Hellpoint

A genuinely distinctive atmosphere, widely praised

Hellpoint's setting is specific and, by wide consensus, its strongest asset: a Souls-like built around a cosmic-horror space station rather than the genre's more common dark-fantasy trappings. "I absolutely love the atmosphere and aesthetic of the game. It's like a Dark Souls meets Dead Space meets Event Horizon. It's fantastic," reads a 2022 review, a comparison echoed independently across a large share of this review base. A 2020 review credits the specific design work: "Great creature, armor and weapon designs," a sentiment repeated consistently enough to treat as a genuine, distinctive strength rather than a matter of individual taste. That combination — a genuinely underused setting in this specific genre, executed with real visual and tonal confidence — is the throughline of praise across nearly this entire review base, including from reviewers who go on to detail serious reservations about other systems.

An extremely consistent complaint about punishing platforming

What tempers that praise, with remarkable consistency, is a specific complaint about the game's 3D platforming sections. "Why do we even have parkour in this game? You miss a jump, you die, you have to run all the way back. All on top of terrible movement that feels like your character is jello," reads a 2021 review. A 2021 review reaches a nearly identical conclusion independently: "I want to love this game... However, I cannot recommend it because of one element: The jumping puzzles. Platforming in a 3D environment" combined with imprecise movement and death-on-miss consequences. Checking a broad sample of negative reviews, this exact complaint — not general difficulty, but specifically the combination of imprecise 3D movement and severe punishment for platforming mistakes — recurs with enough consistency to read as a genuine, structural design weakness rather than a matter of individual player skill.

It's worth being specific about why this complaint carries particular weight in a Souls-like specifically. The genre's core appeal generally rests on death feeling earned — a consequence of a specific, identifiable player mistake in combat or preparation that can be learned from and corrected. Reviewers describe platforming deaths in Hellpoint as feeling categorically different: less a test of skill than a consequence of imprecise movement controls fighting against the player's intent, which undermines the sense of fairness the rest of the game's combat design works hard to establish. That distinction — earned difficulty versus mechanical unfairness — is exactly the line several reviewers draw when explaining why they can appreciate the combat while still finding the platforming disqualifying.

Extensive, well-corroborated bugs concentrated in multiplayer

A separate, more serious category of complaint concerns technical stability, particularly in co-op. "If you want to buy it for co-op I recommend against it. One of the zones (Sohn District) introduces a lot of lag between the host and the client. Multiple seconds of lag. That makes that zone unplayable," reads a 2020 review. A 2021 review lists a specific catalogue of problems: "invisible character, stuck in walls, missing texture, hitbox bug, multiplayer bug, reviving teammate problem, respawning problems." A separate review reports a specific interface conflict: "User interface is outright broken — we used KB+M + Controller coop setup, if KBM player was navigating inventory, it would remove selection from" the controller player simultaneously. This review checked Cradle Games' own update history directly and found no patches since a "Patch: Bug Fixes, Balance" update in August 2022 — meaning close to four years have passed without further technical support, consistent with reviewers' claims that many of these specific, catalogued bugs remain unresolved.

A further, related complaint describes a specific, severe softlock: "Softlocked myself after using an item that raises the difficulty of the world because everything was dying in one hit. After doing this, I was the one dying in one hit with no means to return the difficulty back to normal," reads a 2021 review. That's a specific, reproducible design trap rather than a random bug — a player-facing option with a serious, apparently irreversible consequence and no clear in-game warning about how permanent the change would be, worth flagging directly for anyone experimenting with the game's world-difficulty systems.

A specific, reported discomfort effect

A narrower but concrete complaint concerns a specific in-game visual effect: "there are stupid effects like 'mess with your fov' that make me sick and force me to just sit there for up to 4 mins wh[ile it resolves]," reads a 2021 review. This is a specific, actionable piece of information distinct from the game's broader difficulty or bug complaints, worth flagging directly for any player sensitive to field-of-view distortion or similar visual effects.

Weighing the ambition against the execution

It's worth giving real credit to what Hellpoint attempted, even where reviewers describe the execution falling short. Full online co-op is genuinely rare in this specific genre, and a meaningful share of reviewers explicitly frame their criticism as disappointment precisely because the underlying ideas — setting, combat variety, cooperative structure — were strong enough to deserve better technical follow-through than a small studio ultimately delivered. That's a different kind of criticism than dismissing the game outright, and it's worth keeping in mind when weighing how much the specific, well-documented flaws above should affect an overall recommendation.

Final verdict

Hellpoint delivers a genuinely distinctive cosmic-horror sci-fi atmosphere that stands out within its genre, and this review credits that achievement without reservation. What keeps the score moderate is an extremely consistent complaint about punishing, imprecise platforming, compounded by extensive, well-corroborated bugs concentrated specifically in multiplayer that this review confirmed have gone without a patch since late 2022. This is a reasonable pick for solo Souls-like fans specifically drawn to its setting, ideally at a discount; co-op-focused buyers should treat the multiplayer experience as a real, currently unresolved risk rather than a settled feature.