Hellboy: Web of Wyrd puts players inside a shifting, comic-book haunted house, and for a few hours that idea carries real weight. The 2023 roguelite for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC and Switch casts players as Mike Mignola’s demon investigator working a case inside the Butterfly House, a mansion that rearranges itself each time Hellboy dies and tries again.
Trailer, via thegameawards.
The B.P.R.D. Case File
The setup is simple. Hellboy enters the Butterfly House to investigate a case for the B.P.R.D., and each run through the mansion reshuffles its rooms, enemies and rewards. That structure is where the game’s ambition and its problems both start.
The visual style is the strongest hook. Rooms are rendered like panels pulled from a Mignola page, thick linework and stark shadow doing a lot of the storytelling on their own. Cutscenes lean on that same comic-panel presentation, and it works.
Fists, Guns, Rooms
Combat is built around melee combos, Hellboy’s gun and a set of unlockable relics that change how a run plays out. On paper that’s a solid roguelite toolkit. In practice, the moves available are:
- Basic melee strings for crowd clearing
- A revolver for ranged damage
- Relics that alter abilities between runs
- Environmental interactions tied to the mansion’s shifting layout
The problem is that none of these ever really evolve. New relics show up, but the underlying feel of a punch or a gunshot barely changes between the first hour and the tenth.
Repetition Sets In
Runs blur together fast.
The Butterfly House is supposed to feel alive with its constant reconfiguration, but the enemy types and encounter patterns repeat often enough that the shuffling stops feeling meaningful. Progress between runs is incremental, and the loop that should hook players into “one more try” instead starts to feel like padding well before the story wraps.
Voice work helps hold interest through the slower stretches. The writing captures Hellboy’s dry, weary humor, and the dialogue between cases gives the world more personality than the combat does on its own. That’s not nothing, but it can’t carry a roguelite loop by itself.
The Butterfly House Wears Thin
Where Hellboy: Web of Wyrd succeeds is in atmosphere and presentation; where it struggles is in giving players a reason to keep pushing deeper into the mansion. The core gameplay loop needed more variety in enemy design, encounter pacing or ability growth to sustain the roguelite format it’s built on. Instead, the game settles into a rhythm that repeats its ideas rather than building on them.
Performance across PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC and Switch is stable, with no major technical issues getting in the way of runs. That stability just means players get a clear, uninterrupted look at a loop that doesn’t have quite enough content to fill it out.
Fans of Mignola’s comics will find plenty to appreciate in how faithfully the tone and visual identity are translated here. The Butterfly House looks and sounds like it belongs in a Hellboy story. Whether it plays like a satisfying game across a full run is a harder question, and the repetition works against it.
Hellboy: Web of Wyrd is a game with a clear identity and a much shakier engine underneath it. The presentation, voice work and setting establish something genuinely distinct in a crowded roguelite field. But the combat and run structure don’t do enough to justify repeated trips through the Butterfly House, and the shine of that first hour fades well before the credits roll.
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