Hellpoint

Hellpoint drops you into the ruins of Irid Novo with a strong hook: a dark sci-fi colony circling a black hole, hostile interdimensional creatures in the halls, and an investigation that is bigger than your character. Its interconnected layout and real-time orbital events give exploration a welcome sense that the station is unstable and alive.

This is a demanding action RPG built for gamers who enjoy making a build, searching every branch for secrets, and accepting that the route forward may not be obvious. Co-op is a major plus, especially because a second local player can join without being treated like a disposable sidekick. The ideas are ambitious, even if the sheer amount of lore and open-ended exploration can make it feel less immediately inviting than its premise.

Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

Hellpoint starts with a good kind of unease. You are not simply clearing a straight line through a space station. Irid Novo is a large, interconnected place with hidden passages and secrets layered into its ruined corridors, and you can tackle its areas in an order that suits your curiosity. If you enjoy getting lost, finding an unexpected shortcut, and wondering whether you have reached an area too early, that freedom is the game’s strongest card.

Combat supports experimentation rather than locking you into one obvious warrior type. Melee and ranged weapons, armor pieces, and build choices let you shape a character around the way you want to fight. Weapons also unlock their individual special abilities through use, which gives you a reason to stay with a favorite long enough to learn what it can become instead of constantly replacing it.

The black hole orbit is the most distinctive wrinkle. As Irid Novo moves in real time, boss appearances, horde assaults, and altered enemy positions and stats can change the pressure on an area. That uncertainty fits the setting and prevents exploration from feeling completely fixed. It can also make a difficult stretch more intimidating, so Hellpoint is better for gamers who enjoy adapting to a hostile world than for anyone who wants every encounter carefully predictable.

Co-op meaningfully broadens the game rather than feeling tacked on. You can complete the full campaign online or in split screen, fight alongside a friend, or even turn against one another. Shared loot and persistent progress for the second local player make couch co-op especially appealing. If a tough section is wearing you down, bringing someone along is a practical option, not a compromised version of the game.

Graphics

Irid Novo is rooted in dark sci-fi imagery: a derelict space colony haunted by cruel interdimensional entities and overshadowed by an ominous black hole. The setting has the right ingredients for a grim, lonely trek through the wreckage of a once-great human achievement, with cosmic horror pushing the station beyond ordinary spaceship fiction.

Story

You play a Spawn of the Authority, organically printed on Irid Novo by the Author and sent to investigate the Merge, a catastrophic event that left the colony in ruins. It is a premise with immediate purpose, but it does not hand you a simple rescue mission or a neat revenge plot. Your job is to uncover what happened and why.

The deeper you go, the story expands from an abandoned-station mystery into an interstellar intrigue involving the Cosmic Gods and the entities acting as their puppets. That combination of human technological ambition, quantum catastrophe, and hostile cosmic forces gives Hellpoint more flavor than a generic monster-filled ruin. It is clearly reaching for the mood of classic science-fiction films while keeping its horror close at hand.

Its lore-heavy approach will land best if you like piecing together a world from its mysteries instead of expecting every answer to arrive in a clean sequence. The open structure is part of that appeal, but it also means the narrative can feel as sprawling and cryptic as the station itself. For the right audience, that is an invitation to dig deeper. For others, it may create emotional distance.

Overall Experience

Hellpoint earns attention through conviction and scale. The derelict colony, the black hole-driven changes, the flexible combat builds, and the willingness to let you explore out of order all point toward a game that wants you to feel small inside a dangerous, unknowable place. When its systems line up, wandering Irid Novo should feel less like checking off rooms and more like surviving an expedition into something deeply wrong.

There is a trade-off: freedom, secrets, dynamic events, and dense lore ask more patience from you than a tightly guided action game would. You need to be comfortable setting your own priorities, revisiting spaces, and living with uncertainty. That can turn the game’s ambition into friction when you want a clear answer about where to go or what to pursue next.

Still, Hellpoint has enough unusual ideas to recommend to dark sci-fi action RPG fans, particularly if you have a co-op partner ready to descend into Irid Novo with you. The Hellpoint publisher page is useful if you want a closer look at its build options and co-op setup. It is a flawed but worthwhile trip for gamers who value atmosphere, exploration, and collaborative problem-solving over a smoother, more directed ride.