While I wait for Diablo 4 to figure out its messy new season, the only game that has managed to tear me away from playing more Path of Exile 2 is Hell Clock.
I should’ve known it would: Hell Clock’s new Cursed War expansion was delayed to give PoE 2’s season some time to breathe. The developers at Rogue Snail know their audience because they’re part of it too: Action RPGs players cycle through games on a seasonal basis, and Hell Clock is perfect for filling in the gaps.
It’s a run-based roguelike with an action RPG engine under the hood. There’s loot, but you don’t need a degree to understand how it all works. You stack on everything that promises more damage after clearing each room and watch screens of monsters explode. There’s depth in its buildcrafting of course, but I suspect min-maxing your items is more important in higher difficulties. On normal, I never hit a wall during the original three-act campaign by simply tossing stuff together on the fly.
Hell Clock has had some major updates since I played it the first time, so my trip through the campaign almost felt like playing a new game. Movement is smoother now (you can go full WASD or click-to-move) and bosses are much meaner than before. Rogue Snail also implemented an entire set of crafting items that borrow basic ideas from Path of Exile’s crafting system. It took a few nail-biting boss fights for me to realize how important they are for creating items that beef up your defenses so you can survive more than a hit or two.
The Cursed War expansion adds a fourth act that tells the origin story of main character Pajeu, and it’s just as bloody as the others. One of the reasons Hell Clock works at all is that it’s not an action RPG where you kill demons for the thrill of it—it’s a fictionalized revenge story for a real-life massacre that happened in Brazil. Pajeu watched the First Brazilian Republic slaughter an entire town during the War of Canudos. The game takes place years later as Pajeu revisits the town in its hellish, tormented form, armed to the teeth to face the undead soldiers that haunt still it.
Cursed War rewinds the story back to when he was recruited into the Brazilian army during the Paraguayan War as a slave. This is where the fury Pajeu carries in the base game was born, and it makes the sting of the third act—which shows how the atrocities have bled into the present day—last longer than it already did the first time I played through it. Hell Clock feels like a grown up’s version of Diablo’s Sanctuary, where the demons have names and uniforms.
I felt no remorse for picking up one of the new skills, Tupã’s Wrath, and frying every last one of them. Rogue Snail basically put my favorite PoE 2 skill into the game, letting me unleash a flood of lightning bolts in every direction. Each run I stumbled into new ways to scale its damage up, like a relic that causes it to empower your skeletal minions. I found an unstoppable combination on my first run of the new act, that builds a defensive layer over my health as I spam thousands of lightning bolts. Nothing but bosses can touch me now.
At least they couldn’t in the normal difficulty mode. Hell Clock also has two harder modes to climb through if you’re interested in finding some of the game’s most powerful items. There’s enough roguelike randomness to challenge even a build like mine in there, especially as monsters gain elemental resistances and other threatening bonuses. And, just like in Hades, there are plenty of mid-run boons I’ve not even tried yet, let alone the other skills that came with the expansion.
Hell Clock is so good that I don’t want to squeeze it dry in a week of non-stop blasting. I want to savour it between all the other things I’m playing. A run here or there while I think of another new combination of relics or skills to try. As much as I am still in love with PoE 2 at the moment, I’m always excited to close it and see how a quick 20-minute rampage through Hell Clock will go, and the $10 expansion has just given me a whole new box of toys to play with.