Hell Clock begins with the message: “This is a work of fiction based on real events of the Canudos massacre (1896–1897)”. I won’t go into the details of the massacre, but from what I’ve read it was a tragic event that occurred in Brazil. The game’s overall tone fits perfectly with the dark, gloominess of the actual history and makes plenty of references. If you are interested, please take a few minutes to do some research before coming back to this review. I just wanted to point this out and applaud the developers at Rogue Snail for shedding some light on the history this game is based on.
History aside, Hell Clock is a lot of fun. This is the type of game I can lose myself in and spend hours playing. The game is a combination of roguelike and ARPG—like a mixture of Hades with Diablo elements. Developed by Rogue Snail and published by Mad Mushroom, Hell Clock released on July 22nd, 2025. The game offers different skills and potential builds to try out through 3 Acts with 21 floors in each. The developers recently released an end-game that offers deeper builds and a more challenging experience. So, lets run out of time as we discuss Hell Clock!
The Story: Descending into Hell
We startle awake as our main protagonist, Pajeú. Pajeú is a warrior whose mentor, The Counselor, had his soul stolen and dragged down to Hell. Your main mission is to save him. to do so, Pajeú must descend into Hell multiple times and fight off the evil spirits and oppressors that lurk down in the depths, all while racing the clock that will drag him back to the surface. During your journey, you will come across a cast of many characters, such as the mysterious old woman and João Abade, one of the guerrilla leaders during the War of Canudos. They will wait for you at Quixeramobim, which serves as the homebase between each run.
As mentioned before, the game is heavily inspired by the Canudos massacre. Many elements within the game pull from this real historical event. However, you can still appreciate the story without knowing the actual history. It’s a dark, gloomy, vengeful story that kept my attention and made me want to attempt more and more runs to see what happens next.
The Gameplay Part 1: Roguelike with a Timer
Because Hell Clock combines a roguelike and an ARPG, I felt the need to split the gameplay discussion into two parts. That said, I still want to cover a lot in both parts, so I’ll keep my thoughts concise.
Starting off, I found the controls to be very easy to learn and get comfortable using. Key binds can be edited of course, but the default controls are nothing overly complicated. You have the option to change how your movement is done, something I haven’t seen in other roguelike games. You are able to move with either WASD or with the left-mouse button, like how it is in Diablo. Of the two, WASD movement feels a lot smoother, at least with the default key binds. I’m sure if you map your key binds to be similar to a Diablo style, it might not feel as clunky. You are also able to use a controller instead for the non keyboard & mouse warriors out there.
Through the three acts of the game, you will traverse through 21 floors each. The floor layouts are not super long and are pretty straight forward with few branching paths. The layouts also do not seem to change much from run to run, but I’m a little forgiving of this because they are short. Floors are themed as well, such as a dungeon aesthetic to the fiery pits of Hell. New areas will introduce new enemies to gun down, from shambling corpses to giant burrowing worms. Every few floors, you will run into what I suppose is a “mini-boss” and every seventh floor will be a boss battle for that area. While fighting the monsters of Hell, you gather various items. Trinkets provide small bonuses to your Pajeú’s stats. Gold is used at shrines to buy blessings.
Blessings provide larger stat bonuses and can progressively get better as you buy them—buying the first tier of a stat will unlock the next tier being purchasable at the next shrine. As you kill enemies, you will also gain experience and upon leveling up, you select a blessing for your skills. Soul stones serve as the permanent currency used between runs to make yourself stronger. You might come across relics that have unique passives (and also stay between runs), chests that contain loot and various other things. This feels like a standard roguelike set up that I think works well and I have no complaints.
What Hell Clock does differently though is introduce a timer aspect. You have a limited time in order to get through all 21 floors, with the timer pausing during boss fights. If your time runs out, your run will end and you respawn back at Quixeramobim. You can purchase upgrades that will either add more time (you start off with seven minutes) or introduce red portals that will let you skip a floor or two. Eventually, I’m sure you can purchase enough upgrades to easily complete the run within the time limit. However, you can also turn on relaxed mode which pauses the timer completely at any point in the options.
Personally, and I know I might get some judgment from this, I turned the timer off. My easily-distracted brain wanted to go down all the small branching paths. I wanted to make sure all loot was collected and no enemies were left standing. Like I said, I’m sure the timer wouldn’t become an issue after a few upgrades, but I had a lot more fun not having to worry about it at all. However, despite pausing it, the clock stayed paused in the upper left corner on the HUD and I wish it removed it instead. I also noticed that I kept getting a pop up on every floor telling me to come back stronger. Neither of these disrupt my gameplay much, but the constant reminders slightly annoy me. Once is more than enough.
Beyond the time aspect, the game offers a decent bit of customization when it comes to difficulty. When starting a new save, you can select either regular (which should be easy) or veteran (which should be regular) as the difficulty. You can select softcore, the standard roguelike, or hardcore, where a death equals a deleted character. Once you have selected these two things, they are set for the whole save and can no be changed. The game features six save slots in total however, allowing you to try different things and see what works best for you.
The Gameplay Part 2: Builds as Deep as Hell
Pajeú can execute a total of five different skills during a run. You can change these between runs and unlock more skills as you progress through the different acts. Most skills cost mana to cast. They can be altered by the unique passives from relics. Skills can also be upgraded, but you will need to unlock the ability to do this first. Which skills you have equipped will obviously form the basis for your build.
Relics are probably the next most important aspect, especially the unique relics that grant unique passives to your skills. You carry a limited number of relics in your inventory during runs, but you can upgrade that space. You can upgrade relics by spending soul stones. Depending on the relic tier, they will come with a number of affixes, up to three. These affixes work like the stat bonuses you get from blessings, and they upgrade as you upgrade your relics. However, affixes are random and require a little bit of RNG in order to pull something good. Personally, I’d prefer more relics with set passives and no RNG from pulling affixes, but that’s just me.
Blessings you receive during runs are probably the next stones for your build. The game breaks blessings down into foundation and proficiency. The foundation blessings are those that you purchase from shrines with gold—the standard stat increases such as to overall damage or crit chance. You gain proficiency blessings by leveling up, and they affect your skill stats instead of Pajeú’s base stats. Each blessing will have a different tier (common, magic, rare, epic) and each skill can only have a certain number of blessings based on tier. For example, four common blessings, three magic, two rare and one epic. Blessings will improve the further into Hell you go. Players should hold off on selecting the better tiers until later in the run.
Finally, the Great Bell will be the last little bit you need to perfect your build. The Great Bell is the skill tree where you purchase general stats and upgrades. These can be increasing health or mana, increasing reliquary size to hold relics and those time upgrade options mentioned earlier. The end-game introduces other constellations that allow for deeper builds.
When it comes to builds, I tend to go for the DoT types, with a preference for poison or bleed. I love being able to stack up the DoT and do high single target damage or watch it spread in a miasma and cull the masses. Hell Clock does have bleed and plague, but neither felt all that effective. The bosses in the game are complete meat bags with a ton of health. My bleed build never felt like it was doing enough DoT to the bosses, resulting in minutes of dodging their abilities as they slowly bled out. I’ll also be completely honest, I dropped lots of bells on enemies to inflict plague, but I’m not entirely sure what it actually does. If you know, please tell me in the comments because it certainly doesn’t seem to be a DoT.
In the end, I found a high damage/crit build worked best with slight defensive abilities in gaining conviction (a shield to prevent damage to your health). Perhaps I didn’t go deep enough with my DoT builds and would be interested to see where they can go the longer I play the game.
There’s also a freshly new end-game called Ascension to try out when you beat the campaign. However, at the time of writing, I have not unlocked this yet so I don’t have much to say. From what I’ve read, it offers a stronger challenge and deeper builds, such as with the constellations. The developers at Rogue Snail state that it will “challenge your build and take your character to the limit.” Definitely seems worth checking out, but I tend to beat the campaign and move on when it comes to roguelikes.
The Aesthetics: Dark, Gloomy & Cartoony
The art style of Hell Clock is a huge chef’s kiss for me. With the historical backdrop of the Canudos massacre, the visuals match perfectly with what I would expect. You are, after all, descending into hell. Things are going to be a little grim and a little gross down there.
Gunning down a horde of corpses feels satisfying. It’s enough blood and violence to make you feel like a badass, but not too much to make you sick. The game isn’t necessarily gory but it can be grotesque. There are also small cutscenes that will play at times, giving context of the character. They are very short and don’t take you away from the game for long, but are really effective at showing us who these people are and why we might not want them around.
As for the sounds, there are some hits and misses. I think all the gameplay sounds are done well—the sound of shooting bullets or dashing or the monsters themselves. Portuguese is the default audio language and as a fan of languages, this is a very nice touch! You can change it to English but the voice acting is…probably not the best, please just stick with Portuguese. Also, the background music is just okay. After a while, it felt super repetitive, the same string of notes over and over again. Eventually I turned it off and put on my own music, but you can buy the soundtrack as a DLC so maybe I’m just being judgmental.
The Conclusions: Game Might be Dark, but the Future is Bright
The developers at Rogue Snail are hard at work and taking feedback from players to improve Hell Clock. With a content roadmap for the upcoming months, I see a bright future for Hell Clock and can imagine only good things to come.
As it stands now, the game is just my cup of tea. The visuals are great with a decent story to back them up. The different builds are fun to explore and try out. The game has the perfect amount of grind that keeps my attention but doesn’t make me rip my hair out. It is not without it’s flaws, but none of its shortcomings detract from my overall experience. To put it simply, I’m just having a ton of fun playing and I feel as if my review does not do the game the justice deserves. If you are a roguelike or ARPG fan, I happily encourage you to give Hell Clock a try!
After getting stomped on by the final boss in Act 1, I sighed and took a short break in Quixeramobim. I strategized my build, tried something new, upgraded my Great Bell skill tree, failed again and repeat. Despite my deaths, I never got frustrated nor annoyed. I only wanted to get back to descending into hell and start my next run.
Thank you for reading and I’ll see you in Hell!
