I Hate This Place is based on the cult-favourite Image Comics series of the same name (with the alternative title being the slightly less marketing-friendly Fuck This Place) written by Kyle Starks. This comic features the adventures of a young lesbian couple who inherit a farmhouse, only to find that it is at the centre of a host of mysterious events. The resulting story contains ghosts, monsters, aliens, secret government operations, time travel and just about every other pulp horror trope you can think of. The game takes this inspiration and turns in a thoroughly fine adventure.
The game begins with your lead character, Elena, and best friend, Lou, attempting to carry out a ritual to summon the mysterious Horned Man – the main antagonist of the original comic books. This ritual immediately goes wrong and Lou disappears. The rest of the game sees Elena trying to track down what has happened to Lou, and in the process discovering much more about the mysteries of Rutherford Ranch.
Aesthetically, I Hate This Place benefits from a suitable cartoony design. Characters and locations look as if they’ve been lifted straight from the pages of a comic book, with text boxes and onomatopoeic sound effect words to match. The latter is used to show the amount of noise that Elena is making – a key aspect for the stealth sections in the game. Voice acting is, however, a little stiff and I found myself skipping the spoken dialogue and relying on the subtitles.
The environments surrounding Rutherford Ranch are relatively varied, with a treacherous swampland, a huge cornfield, threatening forest, cultist village, a mine, and various secret bunkers to explore. Each of these contains a mixture of enemies and environmental puzzles to solve, the latter of which involving a mixture of finding keys, activating switches, and examining notes to find clues for keycodes and passwords. Aside from the exploration, the game also features combat and base building mechanics.
Combat takes place through a mixture of melee and ranged attacks. Your baseball bat can be upgraded, but is mostly to be used as a last resort or restricted to less powerful foes. As you progress through the game you’ll find various ranged weapons or the blueprints to make them at your crafting table, from simple pistols to powerful automatic rifles and shotguns. These take a variety of ammunition, but your inventory is relatively generous meaning that you can carry a real arsenal into your adventures. The automatic rifle in particular proved particularly satisfying, and powerful enough to take down a late game boss before it could really get anywhere near me.
Alongside your health bar, you’ll also need to manage stamina and hunger. Stamina unfortunately continues to drain outside of combat which can make exploring the map more tedious than it should be whilst only really proving a hindrance when resorting to melee attacks. Hunger can be replenished through a range of consumables to prevent it negatively affecting your other stats. On the whole this became just another thing to manage and never really caused much of an issue as consumables are common items. I didn’t really need to resort to the various cooking recipes, instead living on crisps and tins of beans, which reminded me of my student days.
Alongside the items and equipment you find and scavenge you’ll also need to construct various buildings at Rutherford Ranch. At first this is restricted to a simple stove and crafting bench but later more elaborate blueprints can be found such as ammunition tables which can be set to passively work whilst you explore. This part never becomes too complicated but is a welcome addition to the game.
One part of the game that I found surprisingly underwhelming was the overarching story. I finished the game in just under 7 hours and completed most of the side quests – fortunately so, as a lot of the narrative is hidden within these. The main story ends quite abruptly and leaves quite a lot of questions unanswered. I also found that some side quests did not complete properly and I encountered a couple of crashes and bugs where I fell through the floor.
