Few things in this world truly confuse me, and I can now say that HRS: Devil Game I is one of them. Also known as Horrible Real Street, it is classed as an action-adventure indie strategy game, however, it is clearly a survival FPS, horror-indie game.

The developers, Unk Games, which I believe is short for Unknown Games, along with Abdullah, Mortatha, and Ali developed and published this solid attempt at a Dead by Daylight type of game. I’ll do my best to try and explain what this is and maybe typing this out may help me understand what happened in this game.

So, there is a story mode, however, it is currently unavailable to play, so that leaves the multiplayer, which has three game modes. Long story short, as best as I can tell, you are in a maze/level, and you have to escape.

Finding Mode has you collecting weapons and keys to protect yourself, Opening Doors Mode has you collect three keys to escape out of one of four doors, and Finding Win Block mode has you, and I quote, “You need to destroy to clean the blocks to find one block that has blue shiny colour to win.” That is all the information given.

Gameplay-wise, information is limited even further to be non-existent. There are no tutorials or settings to see the key binds. You just go in blind. Eventually, I worked out the buttons, so for those wanting to know, E is used to open supply creates. You can’t see what is in the boxes, but generally, it is hearts/lives and guns.

I hated the movement the whole time. You are literally on an angle, and I would get a stiff neck because I had to tilt my head to semi-straighten up my view. Speaking of views, there is no setting menu, so there is no way to change the sensitivity and no way to sharpen the picture or raise the brightness. Hopefully, these will be available in the future, because at the moment, it is hard to play this for long periods.

Visually, as stated above, this game is hard to look at. I know it’s not a triple-A game or made by a billion-dollar games company, so everything in this review has to be taken with that in mind. I get what they were going for. They wanted it to be hard to see, to make it spookier I guess, but they went a little too far in my opinion, and during some parts of the map, the screen just goes black and you wander blind and directionless. Your avatar looks like it came out of someone’s worst nightmare and then melted in a housefire, though this does help the scary factor of the devil enemies, even if they did remind me of Beelzabot from Futurama.

The sound and music in this game also confused me. On one hand, the Devil’s saying, “Come to me,” is one of the creepiest things I have ever heard, and it certainly gave me plenty of nightmare fuel.

On the other hand, the music being played over the top is something you would find playing in games like Final Fantasy III, or any other fantasy game in the ’80s-’90s. It didn’t mesh that well, and again, there are no settings and no way to adjust volumes. It’s a loud game, so turning down the headset is your only reprieve.

Overall, I get the concept and it is an interesting idea, but unfortunately, they seemed to overestimate their idea of a finished product with the end result.

They either need to bring it back to more manageable graphics, like an old-school Doom and Wolfenstein, or spend some big bucks fleshing out the characters and the overall presentation of their mazes. Either way, it still needs time in the oven, but it has potential once some of the quality-of-life areas have been drastically upgraded.

Written by: Adam Brasher