Hell Express is Death Stranding meets Helldivers meets Pacific Drive – aka, deliver letters to the dead in a combat truck

Quick confession: every time I come up with an absolute Frankenstein’s cocktail of allusion-cobbling Google-bait like the headline for this article, a fairy dies. But that’s OK, because Hell Express is a top-down 3D extraction shooter about delivering letters to the dead. When I play it – there’s no release date yet – I will convey a note of apology to the soul of the fairy I’ve just slain with my appalling SEO practices. This may be difficult, however, because many of the underworld’s denizens are hostile. The only thing you’ll be delivering to them is bullets, fire and explosives.

“Hell Express is a PvE isometric extraction shooter for 1-4 players, blending heart-pounding combat, high-risk treasure hunts, and strategic resource management in a world teetering between life and death,” explains the Steam page. “As a member of Hell Express—an armed delivery company that sends delivery to Limbo—you’ll choose from a diverse cast of characters, each with unique abilities and personal motives. Dive into the perilous depths of Limbo, complete dangerous deliveries, and scavenge for treasures to upgrade your gear and vehicles. But beware: every decision could mean the difference between survival and ruin.”

Further down the page they call it a “road trip”, with a “Hell Trakker” van you can equip with flamethrowers. There are glimpses of the extraction mechanics, too, with a squad of players holding the line against boglins while hauling somebody’s KO’d ass to the van. Still, I think I prefer what I’ve seen of the stealthy interior stretches. I hope it scrubs up well as a solo play – I don’t need any co-op partners trampling on my atmosphere of mounting trepidation. Go watch the van, why don’t you.

Hell Express was announced last year, and developers Full Metal Bagel Games have just signed up with Arc Games as publisher. Arc Games used to be part of Embracer, before Embracer fell into a giant, self-dug hole of layoffs and restructuring. They and Star Trek Online developers Cryptic are now part of Project Golden Arc, an operation run by members of the Arc Games management team with funding from XD Inc.

As for Full Metal Bagel, they apparently include “industry veterans who’ve worked on highly acclaimed titles like The Last of Us Part II, Assassin’s Creed Origins, Honor of Kings, and more.” As ever with these things, it’s unclear whether “veterans” here means people whose contributions to those games were significant enough to imply anything substantial about the game they’re making now.

A quick LinkedIn trawl reveals that Full Metal Bagel’s art director is Keyi Li, who was a senior concept artist at Ubisoft and Tencent. I do like the art direction of Hell Express. There’s an enticing balance of crisp military tech, convoluted and decayed layouts, and paranormal fixtures or interruptions. Did you see the queue of petrified people by the derelict bus in the announcement trailer? I thought that was one of the better queues of petrified people I’ve seen in a game – probably, one of my top three.

Look out for a Hell Express playtest this spring. If you’re keen on such dreary, darkling spectacles, you might also like End Of Abyss, which I sampled at SGF last year. A fairy probably died for that headline, too.