With a tagline of “The most offensive platformer ever”, Hell Pie sets a fairly high bar before players even install the game. As someone who can find humor in even the darkest of situations, I will admit this statement sent me into the game with high expectations that, to be frank, were not really met. Unfortunately, this also applied to the rest of the game as well.

The title opens strong by taking the player straight to Hell to meet Nate, the Demon of Bad Taste, as he appears to be cranking one out at his desk. I’ll admit, the fake out here put me in a weird place as I was sitting there in the same room with my kid and wife, one of which the joke went clear over their head and one wanted to divorce me, and I’ll leave that up to you to decide who is who. This was one of two jokes that managed to pull more than a slight chuckle out of me in the game’s runtime, with the other coming in not much later as I interacted with a Xerox machine that promptly spewed out a never-ending stream of dick drawings, bodily fluids and balls included. Outside of these jokes, I was left in a weird place where I was fully expecting something on par with The Boys, and what I got was one of those heavily edited episodes of South Park my local channels play in the late hours of the night. Sure, there are some gross-out gags, weird enemy types, and viciously violent scenes, but nothing we haven’t seen done bigger and better before.  Nate’s quest is a pretty straightforward one – it is Satan’s birthday and he’s tasked Nate with gathering the ingredients to make the cake. He isn’t alone in this journey, as he’s chained to his trusty sidekick Nugget, a cherub who is eager to please and thrives on canned meat. These meats allow you to upgrade Nugget’s abilities, and is just one small part of the collect-a-thon that is Hell Pie. 

Like any 3D platformer worth its salt and brimstone, this game has a wide selection of collectibles – not just the previously mentioned ingredients, but also some gems that can be used to unlock cosmetics, and then cutesy horned creatures that can be sacrificed in a quite devilish manner to give Nate new abilities and is sure to make PETA squirm. Initially, I was super into this, but like many other factors, this began to fall apart early into the game. If I enjoy a game, I will scour every square inch of the world in search of these little intangible bits. This is probably because I have undiagnosed OCD, but whatever the reason, this was my mindset through the first two areas, only to find out that the gems I mentioned before respawn each time you leave or die within an area, thus ruining my early goal of “completing” this game. It’s probably my issue, but if you’re like me and suffer from this struggle, it’ll likely turn you off from this as well.

Following in the theme of starting off great and then promptly taking a nosedive straight into the abyss, the game worlds show promise by tasking you to navigate two of my least favorite places on Earth: an office building and a grocery store. The latter of the two incorporates annoying shoppers making the stereotypical complaints you or I would have about this neverending task. From here, it mostly goes to less Hell-ish locales like forest areas and tropical villages, but these don’t really line up with the overall theme for me. Where is the DMV? What about going to one of your kid’s friends’ birthday party? The dentist? A strip club on a Tuesday? With the exception of a later level that I don’t want to spoil for anyone, it felt way too much like Banjo-Kazooie and not enough Doom. Again, I know this was an expectation, but seriously, this was a ways off of what my vision of Hell would be – something along the lines of Dante’s Inferno or even Agony, one of the worst games I have ever played, would be more aligned with my expectations of Hell.

If you’ve ever played a 3D platformer, you know what you’re in for here… Except with bugs. Lots and lots of bugs, but we’ll come back to those later. The title is mostly platforming, which yet again is fine at first, and I want to add was a non-issue in the Steam demo I played, but this release running natively on a PS5 is kind of like trying to play a potato. I thoroughly enjoyed using Nugget as an anchor point to swing around like Spider-Man, which later into the game can be done so much it almost allows you to skip huge sections of levels, but after a while, the issues really started to pile up. As you would expect, there is some combat involved, but outside of some short shooting segments, this is reduced to basically bashing in the enemy’s face using Nugget as a weapon. It’s rather bland and so easy that a toddler could do it, which makes the whole offensive bit seem a little off since this is clearly marketed at adults. Or thirteen-year-olds that have parents with little to no morals.

I am not sure if this is a result of crunch, a lack of quality testing, budget constraints or just the PS5 translations, but by the time the credits rolled, I was mentally exhausted from dealing with all of the issues and poor design choices. I know a lot of my previous gripes with this have mostly been opinion based, since humor and other themes are subjective; however, the game not running as it should is something that would irritate anyone. I’ve been plagued by a PS5 system error (CM-something something) which I have never seen on any other game I have played. I could usually just hit X to bypass it, but occasionally it would boot me back to the home screen. In the event it didn’t, chances were pretty good I was mid-jump and that when I resumed the game, I would drop straight into a bottomless pit. This was so bad I actually held off on trying to finish this game until the release date came in hopes of a day one patch, which never came. In another instance, I was stuck in a boss battle where the next phase failed to load and we were left in a weird silence that took me back to when I worked in-person customer service and I had just told a Karen that I couldn’t accept her coupon that expired two years prior. Additionally, there were invisible walls, missing animations in certain enemy encounters that gave it an intermittent stop-motion look, and checkpoints that make you painfully backtrack to unlock the area that you had just reached.

From a presentation standpoint, this is on par with what you would expect from an N64 game, albeit a not-so-great one. The blocky character models and bright colors did tickle my nostalgia gently, but not enough to make me love, or really enjoy this game by the end of it. There were some obvious misses here, with the most noteworthy being the complete lack of voiceovers. Even if there was just one person narrating everything in different voices, I would like something more than just reading every statement thrown at me, since this was a norm even back when Conker’s Bad Fur Day was released more than 20 years ago. This is also the second PS5 release in a row that failed to capitalize on the Dual Sense feature and is missing vibration support entirely, also something that was a thing on the N64.

Hell Pie is bound to find an audience, but I doubt it’s the one they are looking for since the humor rarely hits the mark unless you think walking dicks and turds, toilet humor, and the thought of eating a dirty tampon excites you. I am by no means a prude, I was just expecting some smarter jokes, not just the same dick jokes I’ve heard since sixth grade. This is an example of a game that will likely get patched into something playable, and I really hope it does, as the PC demo I played showed much more promise. As it stands, I would recommend waiting for a deep discount or getting it on a different platform.

5 out of 10

Pros

• Has a Few Genuinely Funny Jokes
• Some Accurate Depictions of Personal Hells
• Feels Like an N64 game

Cons

• The N64 Feel Doesn’t Hit as Hard in 2022
• Tons of Bugs
• Boring Combat
• No Voiceovers or Vibration
• Mediocre Childish Toilet Humor

Hell Pie was developed by Sluggerfly and published by Headup. It is available on NS, PC, PS4, PS5, X1 and XSX. The game was provided to us for review on PS5. If you’d like to see more of Hell Pie, check out the game’s official site.

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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