Hellboy-inspired tabletop RPG Apocalypse Keys asks who will hold you as the world ends

polygon.com:

“Hell is other people,” reads the oft-quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, a minimalist stage play about three souls trapped within the walls of a single-room purgatory. The characters confess, bicker, seek absolution, seduce each other, and wax on about the existential terror of bearing another’s judgment. In 2013, cartoonist and writer Tim Kreider typed a line that would come to define a generation of online interaction: “If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

New tabletop role-playing game Apocalypse Keys shares much in common with these two disparate pieces of media, even if creator Rae Nedjadi and publisher Evil Hat Productions don’t mention either in the credits. Heavily steeped in Hellboy vibes and mustering an impressive mechanical pedigree, Apocalypse Keys puts the vital need for connection — even love — front and center alongside the literal end of the world. It asks if relationships can save us from our worst impulses while relishing in the full-throated heel turn toward oblivion.

Players embody monsters working for DIVISION, a clandestine government wetworks agency with a silly acronym but serious mission: Seek out Doors of Power and stop the Harbingers who would kick them wide open. Sessions consist of mysteries that the group, along with the guidance of a Keeper (the game’s moniker for a game master), flesh out collaboratively as they collect the eponymous keys of the apocalypse — evidence that can be as mundane as a waterlogged Walkman or as obvious as a bleeding crown of blackened roses.

Like Hellboy and its BPRD spinoff, the player-characters’ monsters have bucked their apocalyptic birthright in favor of saving humanity from unseen