HELLESCAPE in-game title screen.

HELLESCAPE game logo., an indie game I've been doing pixel art commissions for, finally released their demo! How does it hold up? Well...

I should preface this review/ critique/ whatever by saying that I won't be judging this based on how much it copies Undertale and Deltarune(UTDR) as Spoofy has made it clear that this is, in fact, an UTDR clone and clone/ heavily-inspired indie games aren't a new concept. Mario: Kitsune Tails, Super Bernie World. Sonic: Polyroll, Panic Porcupine, Freedom Planet. Kirby: Spark The Electric Jester, Froggo's Adventure, Astropods: Starside Glaze. Hell, even Undertale! Astromeda, Heartbound, Knuckle Sandwich. Does that excuse the blatant nature? Obviously not, just saying I won't be focusing on that aspect here at least cause yes it's very much a Deltarune rip-off, but I came into this fully expecting that anyway. I'd like to judge it on its own merits. So with that out the way, what do I think?

Yellow star. Gotta be honest: It's rough, but I can see the vision! Firstly, the game is REALLY unoptimized. This whole playthrough was played windowed cause whenever I'd fullscreen the game, the fps would literally get reduced to 1 per two seconds. It usually happen in places were shaders like blur or bloom are in use, but sometimes it would just happen randomly too or if I left the game running for a bit while playing. Apparently this is due to leftover music assets or something, but idk this seems very unusual for a GameMaker game to lag THIS hard. Spoofy is working on minimizing the lag, but yeahhh rough, to say the least. Windowed mode isn't safe either btw, but at least there it lagged significantly less.

˚₊‧꒰ა Plot Summary ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

Bunny girl dancing. The gist of the main story is that we're a prophesied robot(or a vessel with a robot body, anyway) sent to Hell to save the demons there from world destruction, but we'll soon meet someone that'll rival against us, the ARCHANGEL. It turns out that this isn't Hell and is actually Earth, but due to an apocalypse between Humans and Demons, the Demons won and transformed Earth into Eva. Humans built robots as a last line of defense, but they were just too weak. Comma, the player character, is a bunny android, so you could say that she's maybe one of the last surviving artifacts of the Human race, but that's just me theorizing. Interesting premise!
So we spawn in the world and meet a powerful demon, Akuma, that works for the ARCHANGEL, tries to kill us, but was ultimately stopped by our companion, Nine. Nine then explains pretty much the plot summary I just did above, then we're off to save the world!

Then, we meet Llya, the queen of one of the Hell rings, who's looking for her son, who we soon find out is actually dead and she just wanted to keep us busy while the world is being consumed. Interesting character! Tho I felt like her arc was a bit rushed? Nine quickly gets suspicious of her, but she barely tries to brush it off before saying that she gives up. It also doesn't help that we barely see her throughout the game, so she's not much of an established character for me to care too much about either. I love her design tho! But that's only cause I designed her lol.

˚₊‧꒰ა Gameplay ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

Cockroach character boxing. The environments, sprite work, animations beautiful!! But again, I made all of it as a part of a commission, so biased for sure. The only wonky sprites were the ones that I didn't make, like Llya's dialogue sprites, and Manica due to how tiny as hell she is. I made a lot of sprites for the game and I'll be showing them off soon! They'll be downloadable for preservation purposes and in case anyone wants a closer look at them.

The overworld gameplay is pretty much like your typical RPG, so nothing crazy there, tho I do like some moments where you jump and slash things, but they're very seldomly used. I really wish the walking and running speeds were faster. You can slash enemies to strike encounter them, but the hitboxes are very small, so triggering the strike encounters feel very inconsistent half the time.

Battles, similarly, have their issues. Firstly, why does defending cost AP(the magic stat of this game)? It's a pretty high cost too, so it was just a skill I literally never used, compared to Deltarune where it can help you gain TP faster and reduce damage a bit. Kind of a dumb decision, ngl. Healing items kinda suck as the amount most heal you is less than the amount of damage enemies deal to you. Speaking of which, this game suffers from a problem I see in many other average UTDR fangame: attack patterns are not properly designed and instead rely on heavy use of RNG. RNG itself isn't bad, but this game suffers from bullet spam, leading to situations where you get cornered and forced to get hit, which IS bad. The parry is a cool addition, but I wish it was utilized more besides being a thing you can do rarely. Due to bad RNG, parryable bullets, most of the time, just get sent out of the bullet board. The parry hitbox is also very small, so half the time you'll either get hit or miss the bullet. Very inconsistent. The default attacking minigame kinda sucks tbh. It barely registers your input half the time, so what I ended up doing is just spamming all 3 keys. Each enemy has their own SEAL(or ACT) minigame styled in the likeness of Warioware. Cool in theory, but there's no variation in games and almost all enemies just default to pressing all the arrows before the time runs out. There's no other way to communicate with the enemies, just SEAL and CHECK. Underdeveloped. You can FIGHT or SEAL, but from the amount of grinding I did, either options don't seem to change much besides the castle having people in it or not. Very reminiscent of Deltarune Chapter 1, in that regard.

˚₊‧꒰ა Conclusion ໒꒱ ‧₊˚

Pink tree blowing in the wind. Overall, promising, but definitely needs more time in the oven. It could, for sure, develop more of its own identity, rather than being essentially a UTDR fangame. This is pretty much a diet Deltarune. Again, clone indie games do exist, but they'll at least TRY to do something different, but this is quite literally Undertale in the UI and battles, and Deltarune in the overworld. If nothing else this game gets praised for, I can at least feel safe knowing that people love the sprites I made for it and I do hope to work more with HELLESCAPE in the future!

White dog furry and white fox furry running towards the screen.

Edit

Pub: 02 Jan 2026 22:25 UTC

Edit: 02 Jan 2026 23:11 UTC

Views: 45