Web of Wyrd is wasted potential and quite a lackluster use of the Hellboy ip that doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.
Web of Wyrd, a game based on Mike Mignola’s comic book; is the first Hellboy game in nearly twenty years. I was extremely excited when the game was revealed during the game awards last year, a game based on a more niche character like Hellboy looked and sounded really intriguing.
Unfortunately, the game did not live up to my expectations. Telling an original story rather than retelling the comic or movies, I was looking forward to seeing where it would go. However, this game does a poor job at storytelling. The narrative is told largely through text boxes between characters with not so great voice acting, which makes sense as this isn’t a AAA game.
The story being mind numbing and uninteresting is one thing, but the gameplay is far too easy to be enjoyable in any sense. This game follows a similar gameplay loop as The Binding of Isaac, it’s a roguelike meaning you’re supposed to die and repeat many times but the difficulty was so easy I died maybe twice throughout my whole playthrough. Other than it being too easy, the actual gameplay just isn’t interesting. You spend most of your time pressing the punch button while the enemies just stand around.
The game isn’t entirely terrible though, one thing it greatly exceeds at is its artstyle. It has this cell shaded look to it like it’s taken right out of Mignola’s comics. The only real part I enjoyed about the game was the comic accurate look, it’s absolutely stunning to look at. Seeing how well the developers brought Hellboy’s art direction to the video game medium further disappoints me because I know their focus was on how the game looked rather than how it played or on its narrative.
Something that I’m struggling to understand is why the voice acting feels so soulless when the cast is lined with some of the most iconic voice actors in the industry. Maile Flanagan, most known as the voice of Naruto put no energy into her role as skuld. Steve Blum and Cissy Jones, two other legends in voice work gave equally dry performances. The star of the show on the other hand, the late Lance Reddick did noticeably stand out amongst the rest of the cat. Being one of Lance’s last projects, he made this role his own. I went in expecting a voice similar to former Hellboy actor Ron Pearlman’s but Reddick gave the character a very different voice. Reddick’s Hellboy has a very relaxed and lighthearted dimminar compared to Pearlman’s which was off putting at first but did grow on me as I continued to play.
All in all, Hellboy Web of Wyrd is a game far too easy to hold my interest with a story so boring and detached from the comics that I just couldn’t care about, with few redeeming qualities like its outstanding art direction and nice voice work from Lance Reddick. I think there’s a whole lot more than could’ve been done with the character of Hellboy that was wasted in this game.
