Can a game be equally good and bad? It's rather ugly to look at but also has some interesting flourishes, like the gregorian chant playing during one of the bosses, the Bruegel-inspired main bad place, the genuinely creepy level in that bad place that's designed like a child's bedroom and has lullaby music playing, and way more lore to delve into than a game like this really deserves, like a detailed profile on all the five baddie serial killers you have to fight, a voodoo-insipred tarot deck that summarizes the plot of this game, and a detailed nineteenth-century sketchbook of the mechanical designs of the big bad place. The writing and acting is kind of bad, mostly that super-edgy profanity-laden aggro style that only young boys really find engaging and not very well-developed characters, but then there's a skeleton-snake with an Irish accent who's your best friend in Hell (really!) and then the cutscene with the Bible and TS Eliot-quoting main baddie right before your fight with him that has to be seen to be believed, if not played through. I'd probably pass this by now as a grown-ass man, but I played it as a high school kid first and then subsequently played it more than once.

Reviewed on Apr 28, 2022


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