Hell Is Us is rated M for Mature (17+). This post discusses themes and content that some readers may find unsettling. Although the game is fictional, it deals directly with religion, fanaticism, psychological trauma, and heavy emotional themes that might not sit well with everyone. If you have experienced difficulty separating fiction from reality in the past, I’d advise against playing the game.

Additionally, this is both a personal opinion piece and an in-depth exploration of the game's lore. I’ll be diving into the narrative threads, worldbuilding, and mysteries I found most intriguing across Hadea. If you prefer to experience the story completely blind, bookmark this and play the game first.

Humble Beginnings: Shamanism and Survival 

In Old Hadea, around 11,700 BC, the Hasalins arrived—fleeing a global catastrophe during the Younger Dryas. The conditions were brutal: freezing temperatures, biting winds, and lethal mountain terrain. Yet against the odds, their gamble paid off. 

Grounding the lore in the Younger Dryas is brilliant. That period is already a hotbed for wild, entertaining rabbit holes on the internet—lost civilizations, cataclysmic floods, even attempts to link it to Noah’s Ark. I don’t claim to be an expert on it; I just see those theories pop up on my YouTube feed from time to time. They make for fun viewing, but nobody should treat them as gospel without hard scientific receipts. 

Anyhow, back to the Hasalins. 

The Hasalins adopted shamanism, and like most early signs of tribal society, each tribe had a priest to guide each tribe member. These priests counseled, healed, and anchored their people. For a time, things held together. There were no conflicts, and no unadulterated hatred that we know of so far. 

To have new traditions after braving natural disaster is itself amazing. Each tribe could technically have its own sets of beliefs, and unique spiritual channeling from tribe to tribe. It opens up a whole new layer of how much of the beliefs from those tribes have been actively adopted by modern Hadea. The game doesn’t make any references to what has been inherited per tribe, however, modern Hadea does inherit something greater, later to be discussed as we continue. 

So how did disparate Hasalin tribes suddenly consolidate into a unified dogma? 

After migrating into the mountains and valleys of Hadea, eight distinct tribes formed, each with its own customs and folklore.  

Eventually, seven of those tribes converged around the worship of Sethyris. 

One tribe refused. They rejected Sethyris entirely, broke off, and established the worship of Teaar in the Vysa Hills. When you explore that region, you can still see their sheer dedication carved into the landscape through remarkable stone craftsmanship.  

The remaining seven tribes merged their oral histories and rituals into a single organized faith centered on Saint Palom. How that unification actually happened is one of the game's biggest mysteries. Who was Palom as a mortal man before he became an icon? What gave him the authority to unite rival chieftains? 

Palom's role is unique: he isn't the god—Sethyris is—but Palom became his mortal conduit. The tribal shamans formed a ruling Conclave, leveraging Palom's teachings to crown themselves rulers of Hadea under a centralized theocracy. 

Most critically, Palom achieved something monumental: he made the first discovery of the Eye of God. 

That singular event cemented his divine authority and laid the cornerstone for Palomism. 

Sabin Gau and the Reformists 

Several hundred years after Palomism flourished across Hadea, a young Palomist named Sabin Gau accused the church of corruption. His writing spread like wildfire—he wanted fewer restrictions, less power concentrated in the priests’ hands. Essentially, he and his followers, wanted to keep worshiping Sethyris without the theocracy strangling them. 

The church couldn’t accept that—which is my assumption. They needed control—control of faith, of income, of the narrative. So, they branded the Sabinians as heretics and unleashed a holy crusade to crush them. 

They weren’t extremists, but the punishments were extreme. Executions, rape, dehumanization. The Palomists turned cruelty into policy, and normalized this brutality as a deserved response. 

Modern Mysteries? 

Beyond the general curse, Hadea is riddled with bizarre temporal anomalies. Why did Yankel commit suicide? Why does time reset every new year? Is Hadea trapped in an eternal timeloop? If so, has everyone in this country been dead for decades, forced by the curse to replay their final agonizing days like ghosts? Who triggered this, and how do you even break something that warps reality itself?  

As you explore, the notes you discover paint a surreal picture. Settlers write about feeling physical shifts in time, as though abruptly dropped into the past. Others describe unbearable, looping sensations of déjà vu.  

Then there is Lord Aster. Several Sabinian factions revere him with near-religious obsession. But what makes Lord Aster truly fascinating isn't his followers' fanaticism—it’s the lingering suspicion that his death triggered the temporal collapse across Hadea. 

Rogue Factor scattered dozens of these narrative breadcrumbs throughout the world. And the deeper you look, the more it feels like everything converges on the second discovery of the Eye.  

Piecing together Hadea’s timeline is messy because historical records constantly bleed across eras.  

Centuries after Palom, an expedition armed with ancient texts marched into Mount Obek. 

The Eye was rediscovered—uncovered a second time deep in the mountain. This rediscovery gave birth to the Order of the Eye . The scholars believed they had unlocked the dawn of a golden age—unaware they had just signed Hadea’s death warrant. 

The Order treated the Eye as an emotional dampener. Their theory was simple: if you could mechanically suppress fear, malice, and rage, you could finally halt Hadea’s endless religious slaughter. 

To achieve this, they built their crowning achievement: the Eminous Shroud., a massive machine engineered to project the Eye’s frequency across the entire country.  

On paper, it was an audacious, desperate bid for peace—an attempt to end centuries of sectarian bloodshed sparked by Sabin Gau’s reformation.  

Instead of salvation, they triggered the First Lymbic Invasion. Grotesque white entities, tied in some terrifying way to Teaar, manifested and annihilated everything in their path. Military commanders burned through hundreds of soldiers just to fell a single beast. 

Blacksmiths had to rapidly adapt, harvesting creature husks to forge experimental weapons. 

The invasion broke Hadea beyond repair. It forces the ultimate question: was the Eye ever benevolent to begin with? Or was human arrogance simply never equipped to harness it?  

The Eye’s Aftermath, Timeloops, and OMSIF 

The Eye, the Order, and the Shroud all lock into the same vicious cycle. Temporal anomalies stopped being accidents and were weaponized, fueled by raw collective trauma and exploited by shadowy external factions like OMSIF and the Ziel Council. 

Why weaponize a timeloop? Why keep a population trapped in perpetual grief? The game doesn't spell it out directly, but it reeks of military-industrial experimentation and resource extraction. Eternal war means eternal opportunity. 

Then there’s Remi Létam. An emotionally detached operative, son of an OMSIF agent, and easily the strangest protagonist in recent memory. He claims he wants to help Hadea, but his internal motivations are paper-thin. Rogue Factor left him largely opaque, which can be frustrating given the psychological weight of the world he moves through. 

Above all, the core paradox remains: if the Eye was engineered to pacify emotion, why did it summon the Lymbic abominations instead? Why did the research scientists go mad and commit suicide in its chamber? The Order resolved to destroy the artifact if containment failed—and maybe that was the only sane choice they ever made.