I Hate This Place makes a strong first impression. The visual style is here to stand out with thick outlines and exaggerated violence that give the world a distinct personality. It doesn’t ease you in. From the start, it makes it clear that this is not a place you’re meant to feel safe in, but a place you’ll hate. Yes, I went there.
Better keep your distance
You play as Elena, drawn into the area surrounding Rutherford Ranch after a ritual goes wrong and something ancient and violent is unleashed. There’s a personal angle running through the story, and a growing influence of something referred to as the Horned Man, but the game keeps that narrative deliberately sparse.
Instead of pushing the story forward through constant dialogue or cutscenes, I Hate This Place prefers suggestion and small, voice-acted dialogue. You piece things together through encounters, locations, and fragments of information scattered across the world. I appreciated that restraint at first. It fits the tone, and it comes close to the feeling you have when reading the original comics. The downside is that the story rarely escalates. Threads are introduced, hinted at, and then left hanging for long stretches. The mystery stays intact, but the emotional weight never quite pulls you in. I understood what was happening and why it mattered, but I didn’t always feel personally invested in uncovering the next piece. Instead of an intriguing story, I had the feeling that the setting itself carried the most weight here.
The survival loop
Mechanically, the game revolves around a clear rhythm: explore during the day, survive the night. Daytime is about scavenging, clearing areas, gathering materials, and slowly improving your camp. Nighttime is where the game turns hostile. Enemies become more aggressive, visibility drops, and mistakes are punished more quickly. Sound also plays a central role here. Many enemies react more to noise than sight, which pushes you toward careful movement and deliberate decisions. Running blindly or smashing through environments is an easy way to get overwhelmed. Early on, that creates genuine tension.
Over time, though, that pressure softens. Once you understand how resources respawn and how base upgrades feed back into your survival, the loop becomes manageable instead of stressful. Crafting stops being about survival and starts feeling like maintenance. You’re rarely forced into crucial on-the-spot decisions, and that undercuts what should be the game’s strongest hook.
Stealth, combat and your camp
Stealth is clearly encouraged, and in theory, it’s where the game shines, but in practice, it is too inconsistent. The isometric perspective doesn’t always give you enough information to read enemy awareness properly. There were moments where I was spotted or attacked without fully understanding what triggered it. That kind of uncertainty breaks the immersion. I have no problem with being spotted, but it must feel fair.
Combat itself, on the other hand, feels weighty enough, but it doesn’t evolve much. Enemy behaviour stays familiar, weapons don’t drastically change how encounters play out, and once you find an approach that works, there’s little reason to change it. Fighting becomes something you manage rather than something you fear. For a game that leans on horror and unease, that’s a missed opportunity. Once confrontation feels more like routine, the horror aspect quickly dies away.
The last important mechanic I want to point out is your camp. Building up your camp is meant to be a long-term investment. You unlock structures that help with food, crafting, and resource generation, giving you more control over your situation. Early on, that feels rewarding. You can see real progress. The issue is how quickly that progress removes pressure. Even modest upgrades are enough to stabilise your situation, and once that happens, hunger, scarcity, and risk fade into the background. The systems still function, but they stop asking difficult questions of the player. Again, I couldn’t shake the feeling that everything changes into easy survival a bit too soon. The game nails the atmosphere, and there’s a good horror game buried underneath it all, but it really suffers from some balancing issues.
Conclusion
I Hate This Place has a strong identity and some genuinely compelling ideas. Its early hours make effective use of sound, darkness, and isolation, and its visual style gives it a personality that’s hard to ignore. But the systems underneath don’t push back hard enough to sustain that tension. Survival becomes comfortable, and for a horror game, that’s just a shame and something I can’t ignore. I didn’t hate my time with I Hate This Place, but it could have been so much better.
