For many triple-A video games, appealing to a wide audience often means ensuring players can see a game to its conclusion. That sometimes translates to sanding down combat, exploration, and puzzle-solving to make it approachable as possible. But this can sometimes veer into making games too guided for their own good. Hell is Us tosses all of these conventions out of the window. Goodbye quest logs, maps, and objective arrows telling you where to go. By trusting players to figure things out, Hell is Us' smart level and puzzle design shine to create compelling and rewarding discoveries, despite middling combat and uneven storytelling.