Hell is Us: War and emotional distance

Hell is Us is a recent action adventure video game, with an emphasis on puzzles and exploration. I really like the game, but this is not a review.  See other sites for reviews. I am here to discuss story and themes.

Hell is Us is about war. But it’s not some high fantasy war, disconnected from reality. It’s a flat out genocide.

It takes place in the fictional country of Hadea, geographically isolated from the rest of the world. There are two religious groups, the Paloms and Sabinians. After years of forced resettlement, racist propaganda, a vote for Sabinian indendence, and so much more, the country has erupted into violence. The Sabinian army now is attempting to eradicate the Paloms. Even otherwise sympathetic characters, even young children, often express hatred for the other side, viewing them as less than human.

Paloms and Sabinians have a history that deliberately evokes Catholics and Protestants. But whether intentional or not, there is ~another~ genocide that very strongly comes to mind.

The player character is Rémi, who was born in Hadea but escaped as a small child. He never fights any humans, instead only fighting the demonic invasion that the war seems to have provoked. He is a heroic character, often helping civilians, and even saving lives. But as for the war itself, he mostly gives it the silent protagonist treatment, giving space to the player to have their own emotional reaction.

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Confession

I left Catholicism when I was 18, so I literally have a child’s understanding of the Catholic practice of confession. It was a ritual that did not make much sense to a child.

What is confession? It’s one of the seven sacred sacraments, the other six being eucharist, confirmation, marriage, holy orders, annointing the sick, and baptism, in some order. Catholic Wednesday school, known as CCD, is supposed to introduce kids to three of the sacraments, namely eucharist, confession, and confirmation.

Confession was essentially a scheduled annual obligation. One day, all the kids would quietly line up for a little private chat with one of the priests. And just to paint the picture, we always talked to priests face to face, we never used confessional boxes, ubiquitous though they are in fiction.

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Computer difficulties

Story time.  So the other day, my computer crashed and then it wouldn’t restart.  I’m not much of a hardware person, but my brothers are, so I spent a long phone call with one of them opening it up and inspecting the hard drives.  The hard drives are fine.  Great.  It’s probably a software issue, and the Windows installation was corrupted.

Anyways, I decide it would be easier to bring it into a shop rather than fixing it myself.  I put it in a suitcase and roll it over to the repair shop across the street.  I tell them Windows needs to be reinstalled, and they say they’ll take it in for advanced diagnostics.  It’s free, provided that I register as a member–so actually it’s not free, it’s $60.

A few days later and they say it’s fixed.  Not diagnosed, fixed.  They say that they needed to reinstall Windows, which is what I had said.  So I roll the computer back to my apartment, and guess what?  The computer works, but the hard drive is wiped.  Specifically, just one of the two hard drives was wiped, the other hard drive is fine.  It’s just… that was the hard drive I was using.

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Link Roundup: September 2025

My PC is out of commission right now, so no origami this month.  Still got a handful of links.

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults | Ozy Brennan – When we talk about Rationalist cults, no we’re not describing Rationalism itself as a cult, we’re talking about specific groups of people with isolationist and dysfunctional social dynamics.  Such as the Zizians, a trans vegan cult that recently murdered a landlord.  Ozy interviews former members to get a sense of what they were like and where they went wrong.

Many of the cults seem to have had a practice of exhausting multi-hour sessions, where they would read far too deeply into minor domestic behaviors.  That… really reminds me of Barefoot Bum’s description of the Kerista Commune (the cult known for coining “polyfidelity”).  It was not a Rationalist group at all, but had institutionalized a very similar practice.

Videogame politics for a burning world | Unwinnable – An interview with Ajay Singh Chaudhary, who offers an interesting perspective on climate change.  He frames climate change not as a future apocalypse, but rather as a thing that is happening right now–“all the things you hate about the present getting worse and then being stuck that way”.  Since this is a video game periodical, the latter half of the interview turns towards video games, and their role in climate change.  We have to ask, is the extravagance of large commercial video games necessary?

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