It feels like forever ago (cue up a cigarette drag), but looking back, 2025 was an uncharacteristically stacked year for new video games. Kirby Air Ride got a decades-overdue sequel! Battlefield 6 was actually good! Blue Prince redefined puzzle games! Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — can you believe that only just came out last year? (Cue up another cigarette drag.)
The under-the-radar games of 2025 were also operating on another level. In a year stacked with shiny new entries in long-running AAA series, we also got indie gems like And Roger…, Ball x Pit, Despelote, Is This Seat Taken?, and Wheel World. Though the real story of 2025 was the emergence of AA games — moderately scoped projects that nevertheless tend to take up multiple GB of your hard drive. One such game, Hell Is Us, is getting a second lease on life a year after its release.
Hell Is Us is a must-play Soulslike on Game Pass
Developed by Rogue Factor, Hell Is Us is a semi-open-world action adventure game with heavy Soulslike influences that was saddled with some seriously unlucky release date timing: Sept. 4, 2025, a date those who lived through remember as Silksong Day. But Hell Is Us is seeing a resurgence one year on. As of this writing, it’s currently the third most-popular game on Xbox Game Pass, having been added to the service in July. (Microsoft does not publicly share extra numbers for how many streams or downloads a Game Pass game has received.) The studio announced in early August that Hell Is Us has been played by a million people to date.
Hell Is Us is about a peacekeeper who returns to his homeland to search for his parents — a refreshing twist on a story structure that typically revolves around rescuing a lost lover or whatever. While there, he discovers said homeland has been overrun by supernatural horrors. Hell Is Us features many of the hallmarks of the genre (parries, so many parries!), but the main gimmick is a minimalistic UI that forced players to explore the world to uncover its missions; the game literally opens up with a message informing you there are no maps, quest markers, or other traditional navigational tools to guide. Hell Is Us is truly for the exploration sickos.
Critics were mixed: It’s currently sitting at a 77 on Metacritic based on 60 reviews. But Polygon’s own Soulslike champion Austin Manchester gave it a largely positive review, praising its tightly balanced yet intentionally frictional mission structure, though criticized the lack of enemy variety, which he found repetitive. “While the game has the look and feel of a Soulslike, thankfully it doesn’t lean into all the trappings of the genre,” he wrote. “Hell Is Us is still a wonderfully gripping game. Over the course of my 25 hours in Hadea, I frequently spent entire afternoons scouring its levels or stayed up way past my bedtime so I could keep exploring further.”
And here’s a truly deep cut of a selling point: Hell Is Us is directed by Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, the guy who served as art director for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. If you’ve been missing Adam Jensen’s richly realized sci-fi world, Hell Is Us is an unexpected salve.
Hell Is Us is out now on Xbox Series X as part of the Game Pass library. It’s also playable on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC, and a Nintendo Switch 2 version is planned for an Oct. 8 release.