As far as story goes, you don’t learn much more about the universe you’re in. After some exploring you do come across one supercomputer who tasks you with ‘collecting information’ about Irid Novo, although the sparse dialogue does very little to illuminate why your character is collecting information in the first place. The writing can also feel verbose and generic at times. As a result, the world you’re dropped into feels rather superficial in places, and players are largely left to their own devices to fill in any story gaps.
When it comes to tutorials, character abilities, or in-game menus, things feel very cryptic and at times unpolished. You’ll find yourself figuring stuff out on the fly quite often. Cradle Games touts its multiplayer mode as one of the biggest draw cards in Hellpoint, for example, although it took me and a friend over thirty minutes to find the menu where we could boot up a game together. While some players might enjoy being thrown into the deep end as an extra layer to the Souls-like gameplay, I mostly found it alienating as a player.