I Hate This Place is an isometric action-adventure survival game by Rock Square Thunder and Feardemic set in a vibrant and macabre, 80s-inspired world. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn’t do well, and if it’s worth your money.
I Hate This Place Review Overview
What is I Hate This Place?
I Hate This Place is an action-adventure survival game set in an 80s-inspired, comic book-esque world where the horrific mutants of science fiction meet with the esoteric monsters of cultist fantasy. Forced to search for and save their lost friend Lou, protagonist Emma must sneak past and fight against monstrous abominations plaguing her family’s ranch, and discover what mysteries lie amidst the scattered viscera.
I Hate This Place features:
⚫︎ Isometric action-adventure mechanics
⚫︎ Stealth and crafting-focused combat encounters
⚫︎ Base-building and resource management mechanics
⚫︎ Open-world exploration with day and night cycle
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
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 Steam |
 PSN |
 Xbox |
 eShop |
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| $49.99 | |||||||
I Hate This Place Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Sets the 80s Vibe Well Genuinely Frightening Atmosphere |
Voice Acting and Animation of Dubious Quality Lackluster Base-building and Open-world Exploration Confusing and Unintuitive |
I Hate This Place Story - 6/10
Surprisingly, I don’t hate this game’s story. The dark cult fantasy and sci-fi themes mesh together quite well, and the world-building borders on above average. Sadly, the game’s characters and dialogue are far too one-dimensional for this game to score any higher.
I Hate This Place Gameplay - 4/10
While I Hate This Place has decent combat, stealth, and crafting systems, literally every other mechanic it has feels tacked on and underdeveloped. The base-building is rudimentary at best, the resource management is brain-dead easy, and the exploration is boring even at the best of times. This game really should’ve stuck to what it could do well, because this spread of competencies is appalling.
I Hate This Place Visuals - 8/10
To its credit, I Hate This Place understood what vibes it wanted to set and did so very well. From the VHS-punk of the menu screen to the rustic simplicity of the era-appropriate world design, this game screams a specific decade. If only its animations could keep up, because apart from some okay monster attacks, this game animates like a puppet show during cutscenes.
I Hate This Place Audio - 7/10
This game has many pitfalls, but its horror value is not one of them, and that’s largely owed to its good sound design. The horrific atmosphere of the rural setting is emphasized well by the background sound effects and music. Too bad the voice acting is passable at best, because this game was honestly quite scary when the characters weren’t talking.
I Hate This Place Value for Money - 3/10
Nearly $50 for a game like this is atrocious. I Hate This Place has its ups and downs, but even at its best, it shouldn’t cost more than $25. Considering the game’s current quality, it should be $20 even, with a sale on top. I can think of many, many games worth less than half this game’s asking price that are ten times the quality, so I wouldn’t bother buying this unless you’re out of options.
I Hate This Place Overall Score - 56/100
Like a low-budget 80’s horror flick, I Hate This Place is all flash and no bang. The vibes are just right if you’re considering just its visuals and sounds—bad VAs notwithstanding—but the gameplay is simply too one-dimensional to appreciate. Once the initial thrill wears off, it’s just one cheap jumpscare after another, with no nuance or complexity to follow.
I Hate This Place Review: Thanks, I Hate It
I wasn’t born in the 80s, but I very much dig the aesthetic, particularly for its horror scene. Many horror icons we know and love today found their footing during this decade, so much so that the vibes of 80s horror are unmistakable in the current age.
I was thrilled to hear that I Hate This Place was going to emulate said vibes, and that, as a crafting-based isometric survival game, the prospect of reliving my own horror movie or graphic novel was a very real possibility. Sadly, such expectations could only be met with disappointment.
I Hate This Place was not a horror experience as much as it was a horrid one. Although I could see the best of intentions driving it forward, the worst of executions rendered it a poor experience overall. It sure managed to look and sound the part, but there’s no salvaging the rest of it. Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Passing Days and Surviving Nights at Rutherford Ranch
First, let’s talk about the game’s setting, because such an evocative title like "I Hate This Place" warrants a deeper analysis. Said hated place is no other than Rutherford Ranch, a rural haven of animal life and apparent cult activity that our protagonist was thrown into under the care of her aunt and uncle.
We start the game’s story with some immediate cult shenaniganery afoot, as the main character and her best friend try to summon an eldritch god by performing a ritual in the woods. Although assurances of well-researched sources are thrown around, the ritual goes about as well as you’d expect—with our friend vanished and an unknowable wrongness now permeating the ranch’s air.
With no other leads on their whereabouts, you’re forced to descend into a nearby bunker to look for them, but something about the shattered glass and splattered viscera tells you that this may have been a mistake. You forge ahead into the darkness and are rewarded with the game’s best bit of gameplay: crafting-based combat and stealth mechanics.
Strong Combat and Stealth Mechanics
It’s really hard to tell from the tin, but I Hate This Place actually has a pretty good combat and stealth system under its wing. It doesn’t utilize it well past the starting area and becomes more and more vestigial the farther you get into the game’s story, but that’s getting ahead of things. Let us first discuss how it works initially before we dive into how it is executed throughout the game.
Combat in I Hate This Place can be divided into melee and ranged engagements. Players are initially equipped with a bat to smack enemies with, but can eventually craft themselves a firearm once they find the blueprints for one scattered about and a crafting table to build it on. Ammunition must also be crafted separately using ingredients gathered from containers around the map, with black powder being the notable bottleneck.
Considering the scarcity of crafting materials and the low number of ammunition created per recipe, I Hate This Place’s ranged combat places greater emphasis on decisive, critical strikes over volume of fire. Players are expected to shoot enemies at their weak spots and finish them off with melee strikes to conserve ammunition. When all else fails, however, players can always just sneak around the danger.
Most enemies in I Hate This Place, in the first area, especially, are blind and won’t attack on sight. They do rely on sound, however, and sprinting next to one is a guaranteed way to get sent back to your last save point, because these enemies hit hard. As such, when faced with too big a group of enemies to take out, players can just scoot around them entirely.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds, as floor hazards like broken glass, corrosive liquids, and squishy guts litter most surfaces in and around the bunker, so you might attract attention even while crouched. Some segments even require Solid Snake levels of precision stealth maneuvering to get past under threat of evisceration.
I honestly think this is the best gameplay I Hate This Place has to offer. The stealth mechanics are crisp, responsive, and tense without ever being tedious, and the combat is intuitive and efficient. It’s almost sad that I’m going to have to wipe the floor with this game from this point onward, though, because it’s all downhill from here.
Vestigial Base-building with Pointless Exploration to Match
Believe it or not, I Hate This Place still managed to sneak in additional gameplay mechanics to go with its isometric stealth and combat. I kinda wish it didn’t, because why? The first few minutes of the game were already immaculate; none of this was necessary and would only serve to dilute the game.
Alas, the extra mechanics remain, and dilute the overall quality of the product, they did. Once you make it past the bunker, I Hate This Place transforms from a room-by-room isometric thriller to an…open-world base-builder with a day and night cycle? What?
Trust me, the switch-up confused me too, but I thought it was worth seeing. Who knows? Maybe it was a stroke of genius, and I was doing the thing you shouldn’t do with books and covers. Sadly, no, I was right on the money.
Rutherford Ranch opens up to be your base of operations, if you can call it that. It’s a wide open space that you can build facilities on by spending the Scrap you’ve been collecting this entire time. These facilities can range from crafting stations to resource-collecting nodes and processing plants that grant you several different crafting resources that you can build more things with in turn.
Not a bad idea on paper, but definitely a bad one in execution. For one thing, it’s a very rudimentary base-building system. You’re limited to facilities, not structures like walls, floors, or stairs. It’s all just a one-dimensional, station-centric base-building system, which I’d argue is the worst of its kind. Throw in some needless building times, unclear use for the resources these structures generate, and a complete lack of quality-of-life, and you’ve got yourself a crafting recipe for disaster.
Surely the exploration must be more engaging and fleshed out if the base-building is this off, right? Wrong. This game’s exploration is aimless and unrewarding, despite the whole day and night gimmick it has going on. By day, the ranch is completely safe, and you can go about your business. By night, monsters come out to make your life a living hell, or at least that’s the idea. What you get are mostly mutant deer, weird tentacle monsters, and a sentient sinkhole. That last one isn’t even an archetype; it’s one thing that you can just ignore.
Quests you can get from NPCs are as simple as getting this many pieces of wood, finding this goat somewhere nearby, and fighting more monsters. All of it is suffused with a story that is supposedly unfolding alongside your discoveries, but mostly takes a back seat to all the nothing you’re experiencing somehow.
It’s hard to overstate just how sheer the drop in gameplay quality is the moment you leave the bunker. There’s barely any stealth to be had, all the crafting is for the awful base you’re building, and half the time you’re just running around. What a travesty!
Unclear On What It Wants You to Do
If weirdly vestigial mechanics aren’t bad enough, the game has a nasty habit of not telling you how to do anything and kinda just throwing you into the fire. Sure, the first area has an NPC diegetically telling you what to do, which is pretty okay from a storytelling standpoint, but things sort of spiral into a confusing mess once more and more mechanics are thrown in.
The day and night cycle is barely explained, so you sort of just have to experience it firsthand by being gored by a suspiciously flexible deer. Build times aren’t explained either, just shown in the build UI with barely visible text, so you’re stuck figuring out why the workbench you just made isn’t working.
What’s more is that the game kinda breaks its own rules sometimes, particularly with the whole "day is for planning and the night must be survived" situation, because they literally just throw enemies at you during daytime when you’re supposedly still preparing for the nighttime combat.
Decided to play through a ghost’s backstory, did you? Well, good luck figuring out what to do, because the game sure as heck won’t tell you. It will softlock you into a deathloop, though, so you'd best hope your last save wasn’t that long ago.
Questionable Animation and Voice Acting Quality
Not to pile on the criticisms, but the game’s animations and voice acting aren’t much to write home about either, unless that letter’s meant to describe how awful they are. Puppet-like animation for the cutscenes and second-rate line deliveries come together to create an audio-visual antithesis to the game’s otherwise exquisite 80s theming in world-design and music composition.
It’s almost like something in the game’s code is working to undo any merit its own visuals and sounds achieved. All of this amounts to a middling quality across the board for player experience. Normally, that’s fine, but when your gameplay goes belly-up after the first thirty minutes, then the entire product might be beyond salvaging.
I Hate This Place Too
It pains me to bring a game with such potential so low, but there’s no denying that I Hate This Place’s quality goes only as far as you could throw it. Apart from that great initial taste of its gameplay, it’s all weird decisions and questionable implementations through and through.
Maybe for a different game, I would’ve been able to dismiss the janky animation and poor VA performances as deliberate design choices to better evoke the retro vibe. But when there’s a marked decline in quality after a certain point in the game’s playthrough, it’s hard to think of all these pitfalls as anything but poor craftsmanship.
Thanks, Rock Fear Thunder, but I hate it.
Is I Hate This Place Worth It?
Absolutely Not—I Hate This Price
I Hate This Place isn’t the worst game on the market, but if you were to jump from its asking price down to its quality, you’re likely to shatter your legs on impact. $49.99 is a tall ask for good AA titles, much more for something of this game’s quality.
I’d max out this game’s value at $20, and even then, I’d wait for a sale. It sounds harsh, but what else can be said about a game that impresses for a grand total of thirty minutes, then disappoints for the rest of its run?
| Digital Storefronts | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
PSN |
Xbox |
eShop |
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| $49.99 | |||||||
I Hate This Place FAQ
How Do I Unlock Fast Travel in I Hate This Place?
Players can access I Hate This Place’s fast travel feature by completing the game’s first area, the bunker. Once players reach Rutherford Ranch, they can fast travel between major parts of the map by approaching various docks scattered around the area.
How Do I Save My Progress in I Hate This Place?
Players can save their progress in I Hate This Place by finding specific, colorful television sets playing static, which can usually be found in major hub areas like the Rutherford Ranch, most areas with beds, and various rooms in the bunker.
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I Hate This Place Product Information
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| Title | I HATE THIS PLACE |
|---|---|
| Release Date | January 29, 2026 |
| Developer | Rock Square Thunder |
| Publisher | Feardemic |
| Supported Platforms | Steam PlayStation 5 Xbox Series X|S Nintendo Switch |
| Genre | Action, Adventure, Survival, Horrror |
| Number of Players | 1 |
| ESRB Rating | ESRB M 17+ |
| Official Website | I Hate This Place Official Website |
