A new narrative RPG anthology, Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists, offers a decidedly cheerful approach to journeys through mythological underworlds. Developed by A Sharp and Kitfox Games, the creators behind King of Dragon Pass, this choose-your-own-adventure title presents a series of quest scenarios featuring talking trees, holy riddlers, and rivers of boiling blood.
Despite its namesake, the game maintains an infectious and venturesome lightness. This tone persists even amidst dire blunders and supernatural calamities that can curse, puncture, or unhinge party members. In approximately two hours of play, the author completed a couple of the 10 available heists, leading to a provisional recommendation.
The game's variety stems not from a multitude of distinct hells, but from the choice of party members and the clever reshuffling of story beats. These scenarios unfold against handsome painted backdrops depicting monoliths, bazaars, shorelines, and catacombs. Each playthrough begins with the player character accepting a final job from a dubious power-broker in the "Byzantine-flavored" Eternal City. The initial task might involve investigating the deaths of princes or escorting a murderer, both requiring a descent into an underworld that draws inspiration from Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia.
Player characters are defined through background selections, strengths, and faults. Following character creation, players recruit a crew of similarly imperfect adventurers, spending "Question points" to determine their initial familiarity with each recruit. These characters can develop loose relationships, reacting to each other's traits as the narrative progresses. These bonds are further shaped by the specific task at hand, which might necessitate keeping secrets from colleagues or deciding in advance that a particular companion may not survive the journey.
The heists themselves are structured as round-based encounters, drawing from a pool of over 280 possibilities. Solutions vary based on the party's collective skillset. A unique mechanic involves resolving encounters through bags of tokens. Each round, players draw up to four tokens from three distinct bags. One bag is dedicated to the character leading the encounter, allowing for more of their specific tokens to be used. Another bag represents the rest of the group, and a third contains game-changing boons or knowledge acquired through interactions, such as befriending a spirit or aiding a deity.
These tokens often reflect a character's traits, both positive and negative. For example, "Nerinai is knowledgeable" or "Chisu is greedy." These are applied to one of three scenario-specific actions. An encounter might involve navigating the rapids of the Styx, where players must decide whether to focus on the treacherous rocks or the unruly dead crowding the stern. Another could be assisting the Fates in weaving destiny, presenting a choice between throwing the shuttle or offering to cut the warp threads.
Additional generic tokens can grant resources and buffs or remove debuffs. "Show Some Swagger," if played successfully, can improve a character's morale, while "Get The Measure" earns Insight points, offering a better understanding of token success probabilities. Unused tokens and actions can carry over to subsequent rounds, encouraging strategic reservation of tokens that might fit multiple actions. Conversely, players must decide when to expend tokens that seem destined to fail.
Success in an encounter requires winning a certain number of rounds while avoiding a set number of losses. However, failure does not necessarily end the game; it may result in injuries, mood penalties, or even the loss of a character, but the primary story objective can often still be achieved. The game does not currently support manual saving or reloading.
While not a demanding exercise in resource management, the encounter design encourages strategic thinking through underlying combos and timing considerations. Some actions are best performed early to facilitate later choices, such as disarming traps before attempting to seize treasure. Others are easier to execute when victory points are either high or low, and a few are best reserved for the encounter's conclusion.
Occasionally, players may receive a set of tokens that do not clearly align with any available action, requiring an educated guess about how the narrative will interpret the outcome. While these moments have largely proven entertaining, there have been instances where the storycraft felt somewhat disconnected from the underlying point-scoring system. Throughout a heist, players can also gather items that serve as quick solutions, sometimes allowing them to bypass an encounter entirely.
Given the premise of repeated journeys to hell, the encounters can be quite macabre. One scenario involved hags capable of diminishing character traits with a single look, while another saw a positive outcome requiring a character to be hung from a meathook. The game features plague crows, blade tsunamis, and mesmerising demons, alongside a poetry contest. Despite the grim subject matter, the writing remains brisk and buoyant, with characters bickering and occasionally revealing personal details, maintaining the narrative momentum. The author likens this to Scheherazade turning every setback into a cliffhanger, noting that a flawless victory can feel like a loss by stripping away the reversals and pratfalls that define a thrilling adventure.
Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is available now on PC via Steam. The game is recommended for those who enjoyed the art and writing of King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages but found the village management aspects tedious. It is worth noting that Holly Nielsen, who has contributed to Rock Paper Shotgun, is among the game's writers.