A stylish survival horror rooted in ’80s comics, where tension, sound, and atmosphere collide with accessibility and ambition.
Rock Square Thunder isn’t a company with a long history yet. Before making I Hate This Place, the Polish creator put out Lightbringer, a smaller project that didn’t exactly make waves but showed that the team was interested in experimenting with mood, atmosphere, and mechanics. Rock Square Thunder takes a much bigger risk with I Hate This Place, turning an Eisner Award–nominated comic series by Kyle Starks and Artyom Topilin into an isometric survival horror game.
I Hate This Place isn’t just another independent horror game with similar looks. It comes from comic books, notably horror movies from the 1980s, which had brilliant colors, thick lines, over-the-top violence, and a peculiar mix of scary and funny.
It seems like the creators who produced this game were asking a major question: what if survival horror didn’t simply scare you, but also looked like it came from a book? As a result, the project is sure of who it is, even if it does sometimes have trouble balancing its own goals.
This game wants to be tight, friendly, stylish, mysterious, and have a lot of different ways to play at the same time.
In true horror style, the story starts off quickly. At Elena’s aunt’s supposedly spooky farm, Rutherford Fort Ranch, she and her friend Lou show up. So, they do the one thing that you should never do in a scary story: they call on the Horned Man, an old godlike being. It doesn’t work out, everything goes black, and Elena wakes up by herself. Lou is gone, and the land doesn’t feel right.
I Hate This Place goes on and on from there. What starts out as a personal rescue mission quickly turns into a story full of cults, ghosts, secret government agencies called “The Department,” alien-like things happening, body horror creatures, and weird stuff happening across dimensions. The Horned Man watches over everything, more like a natural force than a typical bad guy. His presence changes the cursed land Elena has to travel through.
The story of the game is very self-aware. Sometimes, the characters’ conversations are so silly that they take away from the fear by making fun of it. This method mostly works. The main plot about Elena, Lou, and the Horned Man is really interesting, and the secret of Rutherford Ranch is slowly revealed in a way that makes you want to find out more instead of just giving you a lot of information.
However, the game seems to try to do too many things in too little time at times. While Stranger Things took dozens of hours to slowly blend its different genres together, I Hate This Place‘s main story is over in seven to eight hours. Adding new ideas all the time can be confusing, especially for people who aren’t familiar with the comic series. Still, the story is interesting, scary, and always strange for those who are willing to deal with the chaos.
I Hate This Place is a survival horror game at its core, and the first few levels are all about being ready, being aware, and being calm.
The hours of operation do a great job of building stress. You’re in charge of sound, health, hunger, energy, and, most importantly, sound. Each step, creak of the door, and blast is important. The game has an isometric view and twin-stick controls, which let you move without worrying about where you’re aiming.
This setup is easy to use and works especially well in stressful situations. The exploration is based on a changing cycle of day and night. During the day, you can look for things, travel, make things, and strengthen your camp. There are enemies, but they are not as violent. You have a little room to breathe.
Everything changes at night. It’s only possible to see as far as a flashlight beam; the threats are more serious and more numerous, and the environment itself feels actively dangerous. Sometimes, the smartest thing to do is to lock yourself inside your protection and wait for morning.
This pattern—getting ready during the day and surviving at night—makes for a strong gameplay loop that is similar to games like Don’t Starve, but with a lot more focus on story development and hand-made environments.
The people who run the camp play a big part. You will be making food stations, workbenches, traps, and defensive buildings. Outposts spread out across the map can also be fixed up and used as important safe havens. Everything works well in terms of how it works, and it makes players feel like they own the world.
Combat in I Hate This Place is meant to be boring on purpose.
There’s no need for you to kill enemies like an action hero. Instead, fights are framed as stressful puzzles of plan. A lot of opponents hunt by sound, which means that even simple things like moving become strategic considerations. You can die if you run rapidly, burst doors, shoot guns, or simply step on floors that groan.
This shape makes it easy to be sly and come up with new ideas. You can toss stuff at enemies to distract them, lay traps for them, or just slip past them. Fights happen quickly, get messy, and are dangerous when they do. There are guns like revolvers and rifles, as well as melee weapons and explosives like Molotov cocktails, but early on, it’s hard to get ammo, so you have to think carefully.
Still, this is where the game falls a little short. Once the introduction is over and the crafting and base-building systems are fully open, it’s surprisingly easy to save up resources. It is possible for players to have a lot of food, health items, and weapons without even trying. This takes away the stress. You don’t have to sneak anymore. At night, it doesn’t bite as much. At first, it’s survival horror, but it slowly turns into action that you can handle.
The way fighting works is good, but the feedback could be better. Sometimes it’s not clear from the weapon reticles which enemy is being targeted, and until upgrades are made, melee combat doesn’t feel very exciting. Once your enemies see you, they won’t stop until they get what they want, which usually means a quick retreat or an explosive answer instead of a long firefight.
I Hate This Place doesn’t depend on grinding XP in the usual way. Instead, travel, scavenging, and crafting are what move you forward. Blueprints let players get new gear and upgrades, which makes them want to explore the whole land and the areas around it.
This method makes sense from a mechanical and thematic point of view, but it also makes the game harder than it should be. As you get better guns, traps, and camp upgrades, you’ll feel less vulnerable. At launch, there is no difficulty slider, so players who want to keep the tension up may find that the second part of the game is much easier than the first.
Crafting, exploring, staying hidden, and fighting are all well-thought-out processes.
The growth curve could better keep the fear that makes the best parts of the game what they are with some tweaks. The best thing about I Hate This Place is how it looks. The look is very comic book-like, with thick black lines, bright colors, and over-the-top animations that make every scene look like it was made by hand. The sound effect text, which is styled as “THUDS,” “CRUNCHES,” and “BANGS,” gives the movie more personality and supports the comic book idea.
The designs of enemies stand out because they are so close to being grotesque and strange. Elena stands out as a well-thought-out main character who fits right in with this world. Performance on PC is mostly smooth, with only small stutters when moving from one place to another. Performance is workable on handhelds like the Steam Deck, but it’s capped at around 30 FPS.
One big problem is the way the UI and words are presented. Notes, dialogue boxes, and menus don’t have the stylization that you see in other parts of the game. They feel strangely plain for a game that is so committed to its theme visually. It’s a missed chance that makes the show a little less solid overall.
Sound design is an important part of creating the mood of a game. There are growls that can be heard in the dark halls, metal clattering in the distance, and other quiet sounds that keep you on edge. Audio cues are not only engaging, but they’re necessary because they have a direct effect on gameplay.
The music leans heavily on scary sounds from the 1980s and sometimes sounds like it could be from a horror movie.
The voice acting is good all around, and the conversation from the NPCs gives the experience personality and dark humor. Sometimes the music can be too loud for quieter parts of the game, but overall, the soundscape does a good job of supporting the tension-driven design.
I Hate This Place is a stylish and ambitious survival horror game that mostly succeeds in making its own personality. Its opening hours are really gripping thanks to its comic book style, sound-driven gameplay, and creepy atmosphere. The mix of scary and dark humor feels true to the source material, and the core gameplay is well thought out.
The game’s biggest flaw, though, is how hard it gets. As players get better gear and more resources, the tension that was carefully built starts to break down. At first, the survival experience is very scary, but over time, it becomes easier to handle than it should be.
Even so, I Hate This Place is still one of the most interesting independent horror movies I’ve seen in a while. It could be up there with the best games in its genre if it got some balance fixes and a bigger focus on challenge. As it stands, it’s a stylish, creepy, and often memorable trip that you should take, even if you don’t hate the place by the end.
