As a longtime Hellboy fan, it continues to astound me that there are desperately few video game adaptations of the big red monkey devil’s exploits. There’s a lot to love about Mike Mignola’s almost 30-year-old hellion, from his look, to the fable-flavored supernatural world he skulks around righting wrongs and protecting the innocent, to the often touching pieces of self-reflection throughout the many stories that touch on themes of loneliness, discrimination, found families, and the risks and rewards of rising to a higher calling. Seven hours with Web of Wyrd was a good reminder of the challenges involved with turning such a complex work into an interactive game where our actions matter. While it nails much of the look of the graphic novels, Web of Wyrd trades substantial story and characters for an entertaining but low-stakes, action-packed romp whose roguelite elements fail to put up enough of a fight to give the heavy-handed devil his due.
At first glance, Web of Wyrd is gorgeous in the same grumpy way that Hellboy books have been since 1994. Even in three dimensions, the signature bold lines, flat shades, and low-detail faces feel authentic to the series. Baroque-style shadows and lighting feel even more effective when you walk through the gloomy halls of your operating base than it does in still frames, and when journeying through the eponymous Wyrd – a parallel dimension built on the memories of old fables and folklore – the European expressionist inspirations from the page feels fully realized on screen in every twisted branch or gnarled monster’s claw.
As a reader who’s given my own voices to Mignola’s classic characters in my head, it took a few runs to really come to like the cast of Web of Wyrd, but every agent, ghost, and goblin helps that old noir-meets-silly-macabre style leap off the pages and into a world that may not feel real, but does come across as easily believable. The biggest adjustment period was with Hellboy himself, voiced here by the late, great Lance Reddick doing a take on his signature smooth and precise cadence that adds a flavor to Big Red that I’ll always associate with him going forward (sorry, Ron Perlman). His supporting cast is good, but the absence of signature Hellboy characters like Liz Sherman and Abe Sapien was hard to ignore.
The plot is a solid caper that would fit well into the pages of a Hellboy comic arc. After setting up shop in the haunted Butterfly House, the BPRD work to figure out the secrets hidden in the Wyrd. While Hellboy punches his way through this ever-changing storybook universe, the rest of the team watches his progress and analyzes the things he learns and brings back for clues. The trademark smart and punchy dialogue from the books is front and center in Web of Wyrd, but sorely missed are the standout moments of reflective prose and meaningful events that make the titular character so multi-dimensional and endearing. Instead, it trades introspection for action, so even though it tells a somewhat balanced story full of mystery and intrigue, it’s not in a way that stands out among the best Hellboy tales.
The Wyrd itself is a mercurial maze divided into four levels with differently themed environments like a Mediterranean kingdom or a shadowy English forest. Disappointingly, this is really only relevant in regards to the kinds of monsters you’ll beat up in them, as each world is laid out using all the same special rooms and events that reassemble randomly on every new run, but they’re appropriately moody and help establish this chaotic land’s bizarre tone. Making progress to the end of each world means entering rooms, clobbering every ugly mug in it, and moving on to the next by traveling through longer paths that sometimes house some easy to avoid traps. Unlike something like Hades, though, your progress isn’t directed perpetually forward. Instead you’ll do plenty of backtracking to open doors in rooms you’ve visited previously after finding appropriate keys.
It’s a good start, but the problem is that even as the maps get larger, they don’t get more interesting to explore. You discover every new kind of room or buff pretty early in your roughly seven-hour adventure, leaving little new left to see, and besides the seemingly endless amount of lore pick ups randomly scattered around the many maps, there’s no motivation to inspect every nook and cranny. Each of the four worlds is a multi-leveled labyrinth, but never more than three floors; I actually appreciated that a run through the Wyrd was a relatively short 20-ish minute venture when compared to other run-based games where start to finish attempts can take an hour or more.
Web of Wyrd’s key strength aligns well with Hellboy’s style: beating up the denizens of the spooky pocket dimension is good fun, at least until you get the hang of it enough to crave a worthy opponent. Combat is simple and easy to learn, with competent play requiring you to mix light and heavy attacks to wear down enemies’ regenerating toughness in order to leave them vulnerable and do permanent damage to their health. Using the charging heavy attack to bounce monsters off of walls and pillars feels great every time, and is a great way to build up their stun gauges to leave them open for big damage. Dodging and blocking becomes an almost unconscious reaction after a while, as the enemies heavily telegraph their moves and don’t do so much damage to your own toughness and health meters that it would dissuade you from staying in close and weathering the storm until you get a chance to hit back. Even the mooks – smaller enemies that fill the room and seem designed to distract you and to get free shots on you from off screen – provide almost no actual challenge.
The sticking and moving is fun and makes Hellboy feel almost like a heavyweight boxer, but I can confidently say that Web of Wyrd is the easiest roguelite I’ve ever played, and bizarrely for this genre there’s no real way to amp up the difficulty. Besides an early death in my very first run as I tried to get my bearings, I didn’t die again until the very end of the final map. Since then, at least a dozen runs and several health, toughness, and damage upgrades later, I’ve never even gotten close to failing a run. Even monsters with unique special attacks, like weird undead creatures who can spit clouds of bats at you, can’t do enough to stop a very basic offensive strategy. I still found fighting to be fun thanks to the kinetic sound and visual design of every solid punch I landed, but I was sorely missing that challenge that is often synonymous with this sort of game.
I don’t know if this is due to the monsters just not being aggressive enough, or if your tools – like Hellboy’s Good Samaritan pistol or a dagger that bypasses enemy toughness and damages their heath directly – are just so powerful that no opponents can keep up, but they quickly became pushovers. After finishing up the main story, you can modify your post-credit runs to make enemies stronger or randomize your equipment after every fight, but none of these adjustments forced me to change my approach at all. If enemies aren’t hitting me in the first place, making them hit the air harder doesn’t change a thing.
There’s some opportunity for depth when you mix your prepared weapon and item loadouts with the handful of buff options you’ll come across during a run. These can be bound to specific tools, and I like adding the fear buff that makes your attacks freeze enemies in place for a short period of time to my ranged weapons, or making every subsequent fist attack in a chain do more damage. It just would’ve been nice to be able to use those tricks on enemies that were giving me trouble.
Between trips into the Wyrd you can walk around The Butterfly House chatting with your team and spending some of the currency you earned during your runs to upgrade your equipment and stats. It’s implied early on that the waves you’re causing in the Wyrd are affecting the mansion, causing it to change… yet the only significant changes you’ll find are new doors opening to let you dive into new layers of the dungeon. I wasn’t expecting Oldest House-levels of transformation, but it turns out that you’ll exhaust everything there is to see and do in the house before you make it to the final sections of the Wyrd, so that was a bit of a letdown.
