James Gordan
From small Brazilian indie studio Medusa Head, Hell Pages is the latest low-budget indie shooter to tackle the wild west of the Steam Market. Given the safety and saturation of this genre, one can only wonder what this booming little studio has found to set its small title apart from the other hundreds of games that appear every week in this store.
Sounds like a flash game, doesn’t it?
One thing I learned playing Hell Pages is that the guys at Medusa Head really, really like bad luck. Specifically, the classic Doom games of the early 90s. The play style and music are heavily inspired by the classics of the 90s. It’s a mix of hellish and fantastic visuals while your ears are bombarded with MIDI rock music.
However, the presentation of the game is very cheap. In fact, Pages of Hell generally looks very cheap, but I’ll get to that in a minute. The graphics, while appealing to our inner rebellious fourteen year olds, look like what you’d expect from a cheap flash game on Newgrounds. The game is dripping with all that papier-mâché aesthetic that is present in almost every Flash game ever made. The soundtrack is by far the best out there, it almost sounds like an old fashioned doom, but it suffers from poor mixing and poor instrumentation.
Doom’s boring flying heads have become even more boring.
The game, well, guess what? It’s easy enough to shoot simple, smoking shots, with serviceable enemy AI and few if any tricks to spice things up. Aside from the occasional shop between levels where you can buy some nasty upgrades or the always welcome extra life, Hell’s Pages is exactly what you expect from a game like this. It features some side-scrolling fire sections with blunt and inconsistent enemies, as well as a boss fight at the end of each level. These sections are slightly better than the rest of the game. Not just because they are threatening, but because the pattern drawings are so sharp they remind you of the drawings you saw in your 8th grade notebook.
The boss on the right would be the perfect mascot for a C-level death metal band with a terrible bloody name.
Hell Pages is a very mediocre take on ultra-saturated weapons in a genre that has little to offer outside of Edgelord’s theme and artistic style. If you’re a big fan of classic Doom and pretty much any media that tries to mimic the graphics and soundtrack, I’d say you could give this game a shot and have a few minutes of fun. Anyone, even the biggest fans of Hell, would find nothing redeeming in the pages of Hell. It’s best to ignore it.
| It’s not an exaggeration: Despite the interesting graphics, Pages of Hell looks like a cheap Flash game found on Newgrounds. | The simplest control system imaginable. However, you can easily take advantage of enemy AI if you know how weak each enemy is. |
| It’s the best the game has to offer. The soundtrack is clearly inspired by classic Doom games, albeit with poor mixing and production values. | You can have a few minutes of fun with Hell Pages if you like something a bit like oldschool rock. But all in all, it’s a very easy and forgettable catch. |
| Last block: 4,5 | |
Pages of Hell is now available for the PC.
Viewed on PC.
A copy of Hell Pages was provided by the publisher.
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James Gordan
Simon Leonard