There are lots of games in the same way there are lots of crisps. Many of those games are good, in the same way that many crisps are shaped a bit like Jesus. But even a crisp shaped like Jesus ceases to delight after you’ve seen a few. Great, you think. Another bloody Jesus Dorito. Hurl it on the pile. You crave something transcendent. Like a Möbius strip Wotsit. Or a Salt ‘n Vinegar Disco inscribed with the Corpus Hermeticum. Something that changes the way you look at crisps forever.
Anyway, Hell Clock is not that, but it does has a wicked sick knife spin attack, so carefree in its centrifugal flesh mangling that I resented every screenshot I had to take for making me move my finger off the funny spin button.
It’s an ARPG, so not only evokes Diablo latently but also deliberately with its dusky Tristram theme homages and candlecursed hellmouth basements. Diablo is… whatever Diablo is now, which sets me up for resistance and suspicion of Hell Clock’s motives, like when your mate dresses up as a cop for Halloween and you start thinking he might turn out to be a real one and arrest you for throwing up outside Wetherspoons.
But no, happily. It’s very much a home-cooked meal to Blizzard’s uncannily shapely cheeseburger; the pissy gherkin tang of applied psychology not entirely but mostly replaced by love and care and a bit of inner fire. It does not want to take over your life. It is pulpy and fiercely animated and grimly righteous. It is smart, dumb fun.
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Which might sound like a flippant undersell for a story set in the wake of the 1897 Canudos Massacre, in which most of the Brazilian municipality’s inhabitants were slaughtered by a government expedition after being demonised as monarchists by the republic. This provides, as I say, a righteous context for pressing the funny spin button in a story firmly focused on revenge, with less time for characters or culture (it’s there if you go looking, though. The Candomblé deities in the constellation skill tree. Some of the relics. Almost certainly some other stuff I’m not equipped to notice.)
It’s firmly Superman vs. The KKK in its stark lines and colours and easy fuck yeah, I get to kill the phantom phrenology doctor. It doesn’t pull punches, though, especially in its third act. “God made us all not equal,” mourns a victim’s spirit. “My brain’s smaller and I was born to suffer”. And it’s a rare and special thing, all told: An ARPG that makes you want to go read a history book afterward, rather than just a build wiki.
Not that I was tempted to seek one out. After the first act, I’d already cobbled together the bones of the build I’d use going forward. A piercing dodge and lightning knives and lifesteal and a dagger shield with movement speed buffs that fed back into my spin damage. Later, an AOE that tore through lightning resistance. Hell Clock is techy but snacky like a Hades. You’re buying and getting rewarded skill upgrades and trinkets at a healthy pace. The clock is basically there to say, OK, you’re cracked enough for one run. Time to start over. It becomes less relevant the longer you play, the more timing buffs you buy with the perma-currency, the more comically lethal you become with permanent upgrades.
Those are equipment and relics and skill trees, status effects and elemental damage and overlapping percentages. The random upgrades on each run offer chances to weight different aspects of even the exact same build differently; to focus on critical damage this time, elemental damage the next. They’re not stingy either. 30% area of effect buffs. 50% damage buffs. Each run is a tangible rocket launch up the power curve, upgrades of all flavours sticking to you as you go, like pollen to a be-jetpacked bumblebee.
There are some genre sins it cannot shake. Hit a wall, and there’s very little you can do in the moment to overcome it. Such battles are won in menus. I hesitate to employ a binary between skill and numbers because I got real pleasure from tweaking my build between runs, playing trinket Tetris. But more than once I found myself effectively invincible due to what I’d done in those menus, but still putting out piddling damage against some randomly generated spongefucker named ‘accursed doom of the possessed tormented’ for an age.
But there is a contagious fury in Hell Clock’s bones, louder than its flaws or features list. Pajeú staggers, weakened, through a razed village in a storm. When he returns, he is the storm. Still spinning, still winning, made of wrath and gunsmoke and a circle of blades and lightning that just keeps expanding with every suspiciously perfect upgrade. I am certain there are numbers under the hood, stewing like the spirits of avenging dead, nudging the RNG just so. Much obliged, furious ghosts. One more run it is, then.