I Hate This Place Review – Survival Trivializes Horror

I Hate This Place is a survival horror game developed by Rock Square Thunder and published by Feardemic. After a summoning ritual goes horribly wrong, you must look for your friend while confronting your past. With the help of several allies, explore various locations and fight back the local horrors. Build structures and harvest resources to create items that help you survive while discovering the truth.

You are Elena, a young woman revisiting her family’s ranch with her friend Lou. Shortly after Lou starts a ritual to summon the Horned Man, she disappears and leaves Elena alone. Elena must journey around the ranch’s surrounding areas and discover what happened to Lou. However, the mission also uncovers some dark secrets about the ranch and her past. Elena must be ready to embrace the truth if she is to rescue those she holds dear.

The story started rough as I wasn’t entirely sure where I was or how the situation related to Lou’s disappearance. With time, the story finds its stride and the pieces began falling into place. Supporting characters make their appearance and flesh out the game world and you learn about past events from expository materials scattered across different areas. It takes time but eventually the I Hate This Place’s complex story will begin to make sense.

Elena’s family ranch and the surrounding areas form I Hate This Place’s setting. It’s appropriately creepy with few daytime hours and lots of dark areas. You often explore underground settings like mines and bunkers. Ghosts provide jumpscares and enemies take various forms, not all of them humanoid. Red tentacles are scattered across areas, some hiding behind structures to get the jump on you. It reinforces the supernatural elements and never lets you forget that something is terribly wrong with this location.

Elena is capable of using firearms and has a trusty baseball bat for melee combat. However direct combat isn’t encouraged, with enemy avoidance often being the best strategy. Enemies are mostly blind and struggle to find Elena until they hear a noise. That’s when their movements quicken and hunting instincts take over, scouring the area to find the source.

Having blind enemies makes it easier to devise strategies where you can avoid combat and crouching to avoid making sounds and distracting enemies is a key strategy throughout I Hate This Place. Even though Elena isn’t a helpless combatant, the enemies are capable of tearing her to shreds if she isn’t careful. They can also work together to attack Elena, overwhelming her quickly. Avoiding combat is always recommended as fighting is risky due to the sound potentially attracting other enemies.

This also means the player must be strategic with weapon usage; when Elena sees a group of enemies, using her firearms may not be a smart option. Instead, you might choose to distract them or throw explosives to clear the room. But with limited resources, you must decide if distracting enemies or waiting for them to pass is vital. If you do fight enemies, can you isolate them or do you fight them all? Making these decisions is tense and immersive, have the player develop plans to survive without wasting resources.

While you aren’t exploring areas, you can return to Elena’s family ranch and create structures to harvest resources. Development is slow at first, requiring Elena to harvest whatever she can find to construct anything. Eventually you can use the resources harvested from these structures for further construction. It’s also possible to build ammunition, food, and medicine to resupply before another exploration mission.

Crafting is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s great to be able to create resources and establish a sustainable loop; having a near-unlimited supply of food and healing items makes a big difference, even if their effects aren’t great. You can always pause your exploration and return to the ranch for a resupply before returning. It makes the game easier and reduces the need to scavenge. You won’t feel like you missed something vital or precious too often.

The downside is that this also makes combat less dangerous. Stealth tactics are encouraged because fighting enemies directly is risky. However, a proper resource setup lets you create an infinite supply of basic healing items. That means you can use melee combat against enemies and heal without worrying about dying. While you aren’t invincible per se, the horror element is slowly eroded because you aren’t afraid of enemies anymore.

Unfortunately I Hate This Place has some technical issues. Sometimes text doesn’t properly display and speech bubbles show up at the bottom of the screen, making them difficult to follow while focusing on the conversation. There are also times where fighting in large areas has technical issues as the game doesn’t handle area transitions well and sometimes lots of enemies reduce the frame rate. Escaping or avoiding enemies becomes more complicated as a result since you can’t move as quickly as you like. While this doesn’t always happen, it is noticeable enough that the player may have to consider lowering graphics settings just to keep things stable. There are also cases where locations sometimes don’t load properly and various objects don’t appear. This sometimes occurs in safe zones, but it does happen in other places as well. It can difficult to save or complete objectives when something vital isn’t there. Trying to proceed and hope the game loads it back in can be counterproductive as you might lose access to a location. But sometimes reloading a save or resetting the game fixes these issues.

Overall, providing several enemies that hunt by sound emphasize stealth and avoidance tactics over direct combat. Early-game resource scarcity emphasizes making the most of each material. However you can trivialize the difficulty and horror once you develop a sustainable resource loop. There are also technical difficulties that need addressing as they impact gameplay. I Hate This Place has great survival horror potential, but it sometimes gets in its own way.

Victor reviewed I Hate This Place on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.