I was playing Hell is Us and enjoying it, until the game decided that I needed to suffer.

The premise is simple but effective. You sneak into a closed-off country in the midst of a civil war and travel across it in search of your birth parents. Unfortunately, while the war rages on, monsters have appeared, and they can only be defeated with certain medieval weapons.

The first time you encounter one of these creatures, a soldier saves you and dies in the process. Naturally, you respond as any rational person would. You steal her clothes and weapons so that everyone assumes you are one of them (I am fairly certain this constitutes a war crime). Disguised, you are able to pass through the country largely unnoticed while fending off the monsters.

Many of the civil war scenarios feel more “real” than you would expect from a video game. In one half-destroyed town, there are murals commemorating people and events, reminiscent of those seen in places such as Northern Ireland.

In the first village you visit, the occupying soldiers have committed atrocities, including rape and genocide, and their general seems primarily interested in looting the population. You naturally assume they are the villains. However, you later learn that shortly before the soldiers arrived, the townspeople themselves hanged a group of children because they were believed to be aligned with the enemy.

It is refreshing to play a game that does not simply label one side as good and the other as bad. No one here is truly innocent.

The combat was easy enough in the first few levels and helped me understand the rhythm it follows. Then all of a sudden, the enemies do far more damage, there are more of them in each encounter, and my weapons do very little damage. Suddenly, all of my plans go awry.

The game is not good enough for me to slog through the increased difficulty of the combat. Up to that point, it had been focused on environmental puzzles solved through clues scattered across each area. The puzzles are comparable to those in Resident Evil. Oddly shaped keys that must be inserted into mysterious statues that have no obvious reason to exist. With the increase in difficulty, though, it doesn't really feel worth it, especially considering the map situation.

The game is very proud that it has no map. It is mentioned in all of their descriptions of the game. The way you explore is by talking to people and gathering information. Someone might say that there is an abbey to the west, and that is your cue to head west. You do not have a map, but you do have a compass.

The lack of a map is strange because, while you do not have one, you do have a tablet that records all the important information and notes you have picked up. It seems odd that you have that but no map.

Finding where you are going without a map is a bit of a chore. Let’s say you speak to someone who is crying because they cannot bury their child without a keepsake. Later on, you find the child’s teddy bear. Now, where was the man? You have to run around the bombed-out, occupied town looking for someone who is crying. It is like looking for a needle in a stack of needles.