partner out every time you defeat a boss, or doesn't allow you to summon co-op partners until certain conditions are met.
I enjoyed the game, and its atmosphere. I also liked thinking about and discovering the fate of Irid Novo, and what the player's role is in all of it.
Admittedly the game isn't for everyone. And there were plenty of times where the jank and glitches became pretty frustrating. And the fully powered up final bosses of the DLC and the main game were not enjoyable experiences overall. (But honestly I don't play Souls-like games for the boss fights. I play them for the exploration and discovery.) Despite all the frustrations and glitches, I played through the game basically 4 or 5 times and all the way to the end I kept discovering new items, secret areas, or new pathways that I didn't know about before.
I really enjoyed it and I'm glad this game exists. I think it's worth checking out if you go into it with proper expectations.

Short Version: A “good enough” game in the style of Dark Souls with an amazing theme, surprisingly fun combat (sometimes in spite of itself), and massive amounts of jank. Buy it on sale if you like Souls games. DLC is more questionable since it is a massive difficulty spike and has some very frustrating parts, but overall I would still say worth it on sale.
Long Version: I seem to be falling down the Souls game rabbit hole and have had this in my library for a very long time, so I finally got around to beating it. Took just about 40 hours to get the best ending while following a guide (without a guide it could take the rest of your life, more on that later).
The theme of this game is awesome. You are on a space station that very obviously has something going terribly wrong. Power is off, bodies are everywhere, and the structure is heavily damaged. Your character is basically 3D printed by the station administrator with the purpose of exploring the station, figuring out what’s going on, and reporting back. I really like seeing sci-fi games in genres that are traditionally fantasy based, and this game has a great sci-fi horror vibe right out of Dead Space or Doom. It is a bit unintuiative, since the game doesn’t tell you a lot about its mechanics and seeing damage types like “induction, entropy, radiation” takes more effort to understand than “fire, cold, poison” but it’s not too bad. Mostly the mechanics are standard Dark Souls stuff with a new name, although one thing to note is that damage stat scaling softcaps super low, so your stats will be spread everywhere and finding weapons that scale off as many damage stats as possible is actually optimal in this game.
I don’t really care about graphics and this game solidly falls in the category of “good enough” for me, although they aren’t particularly great. Especially some of the background cityscape shots of the station that could look amazing mostly look like they were from a game from the early 2000s.
The controls feel super loose and floaty, which actually makes combat more fun. Your dodges and jumps are very generous and cover tons of ground, as well as every weapon having a charge attack or other attacks that create movement, so it can be fun sliding around the enemy and bouncing all over the place. There are a couple mobile enemies that dodge like you do, and those fights are great with dodging, counter dodging, and dash/jump attacks flying everywhere. Mostly though the enemies are DS1/DS2 style stiff and slow. This game also has a strong ranged weapon component, as you would expect from a sci-fi game. When you equip a ranged weapon the camera pulls in over your shoulder and you get an aiming reticle, so it turns from Dark Souls into Remnant. That’s super cool, but I didn’t mess around with ranged weapons in my playthrough much so I can’t say how good it feels. Magic weapons are basically the same as ranged weapons but with different damage types.
Remember how I said your character was created to explore the station and report back? That’s a huge part of the feel of this game. You are not trying to reach a place and defeat an enemy or recover a treasure. You are exploring and learning. The whole game leans hard into that. Everything you do (finding a new bonfire, reading lore items, defeating a new enemy/boss, etc) gives you “data”. Once you reach 100% data you can go back to the station administrator and end the game. There is probably about 175% data available in the game, so you don’t need to do anything close to seeing everything. In fact the station has a couple branching paths that all loop back into each other and really no “end destination”, so in a sense where you go doesn’t matter, it’s just about going somewhere. Obviously there are multiple endings and going to certain places can be helpful for that, but I won’t spoil anything.
That theme can sometimes be very frustrating since the developers take the exploration thing too far sometimes. This game is obsessed with maze like areas (which are usually dark), secret doors (that are usually noticeable, but sometimes aren’t, and have inconsistent ways to open them), hidden areas (get used to multiple hidden areas inside other hidden areas), and platforming. This is why I say the guide is necessary. There are so many secrets and some of them are so asinine that you could waste the rest of your life trying to find them.
The platforming deserves an entire paragraph on its own, because it sucks. Those floaty controls that make combat fun make platforming absolute hell. Frequently the platforming involves some combination of death pits, enemies that are shooting at you, invisible platforms, and the most awful janky hidden platform revealing item I have ever seen in any game ever. This is combined with a horrible strict fall damage limit. You can die to fall damage from dropping off the side of a staircase to skip walking down a flight. I easily died 5x more to falling off platforms than I did to actual enemies.
I think I’ve said enough to let you know if this game is for you or not, but I am going to do a rapid fire round here at the end of random facts/cool things this game does:
When you die it makes a NPC ghost of you where you died, and you can fight it for extra souls. It’s usually a very fun fight, but can be horrible if your ghost shows up in an already cramped and difficult area (you basically have to go deliberately die somewhere else at that point).
You recharge mana and healing charges by damaging enemies, which leans into the exploration angle since you can effectively sustain yourself forever if you’re good/strong enough, but the developers know that so be prepared for some truly excessive distances between bonfires sometimes.
Weapons have familiarity points and unlock special moves or stat bonuses as you use them more. I think that’s cool because it lets you have weapons with good initial stats but no bonuses, or weapons that look less good but become better as you invest in them. Mostly a take it or leave it thing.
The developers really lean into the “this should be unfairly hard and miserable” side of Dark Souls. You will routinely find random death pits positioned exactly where you would naturally be walking/dodging, or get jumped by enemies in closets that stun lock you in a corner, and I already mentioned the platforming. I think this is horrible design and not what Dark Souls is really about, but oh well. At least they are very generous with the items that you can consume for souls (those items are actually a common enemy drop, so it is not unusual to, for instance, have an enemy give you 25 souls and drop an item that gives you 11). That takes some of the sting out of the BS because frequently losing your souls isn’t as big of a deal.
There are no starting classes. Every character starts naked with no equipment and stats of all 1 (makes sense based on the story). Because of this your character starts out super weak, like DS1 weak. Very much one of those games where you have to put 10 points into each of stamina, health, and carry weight before the game becomes playable.
This game is turbojank overload. Tons of bugs, usually in the DLC stuff but not always. A couple annoyingly common ones are an enemy attack randomly turning into a "damage every frame" attack if you get hit at the wrong time, so prepare to instantly evaporate when that happens. Also (this one made me alt+f4 multiple times) it seems like if you get hit at the exact right time while doing some weird combination of dodging and attacking, your character will no longer respond to control inputs and stand there in the idle animation no matter what buttons you press. I only saw this in the DLC areas though.

Not a big soulslike fan. But this game is dope! Even playing it in multiplayer is awesome. Even though it makes the game significantly easier as teh support can die as often as they want and not have any drawbacks. Which is a cool feature if you want to play with someone not much into soulslike or playing their first soulslike. I played through this game like 5 times by now and I always discover something new. I like that it is open world in a way that you can travel from hub to hub back and forth. It a bit sad this game seems to be not as popular or even known. It truly is a work of passion and you feel it. Is it as obsuce as other souls likes? Yes. Do you understand the story after you played it 3 times? Probably. Which also is an interesting thing. The way you … “progress” in the story so to speak. Once you played the game you’ll understand.

Rating: 6/10
Platinum: Yes. DLC needed. Had to co-op with myself to get all coins due to a bug.
Would I play again? Unlikely
Likes: Interesting concept of a souls like with a spacefaring twist and a link to hell. The lore is brilliant, the environment is well crafted, and be sure to check what secret doors look like because there are a LOT of them in this game. Also like the idea of defeating enemies gradually filling your “healing flask.” I would like more people to play this game solely to get more theory’s on the lore, sadly YouTube was lacking in this department and I love investigating others thoughts and opinions on complex stories.
Dislikes: While I appreciated the combat, I didn’t really enjoy any weapons until I got a big, sparkly sword from the DLC. The weapon abilities were lacklustre and as a strength build I felt there were few choices to personalise my build or make it shine. During my second run I had a lot of stuttering, lag and a few crashes, so I wasn’t impressed by this. My biggest issue with this game was an NPC that was supposed to open a door for me was bugged on both my play throughs even after several reloads and attempts to fix it. This locked me out of an achievement to collect all coins but there was a way to play co op with yourself to get around it. I’d expect a 5 year old game to be more polished than this, but I’ll give them some slack due to it being created by only 11 people.

I wish there was a neutral rating, because that's where this game fits. I guess positive will have to do.

Hellpoint is conceptually very cool, sci-fi with obvious influences from Dark Souls and Hellraiser (though less so in that regard). Sadly, the lack of development time, funding, a really buggy launch, and overall sales seem to have hindered this title. I would say it's worth a buy on sale if you need to scratch a Souls itch and like the sci-fi genre as well.

PROS
+ Story is pretty alright
+ Intriguing lore that left me wanting to know more about the universe
+ Lots of weapons and armors to build around
+ Combat is challenging if you don't min/max
+ Graphics are still decent, and elevated with a ReShade preset on Nexus

CONS
- Still a lot of bugs and seems to have been abandoned
- Can crash sometimes, depending on hardware or odd circumstances in gameplay
- Lots of cut content that would have wrapped things up better story-wise
- Area layouts can be confusing, and downright nonsensical sometimes. Too. Many. Keycard. Doors.
- PVP Arena is absolutely dead because no one plays, you will never get that golden armor set now naturally

What a gem. I would compare the gameplay mechanics to DS2 but the charm of its unusual aesthetics really make this game a world of its own. The Blue Sun DLC is quite a leap in environment and brutal enemies. Feels like a old windows game while also feeling alien and profound. Highly recommend a playthrough of this with a good enhancing toke for maximum warpage.

Dark Souls in Space!

Hellpoint is an actual proper Soulslike game in a sci-fi horror setting sporting solid gameplay, gorgeous aesthetics, and some absolutely fascinating lore. The only real drawback - and it is a big one - is the abundance of bugs and glitches. The game is very buggy, from enemy AI that simply stops working, to bosses clipping through the arena boundaries and falling to their deaths, to save files becoming corrupted beyond repair (although this one seems to have been fixed?). There are also some awkward design choices present in the game, such as the Shield Bash ability where you have to sprint towards enemies with your shield raised to break their guard AND it doesn't work most of the time (bug I assume...). Also you can't adjust the graphical settings in-game - not sure if you can do it in steam launcher. To top it off, the developers have not updated the game since August of 2022 so it doesn't look like the remaining bugs in the game are going to be fixed anytime soon if ever. Nevertheless! I quickly found myself hooked and having more fun than what I wanted to admit, and it would be disingenuous to say that I don't recommend it.

8/10