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.

Near the start of this story, it is established that Rémi is a high-functioning sociopath. My expectation on fictional portrayals of sociopathy, is that they have very little to do with the real thing. Nonetheless, I find this to be a really interesting detail that serves the story on multiple levels.

On the one hand, it would be kind of strange if Rémi were not a sociopath. He’s adventuring through a war zone, and mostly doesn’t show emotional reactions to any of it. If we really thought about it, wouldn’t that take away from his portrayal as a hero?

On the other hand, Rémi’s emotional distance may very well mirror the player’s. This is, after all, a work of fiction. It is a video game that speaks the language of violence. Players cannot–and should not–react to violence in the game as if it were real world violence. Nobody who played Elden Ring can say that they felt the tragedy of every corpse strewn across the Lands Between–certainly not all the corpses that the player is directly responsible for. Hell is Us might be trying a bit harder than Elden Ring to drive home its tragedy, but at the end of the day the corpses are still set dressing.

And even in the real world, we often feel emotional distance from violence. It is difficult to really feel the weight of genocide on the opposite side of the world. It is impossible to feel its true magnitude. In a world where more things are going wrong than we can reasonably keep track of, it is inevitable that people feel numb. Perhaps you’d have to be at least a bit numb to stop from panicking all the time. And there is also natural variation in people’s emotional reactivity, which I often think about since I know I am not as reactive as most.

Recently, much has been said about the importance of empathy in averting genocide. It is important to understand that the Other is not subhuman. To recognize the inherent worth and dignity of every person, as my husband puts it. It is extremely troubling to hear the American right propagandize about how empathy is a trap.

But empathy has a common failure mode: when you just don’t feel it. Because you’re numb, or on the opposite side of the world, or because you simply can’t feel everything.

Rémi is a hero, because he doesn’t necessarily feel empathy for every person in this war, but he helps them anyway. If you can’t feel empathy, you can still do empathy. Play the role of the empathetic individual, because it’s the right thing to do.