So I Tried... Helltaker

Each edition of So I Tried… I will try a game that I have never played before. Will I find something new to love? Will I find something new to despise? I'll take a full half hour, no matter how bad it gets or how badly I do, to see if this is the game for me. This time, I played Helltaker.

Well, technically, we played Helltaker. Recently, I and a few others in the GrinCast streamed our journey through Hell.

What I Thought It Was

I’d heard of Helltaker back when it came out in 2020, and at first, it seemed like a funny visual novel where you dated demon women in Hell! Later on, I learned that it was more of a puzzle game of some kind, so I turned to picturing it as more of some kind of basic puzzle game — maybe a match-three? — with dating demon women happening somewhere in between.

What It Actually Is

Not a match-three game, that’s for certain! Helltaker is a puzzle game where you, the Helltaker, must clear a room and reach a prospective demon girlfriend in a certain amount of moves. There are skeletons, spike traps (that look like teeth to me), and moveable blocks to either avoid or take advantage of to clear the way. Then, once you’ve reached the beautiful demoness, you have a little bit of dialogue, with a few choices to be had. Figure out the best thing to say to woo your hellish lover, or be forced to do the puzzle all over again! You had better hope your solution wasn’t a fluke!

There’s a lot of humour to be had with the characters, especially if you ask for the frequently useless advice from your current harem, but the focus definitely seems to be on the puzzles and they get really dang hard, gosh darn it! I got stumped many times and had to get some tips from my fellow GrinCast streamers, Gorz and Jak. Thankfully though, we made it through. As of the end of the stream, the only thing left to do was play the Examtaker update, which seemed even more difficult…

Will I Keep Playing?

Yes! I wound up beating Helltaker’s base game on the stream (and later on, after much trial and error, the Examtaker levels too), but I missed a few things along the way, like a handful of achievements and all the little conversations hidden behind the advice button. There’s probably not that much more to do in the game past that point, but I was definitely charmed by the experience, so I imagine I’ll give it another shot sometime in the future.

I will probably not fight the Examtaker boss again though. That was exhausting.