Hello Cruel World takes you to an abandoned facility where an experiment has gone awry. Will its atmosphere and brain teasers be enough to make you stick around? Here’s our full review.
The puzzle game genre is one that I genuinely enjoy. Imagine a scenario where a particular challenge has you stumped for hours, then think of the sheer gratification upon completing that task. However, it goes without saying that good puzzles require intuitive design—not so much that information is given out freely, but that a step-by-step process exists to eventually nudge you toward that “Eureka!” moment. This intuitiveness is missing in Hello Cruel World and truthfully, this particular title has some of the most questionable puzzle designs and logic that I’ve seen in recent years.
What is it?: A VR puzzle game where you have to escape an underground facility run by a rogue AI.
Platforms: Steam and Meta Quest (reviewed on Quest 3)
Release Date: August 1, 2024
Developer: Akupara Games
Price: $19.99
Hello Cruel World puts you in the shoes of a streamer. Like most ill-fated attempts at making viral content, you had the bird-brained decision to listen to your loyal audience. Goaded into entering an abandoned restaurant called the Crab ‘n Grab, this dingy, rundown establishment has a basement that takes you to a mysterious underground facility. It’s here in this strange place where you see spider-like robots scurrying around and where an artificial intelligence known as “ALICE” contacts you.
I’ll forgive anyone who thinks that Hello Cruel World is a VR horror game – it’s certainly advertised as such if you check its store page. Unfortunately, the game itself isn’t scary at all. For the most part, you just go through multiple samey-looking dank and dimly lit corridors, and rooms filled with rusty machinery or destroyed computers. There were no instances when I felt frightened, and even the scurrying robots, which were few and far between, failed to add to the tension.
As for ALICE, I won’t spoil all the details here. She does want your help, and you learn of past experiments through her musings and text logs. Switching from vulnerable victim to cunning manipulator, she has her own “A-ha! I got you!” diatribes. Sadly, your interactions and conversations with ALICE are rather limited, preventing her from becoming a truly compelling character; you’re unlikely to view her with the same reverence or trepidation as GLaDOS or SHODAN. Additional ambient dialogue or random musings where she either beseeches your character or further disparages them would’ve added more to her personality quirks.
Hello Cruel World’s meat-and-potatoes are its puzzles, which are plentiful. There are those that are rather straightforward, often requiring you to place down pylons that conduct electricity and unlock doors. You’re also given tools by way of augmentations. The first is a microphone, the purpose of which remains unclear to me even after finishing the game. Whenever I activated it, all I heard were weird washing machine-esque noises; it provided nothing that helped me complete tasks, so I just kept it turned off for most of my playthrough.
The second tool, however, is infinitely more useful: an electro gun. Basically, pressing the trigger button lets you shoot orbs that also conduct electricity, acting similar to pylons or rods. The grip button, meanwhile, funnels those orbs back into the weapon, a reload mechanic of sorts. The gadget itself is handy since it creates alternative ways for you to tackle puzzles once the novelty of grabbing and plopping down structures wears off.
Lastly, there’s a chat function that you can toggle and move around with your hands. This simulated chat has randomized users that act similarly to thousands of people commenting on YouTube or Twitch. I wondered if this feature was meant to imitate the lively exchanges between streamers facing an in-game challenge and viewers who want to aid them. I even thought of some examples, such as how the Destiny 2 community attempted to solve the Niobe Labs puzzle years ago or the Discord group of dataminers that discovered the secret Archon class in Remnant 2.
Regrettably, Hello Cruel World’s chat feature is next to useless. Entire conversations are messy, chaotic, and often filled with emojis—as expected—which means it’s not a helpful mechanic. In fact, when I needed a clue or a hint, the chat group barely offered anything of note.
Worse, some of the puzzles in Hello Cruel World just aren’t creative by design. In just a few hours, I had gotten tired of the “electric current links pylons and opens doorways” mechanic, in spite of variations like positive and negative values, barrier beams, and conveyor belts. In some cases, the solutions themselves didn’t make sense.
For example, a Level 3 puzzle required me to place the correct “voice orb” with the password, which would allow the sound waves to travel via speakers. Little did I know that I had to speed up the orb’s playback by linking a “+1 pylon”—the combination of these mechanics was neither mentioned nor implemented in any prior instance, as though you’re just expected to know them by heart. Moreover, due to the way the device grid was structured, there was no way for me to have said pylon and a connected speaker in the same spot, nor a means of linking the electrical currents to open the door. To solve the puzzle, I had to bring devices from a previous puzzle room, something I hadn’t done before. I’m all for complexity and thinking outside the box, but this box was way outside the building.
In another example, multiple contextual clues made for a rather confusing affair. These included duplicate recordings with different playback speeds, a hint that “two people” (or two different voices) would be needed, the name Alice being repeated, and the fact that terminals kept telling me that the passwords were all incorrect after playing all recordings.
Hello Cruel World can be played while sitting down or standing up. There’s also a height offset toggle and slider. For instance, if you’re sitting down and an object falls to the ground, you can switch to standing mode to lower the height and pick up the item. Place the item on a surface and select sitting mode again to continue playing. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a “magnetic grab” option (i.e. point at an item and do a flicking motion to retrieve it).
Likewise, the game has smooth turning and snap turning options, including a full slider for turn angles. Teleportation is also possible by fully tilting the right thumbstick.
There’s also another late-game area where the task had almost no rhyme or reason, to the point that I mostly relied on trial and error, and sheer luck that I saw a hard-to-spot translucent spider robot. Similarly, there was a portion where I had to disable the electrical voltage coursing through some machines—which got magically disabled when I fiddled around with the control options. I couldn’t tell if I had done something else or if this occurrence was a bug.
As someone who enjoys tackling and solving puzzles in games, like The Talos Principle and The Room series, the nursery rhymes/cult stashes in Alan Wake 2, innumerable shrines in Tears of the Kingdom, and VR titles like MADiSON VR, Riven, and Resident Evil 4, Hello Cruel World leaves much to be desired. It struggles to strike a balanced approach between the straightforward and the obtuse, with puzzle design and solutions that are somewhat illogical from what you’d normally expect.
Hello Cruel World Review — The Final Verdict
Hello Cruel World takes you to an underground facility where all sorts of nefarious experiments have taken place. Regrettably, the atmosphere isn’t quite chilling and the villain isn’t that insidious. Worse, puzzle mechanics lack the creativity to keep you engaged, nor the intuitive design to prevent you from smacking your forehead and going, “Who on earth would think of that solution?”
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