hell ♥♥♥♥

TL;DR - For anyone who loves the ARPG genre I feel this is worth buying. It's clear Hell Clock's designs are informed by careful thought and a desire to innovate within the genre and these are exactly the kind of Devs and titles I like to support.

I highly recommend this game for anyone who likes a high replay value fast paced dungeon crawl, challenging bosses, and the zen of grinding rolls on gear for your favorite loadouts. This is very remniscient of earlier diablo titles for me with a strong sense of customization and meta progression that feels like PoE lite. A lot of the mechanics feel well thought out and considered for veterans to the genre while being highly configurable to player's different playstyles and skill levels to lend even more replayability for those who like to challenge themselves across multiple saves. You can even disable the Hell Clock - the game's namesake mechanic that sets a time limit on your runs - if you find you want to just chill instead of speedrun.

I like that you can't necessarily stat check enemies and have to pay attention because of the corruption mechanic during bosses that make each hit more deadly than the last. I started on veteran difficulty and I'm not even mad that the boss on the 10th floor farmed me for a few hours until I experimented to find a build and gather drops that worked, because that's the fun of these kind of games to me. The grind is a patient one, and can be slower paced than some may like, but I like that you can work on more than one loadout at a time which makes every run feel meaningful in the long run.

Most ARPG/Roguelite titles focus their meta-progression on controlling randomness in order for a player to min-max a build and guarantee a performance threshold through the use of banishes, rerolls, rarity increases etc. Hell Clock abandons the foolery and goes their own way. It's a bit much to explain in a simple review, but their choice of a controlled approach that is entirely player led is way more nuanced and powerful the more you understand the system itself and the needs of your build. Absolute chef's kiss.

Try this one guys, I don't think you'll regret it! I'm learning so much brazilian portugese!

As a roguelike, it's pretty good. It's not too hard - about half of my runs ended with the game bringing me back to town (either because I beat the act, or as a story-tied "death" to prolong the game). They made the odd decision to wait until the last 20% of the game to unlock one of the character upgrade trees. It took me under 6 hours to beat. Afterwards there's some NG+ features.

However if you're looking to scratch that "Diablo-like" itch, this isn't it. The game gives you the choice between wasd controls and Diablo-like mouse controls, and given how crucial dodging things is in this game, the wasd controls are vastly superior. Also new gear drops pretty infrequently, and there's rarely any question about which to equip - the difference is usually "number is bigger".

Overall I think it's worth buying on sale if rogue-lites are your thing.