Welcome sinners and Demons alike. Come forth and take control of your own section of Hell in the new game, Hell Architect, as you are tasked with a small section on hell to oversee, torture, control, and maintain your collection of sinners. From publisher Leonardo Interactive and Developer Woodland Games, with previous games such as Taxi Simulator and Urban Explorer, comes with a unique cartoon-violence and hellish take on what the underworld is and can be under the influence of your devilish mind.

Featuring a variety of scenarios to choose from, with all having a unique challenge, my favourite being the Pink Hell, you can also have the option to have a go at a Sandbox mode to flex your hellish muscles with no holds bar. Many of the characters introduced throughout the game all have a fun spin on them, such as Lilith the head of HR, but for those that don’t want to go in blind without a decent understanding of the fundamentals of the game, a few tutorials are available.

These start from the basics of the game to intermediate, and then finally the more advanced mechanics of the game. When you feel overwhelmed about what to do, you can always take a break and go back to one of the tutorials for a refresher.

For those who are familiar with city type or strategy building games, you will feel at home with the building and resources management aspect, but adding torture into the mix as another resource brings a unique spin on the elements of the game. Even though you may be thinking to yourself, this is Hell, why do I need to feed sinners and help keep them maintained and alive in some way.

Are they not already dead? Well yes, but if the game purely focused on just torturing sinners, then it would just be a torture simulator, and that would be only five minutes of gameplay depending on how committed you were. I get what the developers are going for, and Hell wouldn’t be Hell without feeding sinners their own excrement as a form of torture. I do have to mention the game music, for the tone of the game works well in the game’s setting, with a fun and comical aspect to it, but for the game’s sound effects, the tortured kind of sound a little disturbing, but that may just be me.

Overall, Hell Architect is a hell of a game. Its spin on the architect game genre is a refreshing take, and for lovers of other architect games such as Prison Architect, you may get a chance to live out your demonic side, especially when you get the chance to torture such a sinner like Billy the Kid or other such sinners that you would expect to land in Hell.

Written by: Simon Hayward