Blighttown.
Dark Souls crossed with Dead Space? Bloodborne set within the bowels of a great big derelict space station? Yes. Yes please, we like this, we want this, sign us up! Cradle Games’ Hellpoint has got a great premise, a fantastically atmospheric setting and gameplay that unashamedly pilfers ideas and mechanics from FromSoftware’s superb back catalogue while adding a few little twists and tricks of its own. It should be a success, it should an easy recommendation – especially for Soulslike fans – however, a Switch port that massively downgrades graphics while introducing some pretty serious technical issues results in a sci-fi action-adventure that feels like it’s bitten off quite a bit more than it can chew – on Nintendo’s hybrid console, at least.
The story here, in true Soulslike fashion, is a cryptic thing that you’ll need to piece together haphazardly as you traverse the innards of the Irid Novo, the enormous derelict space station onto which your character is birthed at the beginning of the game. The general gist though, if we’ve managed to pull the sparse shreds of evidence together in any way properly, is that you’ve been created by a mysterious AI known as The Author, who requires that you “collect data” by fighting hordes of hellish space demons in order to save the Novo, which is currently orbiting perilously close to a supermassive black hole in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event known as The Merge. Your standard day out in space, basically.
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