Hellboy: Web of Wyrd Review

ign.com:

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