Verdict
While the design is cool and the gameplay enjoyable enough, I Hate This Place is nearly unplayable on my Nintendo Switch, making it impossible to recommend to players on this console, especially at a price tag of $30.
Upon download, I had high hopes for I Hate This Place. With the recent release of the final season of Stranger Things, I had wondered if this could fill the retro-horror-shaped hole in my heart that the show left behind. The game promised me a base-building mixed with stealth and action elements based on comics, which, in theory, sounds like the kind of things I like. The reality was unfortunately not as exciting.
I booted up the game to some cool comic-style cutscenes and some decent writing, though the voice acting left a little to be desired. When you start playing for real, you're asked to get behind the story of Lou and Elena, two best friends who decide to play around with some occult magic and raise a demon known as the Horned Man. Given that Lou's subsequent disappearance is the reason for protagonist Elena's journey, I wish their relationship were a little more believable. Despite that, I followed anyway, interested to see what the game could do with its premise.
The first thing I noticed about the controls was that there was no real explanation about how to use them. To move, shoot, eat, heal, and check your notebook, you have to use all the buttons on the Switch in combination with each other. I was told how to crouch upon arrival into the first indoor area of the game, but other than that, the game leaves it up to you to waste your resources trying to figure out which buttons to press - the number of times I consumed food when I was trying to figure out how to fire a weapon or read a sign was genuinely upsetting.
Inside the first area of the game, I was met with a strange figure wearing an animal mask, which added to the occult-ish vibe very nicely and reminded me a little of one of the best indie horror games, Inscryption. He spoke strangely - which I think was intentional - and vaguely told me that I could find my friend Lou inside. Sure, buddy.
Alongside the copy of the game I received, developer Rock Square Thunder provided a walkthrough video, and it was immediately clear why. Some of the signposts to progression were entirely hidden in the darkness of the rooms. Unfortunately, the map provided at the very beginning of the dungeon also did not prove useful, as I walked around in circles for a long time before I found my way through. While this wasn't a great start, I accepted that perhaps I was just not used to the game's way of doing things.
As I progressed through the first dungeon, I was met with tutorial tips informing me that enemies could not see me but could hear me, beginning my experience with the stealth aspect. Slowly, I began to feel more immersed. The creatures I met were genuinely very creepy-looking, with appropriately scary sound effects. It was easy to tell when I was close to getting caught, which I very much appreciated. The game offered me a variety of weapons and ways to distract the creatures, some of which, like the tin cans, saved me a number of times (once I figured out how to fire them).
As I wandered around, looking for an exit I wasn't convinced I would ever be able to find, I happened upon a room that had a number of doors. It was here that I made my first mistake, clicking 'Y' to open a door that I had not realized did not, in fact, take me to another room, which would create safety from the creatures that were stalking around, but opened a chamber in the same room, alerting them all to my presence.
They spotted me, but it was okay because I had my gun, right? Well, no. As I shot my gun, naively assuming that this would be enough, I found that I could not seem to fell these beasts no matter how hard I tried. They had seemingly unlimited HP, and before long, I was killed. No matter, I thought naively. I'll try again.
I was wrong. This was when I Hate This Place made me ragequit for the first time. Look, maybe it's on me for not checking the game's save system, but really? Why on earth would you not inform your players that they have to save manually, using something (a TV) no one would think to check in a room that had no signposting whatsoever? As I realized what I Hate This Place had done to me, wiping out all that progress I had spun myself in circles to achieve, I felt angrier towards a game than I remember feeling in a long time.
I put it down for a few hours, digesting on the infuriating experience I'd had so far. Still, I was willing to put it down to me, a negligent player, who was in a blind rush to get out of the creepiest of areas. I picked up the game again and finished the dungeon more or less smoothly after this, making sure to save whenever I possibly could and taking more care with doors.
Unfortunately, my problems had only just begun. As soon as I got out of the dungeon, back to the surface, I found my framerate plummeted. As I ran around the area, testing out to see whether it would get any better, it got steadily worse instead. I couldn't see any discernible reason for this. My character was jogging as she had done before in a largely empty environment, save for the dungeon hatch and a few trees. If the game was struggling to load something, I couldn't tell what.
The icing on the cake was that during my experimentation, my character got stuck. There's no unstuck button, nor is there a way to fast travel without standing by a boat, so I had to - you guessed it - quit, and load from my most recent save. Which, of course, meant I had to finish the dungeon. Again. The subsequent ragequit stuck for a few days. I was, however, determined to give the game one last try. Perhaps the base-building element would go more smoothly, and now that I had figured out the basics of the controls and save mechanics, surely I would be able to avoid another disaster.
I was wrong again. Not only did the base-building element not go more smoothly, as I was still having framerate problems consistently, but I encountered several more game-breaking bugs. There were two versions of my aunt in my kitchen after my first night's sleep, and talking to both of them did nothing to allow me to step outside. Once I finally fixed it, using old save files that I was now making every 30 seconds, I found myself irritated and confused at my quest to find my uncle, who, though the game had told me he would be by the river in a particular area, was nowhere to be seen. The map wasn't marked to assist, either. I no longer knew it if were my own mistakes or the game's that led to this disappearance, and I knew I could go on no longer.
The bugs on my Nintendo Switch led me to stop playing, but to get some perspective, I asked my colleague Sam Comrie what his experience was like when he had the opportunity to play I Hate This Place on his ROG Ally at Gamescom. I asked him if he could provide me with some perspective outside of the Switch. He says that on the ROG Ally Z1e, the performance of the game is a different story than the original Nintendo Switch.
Sam told me, "Having seen the Steam Deck performance up close during my I Hate This Place preview at Gamescom, Broken Mirror Studios had it in a decent spot performance-wise. At 15 TDP and low to medium settings, you'll find that it hovers around the 35fps mark, with peaks of 40 depending on the environment. Boosting it up to 25W or 30W while plugged in kicks the framerate to linger between 40-50fps. It's a nice little bump, and it isn't running too hot either, with a perfectly normal temperature of 75°C."
He goes on to discuss the graphics. "It looks sharp on the ROG Ally's 1080p screen, with no major visual detriments playing in handheld mode on lower graphical settings. There's also support for upscaling in-game, including AMD FSR. However, the biggest problem here is that there's a drastic lack of tweaking available graphically, as you're forced to keep a lot of post-processing elements active at all times. If you like to tinker and toggle individual settings, you'll be strained."
While Sam's experience leads me to acknowledge that it very much may be my Switch's outdated firmware that led to this absolute mess of an experience, I also think the game didn't do enough to lead me in the right direction. No quest markers or combat tutorials damaged my enjoyment of the game, and when night fell outside, I found more impossible-to-beat enemies, which could've done with more scaling. This game, while having some promising ideas, was poorly executed, and though I'd like to say otherwise, I'm not convinced that another console could save it.