Cyberpunk Souls: Hellpoint Review

Hellpoint is a cyberpunk “souls-like” set in an intergalactic hub in the stars, where the player character must unravel “the mystery”. How the player does this is open-ended; they could acquire data through the various logs, engravings, new enemy types, breach points, and the largest data caches from defeating the various level bosses.

Developer: Cradle Games
Release Date: July 30, 2020
Price: TBA
Platforms: PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch

From my playthrough, it is entirely possible to win the game without defeating every boss, or indeed, even several of them. The freedom in how you play, explore, quest, and entirely win the game is a refreshing take for the “souls-like” series where most typically a game’s narrative will be linear or feature an ultimatum between one of two endings.

The Power Of Options

The branching paths and endings were truly exciting to see. Combat is tactical and exhilarating with a plethora of enemies, bosses, environmental hazards, (oxygen depletion being a new and interesting mechanic), and everyone’s favorite enemy gravity! Weapons, equipment, and armor are exceedingly varied with even more depth and complexity in their upgrade paths, movesets, and blueprints. Following that thought, each weapon has a moveset that, unlike most souls games, you don’t need to meet the requirements to unlock. You can familiarize yourself with each weapon’s set of attacks and special abilities before committing the requisite stats to unlock its potential to do damage. Huge development for a “souls-like” to make.

Souls-like Exploration

The levels and areas to explore are filled with illusory doors, secret elevators, shortcuts, and all kinds of rewards wait around every corner for the keen and patient eye. Two mechanics that especially stood out as unique are the black hole hour, where more enemies spawn across the station but secret loot areas can also be found. Gaining access will, however, take an extraordinary amount of time and effort but is well worth the expenditure. The accretion points which occur twice an hour are similar to this but much easier to access the hidden areas, with slightly diminished rewards.

The strange monoliths are perhaps the coolest mechanic I’ve seen. The clock that controls the accretion hours and the black hole hour goes quicker, and in retrograde motion while entering these areas. Your character, the controls, your weapons, and appearance, literally the entire area map (including entrances, secrets, and discoverable items) are inverted in this area. It is an incredible head trip every time you enter one of these areas, and I absolutely loved the change of pace it gave.

A Contained Challenge

Overall, Hellpoint is a fantastic entry into the souls-like genre of games, that offers a somewhat more contained experience, but for a very reasonable cost. At $35 the game is incredibly rich in content and replayability while offering so many new and unique ideas to the formula that I couldn’t help but fall in love with this game and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys challenging RPGs, environmental storytelling, and or a “souls” game.