Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists

First off: I’m a huge fan of Glorantha, King of Dragon Pass (KODP), and Six Ages. I love the storytelling style and the world's overall atmosphere of these games. Even though I would have preferred a Six Ages 3 to bridge the narrative gap between Six Ages 2 and KODP, I knew from the start that Thousand Hells would be a day-one purchase for me. Thousand Hells plays a bit like the Hero Quests found in those other games. I actually considered the Hero Quests in KODP to be a weak point because they required too much memorization. Things improved slightly in Six Ages, and here it feels like that mechanic has been perfected. Unfortunately, that’s all about it. There isn't much of a meta-game; the banter is nice but gets old quickly or sometimes doesn't fit for the situation and there are too few hero portraits. The number of Hells is far below a thousand, too... while you can combine the Hells and storylines, but I fear it have much fewer replay value than KODP or Six Ages. Right now I think, why should I play the same heist again? It simply feels very bare-bones and Early Access rather than like a fully fleshed-out game. That said, the artwork is good and it does build some atmosphere, though nowhere near the level of the Glorantha series. Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed. I’ll keep playing it for a while, and if more content gets added, I’ll reconsider this review. EDIT: I played the same storyline twice now.. the talk from the characters is actually the same. I thought, the arguments of the characters would be based on their skills and personality like in KODP. Thats awful.

This game is absolutely dripping with character & charm. I was tasked with sneaking an infamous mass murderer into the heart of Soulflense Prison so he could be appropriately tormented as chosen by the parent of one of his victims. I told him it was a double-bluff where he was to be smuggled in as a prisoner so we might map the prison. We faced gods and riddles, only for the target to try and reverse the whole thing. My choices felt relevant & thrilling, & it felt like a game that fell out of an alternate world where CRPGs kept getting refined. Even if there weren't replayability & each heist & hell only felt worth running through once, it would still easily be worth the price based off how fun that run was. But I don't think it'll prove so limited. I'm eager to launch my next tale.

A game I was very excited for, and expect to put quite a few more hours into, though it has a few friction points. I think the hells are beautiful and terrifying, you really feel like you're clawing for every advantage and very seriously weighing when to press your luck or play it safe. It is very easy to get attached to your heist crew, and the variety of objectives really lends every expedition a pretty unique vibe. I appreciate that there's no progression beyond unlocking the ability to choose your preferred Heist and Hell. When the game is firing on all cylinders, it reminds me of the best tabletop sessions I've had of games like Blades in the Dark (which the cute flashback mechanic really reminds me of). Most encounters have a variety of ways to tackle them, and it's a delight when I find a route where everything lines up for my team - and, more often than not, it's also entertaining to watch them get ping-ponged around a meat thresher and barely crawl away. When I feel the friction... well, it's good that each run takes about an hour and there's no real incentive to win beyond the intrinsic joy of, winning, because failure spirals are harsh, random, and ambiguous. While I love the Insight resource that allows you to look at your odds for a given challenge before you commit to a decision, I wish there was a little more feedback on why outcomes happen like they do. I know there are dice that are supposed to visually indicate the broad chances of an action's success, but I found them so ambiguous and poorly explained to be practically useless. I had to just roll my eyes when a tooltip helpfully popped up to inform me that sometimes a good idea with good odds can still fail - but, like, how am I supposed to tell the difference? I think it's really cool how your odds of a given action succeeding are so dependent on your hero's traits, their condition, your actions through the heist, your choices WITHIN a given challenge... but I'd like to have more of an idea of WHY a given outcome happened, especially considering how ambiguous many of your actions are. Is it better for my Warrior to fight an obstacle with her 'Ugly' trait, or for my wounded and stressed Demonologist to go in swinging with their 'Fists before Talking' trait? I look forward to, uh, maybe, finding out? I hope? Regardless, this is a rad game that I would recommend to any adventure enthusiast with a tolerance for frustration!! It's a beautiful world... you just probably won't understand why you died, when it happens. C'est la vie.

I really really wanted to like this game, but I just can't. It's not its randomness or whether it's fair or not, it's how much incoherent the stories you are allowed to craft with your random actions are: it's not the lack of agency in the outcome, it's the lack of agency in creating something that makes sense. I'm out after a couple of runs, and I'm out dissappointed. I always liked King of Dragon Pass so I'm sorry to leave this review here. Go play King of Dragon Pass instead if you haven't.

This game delivers pretty much what it promises. You get a job to go into hell, select a heist crew and try to do the job without dying / ending up imprisoned / accidentally destroying the thing you were trying to steal etc. The core gameplay loop is that you make choices that involve spending and gaining resources until you're forced to try something that might fail. An awful lot of problems can be skipped one way or another at the expense of something you'd need to skip a different problem later on. Once you're in a challenge you pick a character to lead it and it throws up three options for how to deal with the challenge. Like "sneak past a guard" "stab a guard" "look for a secret door". You then draw four tokens, choosing whether to draw each one for the character you picked to take the lead on this problem, one of the other characters at random, or a pool of plot items you've come across so far. Then you match a token to an action (e.g. "Notice hidden things" to "Look for a secret door") and the game rolls a dice to see if you win, with the odds determined by how well the token matches the problem. Then you draw a new token and challenge to replace the ones that were just used up. Once you have 4 wins or 3 losses the challenge is over and the story moves on depending on the outcome, most of the time the story still proceeds on a loss, but if losses push you into ever more desperate circumstances you'll sooner or later be doing something where losing means the end of your mission. I've played three heists, won two, came back alive from the third but without the loot. One of my crew decided to double cross me and steal it, which given they only got away with it because we got so injured refusing to abandon them to their fate earlier made me shout "You monumental duckhead" at my computer. The writing is decent and draws you in enough to care about how things work out. There's some replay since the game offers four different visions of hell and a dozen or so different missions to do in them. There's probably 12 hours or so of play in doing all of them but I'm not sure I'll wind up aiming to finish every mission before moving on. I definitely fancy another one after doing three though. Like all games with a random component there'll be a portion of players who declare the random factor unbeatable, rigged etc. They're not right, but they're not entirely wrong either. You can definitely make good decisions and win more runs than you lose by doing so and the game gives you some tools to help. You get a limited resources which can tell you the odds of each tile succeeding which helps to build a picture of what sort of choices help your heists. However it doesn't give you any indication of whether the choices you make were good the other 90% of the time, you can see if you won or lost but not whether you won for making an excellent decision or because you got lucky on the random number. This makes the game rougher to learn than it ideally would be, but given the existing tools are good enough to achieve a decent win rate it's not the crippling obscurity some players make it out to be. Overall it's worth a spin as something that's got an interesting narrative idea and a novel way of approaching it. If you've tried a lot of games and the ideas in this appeal to you then it's definitely worth a spin for a cool approach to the genre. On the other hand its price to hours of game ratio isn't great so if you're gaming on a budget then it might be smarter to skip this one for something that'll keep you entertained for longer.

I bought this game because I've enjoyed the developers other games, but I can't recommend it because the player gets so little feedback on what is or is not the correct move. There are too many tiles and challenges that are vague and I feel like I'm just guessing about what to pick far too often for the game to be more engaging than frustrating.

The writing is really strong and the art can be really lovely/gross/engaging! However, I genuinely don't enjoy the main mechanic. Essentially, you're presented with four options to solve a problem. You pick one and, no matter if it's a great or terrible choice, there's an element of randomness. You might succeed, you might fail, but there's so little feedback! If you use up a scarce resource, you can see the chance of the roll, but even that feels fairly shallow. Personally, I'd love to see the chance and bonuses once you roll. It doesn't even have to be before, I just want some feedback on my choice. Anyway, once again, the premise is lovely, and I enjoy the art and writing. I just personally found the central mechanic frustrating. Definitely worth a download though to see if you feel differently!