Helltaker

Steam title card.

Helltaker is a mostly passive block pushing puzzle video game developed and published by Łukasz Piskorz for Windows on 2020-05-11, the ported to Macintosh and Linux shortly thereafter. The game was programmed in Unity.

In the game, you play as Helltaker, a hunky slab of a man who has entered hell in order to convince a bunch of sharply-dressed demon women to join his harem. You must first reach the demon women through block puzzles, then you must woo them through dialogue options.

Personal

I found this game on a list of popular games on steam250.com. It was described as a short puzzle game with sexy demons and that was enough to interest me. I beat it on 2023-01-31 with seven achievements.

The game is free.

Review

7	4	7	6	5

Best Version: Windows

— This section contains spoilers! —

Good

• The art is very nice. The closeups of the demons are well drawn; I especially like when you first meet Lucifer. The chibi characters bouncing to the music looks great.
• The music is very enjoyable. It's not so complex that it distracts you, and it's far from boring.
• Some of the dialogue is pretty funny and the characters each have their own personalities. Azazel, the curious angel, is wonderfully adorkable.
• I like that the game doesn't wear out its welcome. I don't think I could take much more of the block pushing, and the active puzzles for level 9 were a nice change up.

Bad

• The movement controls are a bit too touchy. Also, since bumping into a blocked stone does nothing, I would prefer it not decrease my movement count.
• In each level, you have to complete it using the least number of moves possible. This misses an opportunity to award the player with a bonus for finding the optimal path.
• Since the puzzle and dialogue are not related, it doesn't make much sense to require the player to redo the entire puzzle just to try a different dialogue option. And, since none of them are more than two options deep, it's just a pointless detour.
• This game missed the chance of having a female playable character.
• The close-up character art is a little grainy around the edges.

Ugly

• Nothing.

Media

Promotional

• 

  Steam title card.

Videos

Trailer.

Longplay.

Representation

Strong female character?	Fail	The strongest is Justice, but even she falls prey to the wiles of the player's character without much effort.
Bechdel test?	Fail	The women only talk about the player's male character.
Strong person of color character?	{{{StrongPOCCharacterStatus}}}	{{{StrongPOCCharacterNotes}}}
Queer character?	Fail	None of the characters are clearly queer.

Links

         

• helltaker.fandom.com/wiki/Helltaker_Wiki - Helltaker Wiki.
• twitter.com/i/events/1257962875831947264 - Supplemental comics.