Helltaker

Steam title card.

Helltaker is a mostly passive block pushing puzzle video game developed and published by Łukasz Piskorz for Windows on 2020-05-11, then ported to Macintosh and Linux shortly thereafter. The game was programmed in Unity. The game was updated a year later with an additional level pack.

In the game, you play as Helltaker, a hunky slab of a man who dreams of filling his house with a harem of sharply-dressed demon women. So, he descends into hell to convince them to join only to discover hell is a mess skeletons and stone blocks which must be pushed around before he can even begin to schmooze on the sexy demons. Once he gets to them, he finds out the demon women have no qualms with killing him if he says the wrong thing.

Personal

I found this game on a list of popular games on steam250.com. It was described as a short puzzle game with sexy demons and that was enough to interest me. I beat it on 2023-01-31 with 7/10 achievements.

The game is free.

Review

7	4	7	6	5

Best Version: Windows

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The art is very nice. The closeups of the demons are well drawn; I especially like when you first meet Lucifer. The chibi characters bouncing to the music also looks great.
• The music is enjoyable. It's far from boring, but also not so complex that it distracts you while you're thinking.
• Some of the dialogue is pretty funny and the characters each have their own personalities. Azazel, the curious angel, is wonderfully adorkable.
• I like that the game doesn't wear out its welcome. I don't think I could take much more of the block pushing, so the active puzzles for level 9 were a nice change up.

Bad

• The movement controls are a bit too touchy making it easy to waste a move. Also, since bumping into a blocked stone does nothing, I would prefer it not decrease my movement count.
• Every level must be completed using the least number of moves possible. This misses an opportunity to award the player with a bonus for finding the optimal path.
• Since the puzzle and dialogue are not related, it doesn't make much sense to require the player to redo the entire puzzle just to try a different dialogue option. And, since none of them are more than two options deep, it's just a pointless detour.
• Much of the game's content is hidden. For example, the "hints" aren't very helpful, but actually extra dialogue to be enjoyed. However, if you're a decent puzzle solver, you'll never bother with them and miss it. Also, you can skip most of the puzzles in the menu.
• This game missed the chance of having a female playable character.
• The close-up character art is a little grainy around the edges.

Ugly

• Nothing.

Media

Promotional

• 

  Steam title card.

• 

  Digital poster.

Videos

Trailer.

Longplay.

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	The strongest is Justice, but even she falls prey to the wiles of Helltaker without much effort.
Bechdel test?	Fail	When speaking to each other, the women only talk about Helltaker.
Strong person of color character?	{{{StrongPOCCharacterStatus}}}	{{{StrongPOCCharacterNotes}}}
Queer character?	Fail	None of the characters are clearly queer, though Azazel is possibly.

Links

         

• helltaker.fandom.com/wiki/Helltaker_Wiki - Helltaker Wiki.
• twitter.com/i/events/1257962875831947264 - Supplemental comics.