This game has potential.

Teens are pretty fun, they always have some task to do: what I mean by this is, for example, when you're in the dying state, you can release your spirit to collect tapes all over the map and these tapes gain you a recovery progress so that your teammates can pick you up faster, that's way more engaging then, let's say, what you're doing in Dead by Daylight (just hold m1).

However, the monster role feels way more stressful and way less rewarding, especially less fun (even if you win!). I'm quite a nervous person and even in DBD during its worse days in terms of balance the killer role was not giving me that much mental pressure. A lot of people in the community seem to agree with that sentiment and therefore the queues are quite bad for teens. I remember waiting from 5 all the way to 20 minutes for a dead lobby. I did really enjoyed the Doll master though since he involves way less "hugging the wall until they ran out of ammo" and more skill, set up, + his traps are not annoying and can be dealt with from a teens' side, If we will compare this aspect of this game to DBD's implementation, in my opinion, killers with the trap-related abilities were the most boring ones to play AS and AGAINST, but since in this game you are able to hurt the monster, I think they're genuinely fun since there's a pretty interesting back and forth with weapons, in DBD you just hold W and that's it, since the pallets/windows are your only defense mechanism and they're useless in a good trap set up.

The game's balance is definitely better than in DBD, BUT I'm not really a competitive person and the fun comes before balance to me, that's why imo Dead by Daylight is more appealing, despite how at the times ridiculous it gets. Most of the monsters are just not fun, Hellbent needs to either change their abiities to be more engaging and skillful, more resilient against weapons that requires smarter approach rather than "hugging the wall", as I said before, or to completely change the core monster gameplay if they want to leave these monsters as is. I don't have a good suggestion but hopefully they will figure it out.

I will say though, this game works since day 1 launch of Early Access on GNU/Linux and on Steam Deck, which DBD still haven't enabled the support for with their EasyAntiCheat (it's been a one whole year since the feature announcement), so that's part of the reason why I like this game, since Linux is my primary OS. That's a major personal plus for me.

I will still leave this review as positive since when it works - it really works. I would leave a mixed review if steam would allow me to do so, though, but I really do support the foundation that Hellbent have made there.

This game has potential. Teens are pretty fun, they always have some task to do: what I mean by this is, for example, when you're in the dying state, you can release your spirit to collect tapes all over the map and these tapes gain you a recovery progress so that your teammates can pick you up faster, that's way more engaging then, let's say, what you're doing in Dead by Daylight (just hold m1). However, the monster role feels way more stressful and way less rewarding, especially less fun (even if you win!). I'm quite a nervous person and even in DBD during its worse days in terms of balance the killer role was not giving me that much mental pressure. A lot of people in the community seem to agree with that sentiment and therefore the queues are quite bad for teens. I remember waiting from 5 all the way to 20 minutes for a dead lobby. I did really enjoyed the Doll master though since he involves way less "hugging the wall until they ran out of ammo" and more skill, set up, + his traps are not annoying and can be dealt with from a teens' side, If we will compare this aspect of this game to DBD's implementation, in my opinion, killers with the trap-related abilities were the most boring ones to play AS and AGAINST, but since in this game you are able to hurt the monster, I think they're genuinely fun since there's a pretty interesting back and forth with weapons, in DBD you just hold W and that's it, since the pallets/windows are your only defense mechanism and they're useless in a good trap set up. The game's balance is definitely better than in DBD, BUT I'm not really a competitive person and the fun comes before balance to me, that's why imo Dead by Daylight is more appealing, despite how at the times ridiculous it gets. Most of the monsters are just not fun, Hellbent needs to either change their abiities to be more engaging and skillful, more resilient against weapons that requires smarter approach rather than "hugging the wall", as I said before, or to completely change the core monster gameplay if they want to leave these monsters as is. I don't have a good suggestion but hopefully they will figure it out. I will say though, this game works since day 1 launch of Early Access on GNU/Linux and on Steam Deck, which DBD still haven't enabled the support for with their EasyAntiCheat (it's been a one whole year since the feature announcement), so that's part of the reason why I like this game, since Linux is my primary OS. That's a major personal plus for me. I will still leave this review as positive since when it works - it really works. I would leave a mixed review if steam would allow me to do so, though, but I really do support the foundation that Hellbent have made there.