I Hate This Place Review (Switch eShop)

The way I see it, there are three different versions of I Hate This Place. First, there’s the game as promised in the trailers: a survival horror with some general emphasis on resource management and gunplay, all elevated with some nice-looking cinematic storytelling.

Sweeping cameras slowly reveal the ominous presence of creepily deformed lab creatures. Moody pans pass over entrail-covered woodlands. And emotive close-ups show dramatic angles of the lead character, Elena, as she searches for her friend, Lou, who went missing in the opening. It’s all very appealing. Throw in a high-end voice-over and some occasional '80s synths, and you’d be forgiven for thinking I Hate This Place was going to knock your Stranger Things socks off.

But the truth is the trailers are pretty damningly misleading, and not a second of that narrative flair has made it into the game. Instead, the story is told via some fixed-camera early-'00s-era cutscenes that brought back memories of a simpler time in gaming.

I say all of this because I Hate This Place comes with a fairly hefty price tag ($29.99 USD / £26.49), and I feel it’s important to give realistic expectations. If you were to compare the game to the trailer, what you’d see is more of an echo, a ghostly shimmer of what was being promised elsewhere.

But that doesn’t make I Hate This Place bad.

As for versions two and three, well, the difference here belongs to that familiar old story – the late-night campfire tales of underpowered hardware struggling to run contemporary, seemingly demanding games. This here is a Switch ‘1’ game – and more often than not, it shows.

In fact, when I looked at some videos for other systems, I realised just how much I Hate This Place was suffering on the Switch. On more powerful hardware, the game looks pretty great. Elena’s torch casts accurate shadows from the legs of giant spiders. The shine of the spectral underworlds you visit to solve the mysterious origin stories of a number of ghosts looks great and suitably otherworldly and strange.

On Switch, however, I was often distracted by visual ticks during my six-hour playthrough. Elena’s shoes sometimes clipped through textures on the floor. Cutscenes suddenly jumped back to earlier moments in the story – or ended inexplicably short. Often, ghosts disappeared instantly as if someone had forgotten to add an effect.

I could go on complaining, but here’s the twist: despite the lack of finesse, I had a pretty good time. For me, too many of the big releases of the last year have felt as if they were going through the motions – but with I Hate This Place, I at least felt as if developers Rock Square Thunder were reaching for the sky.

The core gameplay — the twin-stick shooting and combat — won me over quickly. Sneaking around, creeping past monsters, and crafting new weapons and bombs to deal with any that got too close was fun. I soon found an enjoyable balance between being cautious and gung-ho. I enjoyed throwing Molotov cocktails at mutated creatures, watching them burn, and then picking them off with a few rounds of my newly crafted rifle.

Whether exploring swamps or mines, the challenge felt well judged, and each section lasted just long enough. The story — loosely based on a comic series about a haunted ranch and its surrounding wilderness — does a lot of heavy lifting. It grabbed my attention early on and showed enough creativity to win me over some more.

Less positively, though, in larger areas the performance often fell apart, dropping to a hauntingly low couple of frames per second. Some players will find this unforgivable, but for those like me who spent the best part of the last 10 years playing compromised ports, I coped with these moments well enough. Maybe that’s a testament again to the fun gameplay.

The last misleading element of the trailer concerns the crafting and the building. I’ve read some takes in the last few days that painted these crafting elements as more than they are, because in truth they’re very underdeveloped – seemingly remnants of ideas that had to be canned or simplified for whatever reason. For me, crafting more bullets, upgrading a weapon or two, and keeping bandages stocked was all I ever needed, and as someone not that bothered by exhaustive resource management, I was okay with that.

Ultimately, I can’t give I Hate This Place a higher score than the one below. The technical issues and a lack of finesse haunt almost every nook and cranny of its game world. But I also want to stress again that it’s often very fun, too. It’s not one I’d recommend full price on Switch, but if you can tolerate uneven performance and you enjoy scrappy, experimental survival shooters, there’s something here worth playing.