I Hate This Place Review — Ghost Stories

I Hate This Place entered my radar last September; I didn’t look into it too much, but I knew it was a survival game with horror vibes and a cool-looking protagonist, which is more than enough to catch my interest. I was pleasantly surprised to find a game with a deeper literary universe connected to it, backed full of really clever and spooky depictions of ghosts, monsters, and haunted things that go bump in the night, and a mixture of open-world exploration and survival-crafting mechanics that work surprisingly well with what the game is going for. The game has its quirks, of course, but overall left a positive impression on me and introduced me to a new series that I’m dying to check out as soon as I’m finished writing this review.

For the uninformed or those simply looking for a recap, I Hate This Place is an isometric survival-horror game taking place on the haunted lands of Rutherford Ranch, an area in what I presume is the Alaskan or thereabouts wilderness, considering the sun doesn’t come up until 9:30 in the morning. With a retro comic-book style, you play as our badass protagonist as she seeks to save her best friend after she mysteriously goes missing during an ill-advised attempt to summon an ancient god.

That introduction I just gave you sets the stage for the story and, unfortunately, is a good deal easier to understand than how the game presents its world and narrative.

See, one big issue with I Hate This Place is how it presents you with information about the world and story. The game opens to a rather shoddy, poorly-paced cutscene that shows our two main characters performing a strange ritual, our friend suddenly disappearing, and us chasing after her into an underground lab, only to find out she was never there in the first place.

I found out too late that I Hate This Place is actually based on a comic series by the same name, and I have to say, the world I was introduced to in the game has made me super interested in checking that series out. However, it seems as though the game is designed with an expectation that you are already a fan of the comics, as the lore of the world around you is presented in jarring, matter-of-fact ways through conversation and discovery at weird points during the story. It’s not as if we’re learning about everything for the first time, but rather we are supposed to know about the setting’s many oddities and backstory already, so a lot of stuff I had no idea about either wasn’t explained at all or was presented to me without context.

As a newcomer to the series, this made it a lot harder to get invested in the world and often made me confused as to who I was and what I was doing in the game. It took a while before I felt like I had a comfortable enough understanding of what was going on to simply accept new things as they were presented without buildup, context, or the expectation of surprise.

That being said, I did eventually find myself invested in the game and loving the setting. The haunted Rutherford Ranch is presented as a place where all manner of ghastly things can happen, from haunted cars trying to run you over on the road, evil mutated spiders luring you in with siren calls, and evil government bunkers full of secret, mutated experiments.

Mechanically, you’re tasked with exploring the open-world environment, gathering materials to craft weapons and ammo, and completing quests for the game’s cast of characters. I’m not always a fan of crafting mechanics in games, but I feel like it really worked for I Hate This Place; you’re encouraged to scavenge for supplies during the day, which you use to craft weapons and ammo that can help you fight the increasingly active horrors at night.

The game also has a pretty simple stealth mechanic, and both crafting and stealth are presented as optional mechanics that remove your need to engage in the other. If you’re clever and stealthy, you can get by monsters without the need to waste your ammo or healing supplies. If you’re well-supplied, you can blast your way through enemies. A melee weapon will do for most foes if you aren’t particularly prepared in either way, but you will find the game a lot more forgiving if you dedicate yourself to one or the other, or a mix of both mechanics.

That being said, I found the combat to be simple to a fault. You’re really just pointing and clicking, which becomes particularly obvious and underwhelming when you have to engage in melee combat. There is no dodging or blocking, meaning a melee battle is just a slog of trading blows until you or the enemy dies.

To end this review by touching back up on an earlier point, I was really disappointed by the game’s cutscenes. For a game based on a comic book, I Hate This Place uses some very lame, visually unappealing “cutscenes” that just consist of the in-game models standing apart from each other and talking. These scenes would have been way better as comic stills, especially since the game shows us from promo material that it has some awesome artists connected to it.

Overall, I Hate This Place is an interesting title. Its mechanics are solid, if not all that impressive, and are enough to keep you playing as you engage in a very interesting horror setting. The way the game presents the player with information makes the setting hard to get invested in, though, and it feels like the game could have done a better job of pulling from its comic-book roots in some areas. I think fans of the comic will be drawn to the title, and some players will find this game and become fans of the comic themselves, but it may be lost on a wider audience who fail to find themselves fully engaged with the game’s setting and mechanics.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of I Hate This Place. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! I Hate This Place is available on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.