I Hate This Place

I Hate This Place puts players in the shoes of Elena, returning to her family homestead to track down her missing mother, only to stumble into a ritual gone wrong, a friend's disappearance, and a countryside overrun by cultists and flesh-warped monsters. Developer Rock Square Thunder builds the experience around a striking comic-book presentation, all bold linework and 80s horror atmosphere rendered from an isometric, sound-driven survival horror perspective. Steam's Mixed rating on launch tells an accurate story: this is a review sample genuinely divided rather than quietly disappointed, with reviewers on both sides agreeing on what the game gets right and, just as often, on exactly where it falls short.

Art and atmosphere the sample agrees on

Almost without exception, reviewers who dislike the game still praise its presentation. The comic-book art style draws consistent, specific admiration, with reviewers calling out small touches like colour-coded footstep sound effects and atmospheric details in the game's bunker sections as genuinely well crafted. The central mystery, following Elena's search for her mother into cult activity and supernatural threats, is repeatedly credited with pulling reviewers forward even through frustrating mechanical stretches, and the fully voice-acted cast and journal system for tracking clues and passwords draw specific praise as unusually thoughtful for an indie horror title.

Stealth that doesn't behave as advertised

The sample's most consistent and specific complaint concerns the game's core stealth premise. I Hate This Place is built around enemies that supposedly hunt by sound rather than sight, encouraging players to crouch, move carefully, and use noise as a tool. Reviewer after reviewer reports this breaking down in practice: enemies homing in immediately after a thrown distraction device explodes, tracking players through walls, and grabbing them around corners regardless of how carefully they'd been moving. It's a foundational-enough complaint that it shows up in some of the sample's most detailed and even-handed reviews, several of which otherwise praise the game generously — the frustration isn't with difficulty itself, but with a core system that doesn't consistently do what the game tells players it does.

Combat, controls, and performance

Combat draws similarly consistent criticism. Multiple reviewers describe early enemies as damage sponges, citing numerous critical hits needed to down basic threats while ammunition, particularly for the shotgun, remains expensive and scarce. The complete absence of control remapping, for keyboard and mouse as well as controller, is flagged repeatedly as a baseline feature missing at this price point. Performance is the third recurring technical complaint, and notably not one reviewers attribute to weak hardware: one reviewer specifically cites a Ryzen 7800X3D and RTX 4080 Super struggling to sustain 60fps at 1440p with everything maxed, and several others report stutters and frame drops worsening the longer a session runs, on both PC and Steam Deck.

A short campaign that runs out of ideas

Several of the sample's more considered reviews raise a structural concern: the survival and crafting systems that create real tension in the opening hours become mostly decorative once the open world unlocks and resources start accumulating faster than they're spent. More than one reviewer describes ending a roughly 5-to-10-hour campaign with a surplus of crafting materials and no remaining use for them, while base-building additions like a livestock barn are described as pleasant but largely inconsequential to how the game actually plays. The ending itself draws specific criticism too, with reviewers who otherwise enjoyed the journey describing a rushed, buggy final sequence that undercuts the mystery's buildup.

Is it worth the price?

Value is where the sample's mixed reception crystallises most clearly. At close to fifty New Zealand dollars, multiple reviewers explicitly recommend waiting for a sale rather than buying at launch price, arguing the five-to-ten-hour runtime and underused systems don't match the asking price even when the core experience is enjoyable. Notably, this isn't confined to negative reviews — several reviewers who ultimately recommend the game still flag the price as its weakest point, suggesting a lower cost would meaningfully change how the game is received without anything else needing to change.

A slow start some reviewers never got past

Several of the sample's negative reviews concern the earliest minutes rather than anything deeper into the campaign. Multiple reviewers describe a near-total absence of guidance at the outset — no explanation of crouching, crafting, or menu systems, and no clear objective beyond vague environmental hints — leading them to spend their first 30 to 40 minutes simply wandering, confused, before giving up entirely. That criticism sits in tension with other reviewers who praise the same pared-back opening as trusting players to intuit basic systems on their own, but the split matters: for a genre where establishing tone and teaching mechanics early is critical, a first impression this divisive likely cost the game some of the goodwill its later hours might otherwise have earned.

Final Verdict

I Hate This Place is a case where presentation and premise clearly outpace execution. Its comic-book art style, atmosphere, and central mystery are genuinely well-liked across the sample, and there's a real, tense survival horror experience in its opening hours. But broken stealth detection, spongy combat, missing basic accessibility options, real performance problems, and systems that thin out before the credits roll are specific, repeated complaints rather than isolated nitpicks, and they're consistent enough across both positive and negative reviews to take seriously. For horror fans drawn in by the art style and willing to work around its rough mechanics, it's a reasonable pickup on sale; at full price, the sample's own reviewers suggest patience is the better call.