HELL ON EARTH

The haunting world of HELL IS US has a lot to offer

- By Maddi Chilton

In Rémi Letam’s defence, I don’t believe he thought wandering into an active war zone in search of his parents was going to be a walk in the park. Still, I don’t think the guy deserved to end up kidnapped, tortured, and hooked up to a truth serum drip: he did save the world, after all.

There’s a lot that happens before this. Hell is Us plays out as Rémi tells his story to an unpleasant representative of the Ziel Council. He tells them about how he became an ON Peacekeeper in Hadea only to break away to search for his parents, a quest that ends abruptly as he instead battles horrifying monsters called Hollow Walkers and ends an apocalyptic calamity. A fun vacation for anyone.

As Rémi arrives in Hadea, it’s broken into civil war between the Palomists and the Sabineans, two ethnic groups that share the territory but have a long history of violence. The most recent eruption of violence has triggered the appearance of timeloops and these Hollow Walkers, or lymbic entities, which have occurred throughout Hadean history. The supernatural elements are creepy and effective, but it’s the setting’s roots in our present reality that make Hadea work: legacies of ethnic conflict, religious strife, nationalist manipulation of politics, and the ineffectiveness of outside forces to interrupt the cycles of violence. Whether Rémi is also perpetuating cycles of violence by attacking everything he sees with a large axe is up to interpretation.

FIGHT FIRE

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