Thousand Hells is a 'tactical narrative' feast of infernal storytelling, but its defeats can feel brutal

In Thousand Hells: The Underworld heists, I've sort of taken on the role of the dad in that one tweet about feeding cats to coyotes. But rather than serving up pets to jackals, I'm dutifully feeding bands of doomed adventurers into the psychological, corporeal, and spiritual wood chipper of the "tactical narrative" game's bespoke hellscapes.

Those hellscapes—from the primordial twilight taigas of the Midnight North, to the melting fever-dream dominion of the Hell of Nightmares—form a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of abyssal imagination. Made by the developer behind the phenomenal King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages games, its pedigree is obvious as each game guides my hand-picked party of hell raiders through encounters rich with the implied culture, tradition, and history of their respective afterlives.

I just wish I weren't spending quite as much time f...