Video Game / Jupiter Hell

Like chess...with shotguns!

"Something's gone wrong... really fucking wrong."

— The Marine

Jupiter Hell is a commercial Roguelike that is a Spiritual Successor to Chaosforge's previous game, DRL

The plot is simple. You're a lone marine battling your way through Jupiter's moons, encountering corrupted former humans, crazed machines, and fiends from the depths of hell. Similar to its predecessor, a plethora of randomized levels, equipment, and various challenges await as you take the fight to the hellspawn.

Jupiter Hell is available on both Steam and GoG.

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This game contains examples of:

• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • When you're down to the last three enemies on a level, their location is highlighted on the minimap. Which is nice, as enemies can wander around the whole map, and hunting them down would otherwise have the potential to be headache-inducing.
  • Like DRL, there are "mystery" switches (in this case executable terminal scripts), some of which do bad things like flood the level with poison gas. But unlike the previous game, you can always find prior terminal messages that identify what upcoming scripts will do, making it possible to avoid the bad scripts if you're paying attention.
  • Explosions don't destroy items as they do in DRL, and effects of Exploding Barrels only stick around for a short while.
  • When you've cleared the last enemy on a level, any remaining items on the floor become permanently visible, even if they would normally be outside your line of sight. This helps you make sure no loot is overlooked before moving on.
• Apocalyptic Log: The various terminal messages on all the moons paint a picture of an operation that was going to hell well before hell came to it.
• Arbitrary Gun Power: For balancing reasons, a single 9mm bullet fired from an SMG, auto rifle or a chaingun will do at most half the damage it'll deal if shot out of a pistol.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: 7.62mm weapons, especially rifles, punch through armor far better than standard 9mm.
• Artificial Stupidity: If you slip out of sight, former human-type enemies will mindlessly break cover and/or follow you around corners, making it much easier for you to blast them. Justified, in that they're zombies.
• Attack Drone: Come in the security, combat and military varieties. Security drones are the most fragile opponents in the game, with about half HP of even the basic former grunts, with combat drones being on par with them and the military drones possessing the same 30 HP as most hellish/former CRI enemies. However, the security drones also hit harder than any grunt with the respectable firepower of a 9mm auto-rifle, while the military drones also possess better anti-armor damage with their 7.62mm ammo. If you take Wizard master trait as Technician you can summon a drone yourself.
• Auto Doc: Medical stations allow players to heal, extract a medkit, or permanently raise their maximum health.
• Auto-Revive:
  • The Scout class's Second Wind trait saves them from death and heals them to 50%, but only once per run.
  • The Marine class has a downplayed version of that with Survivor, which prevents death once per level, but only if the HP amount at the start of the turn was already higher than 25 (20 at upgraded level).
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • As with DRL, ADV and unique weapons are often hit by this trope if your build doesn't specialize in their weapon type. Such weapons are excellent for a character that does have the relevant traits… but not you.
  • Rocket (and other) launchers are awesome weapons… until an enemy closes to melee range and there isn't a wall in the right position to hit them without blasting yourself, too.
• Back Stab: The Scout's Executioner melee ability as well as the Assassinate mastery lends itself quite nicely to this kind of play, especially since being in Stealth massively ups your chance to crit.
• BFG: The BFT is the most powerful of Jupiter Hell's weapons, and is a direct shout-out to Doom's infamous BFG.
• BFS: The Soulstealer, a powerful two-handed sword that gets stronger the more enemies you kill with it, and adds health with every kill.
• Blood Knight: Jupiter's moon bases have been overrun by demonic forces and the marine (initially) has no idea what the hell happened, but he's clearly not disturbed in the least by the nonstop carnage.
• Bolivian Army Ending: After defeating the Summoner/the Harbinger and clearing Dante Station/Beyond… the marine doesn't get to go home. But he can (and does) vow to make the demons sorry that they ever heard of him.
  The Marine: I know I’m not going home… but at least I’ll take these demonic fuckers down with me.
• Bond One-Liner: After clearing the last enemy on a level, the marine always says something macho to commemorate his victory.
  The Marine: "Cleanup on Aisle Fuckhead!"
• Boom, Headshot!: Interestingly, this is a mid-level skill that's only available to the Technician class. It increases critical hit percentage with any pistol or SMG, but has a short cooldown.
• Boring, but Practical: The 9mm auto-rifle. Its decent accuracy, reliable damage, and plentiful ammo will see you through a good chunk of the early game before it's replaced by a more advanced weapon.
• Bring It: The marine often says something to this effect when facing Exalted enemies… that is, when he's not saying something along the lines of "This Is Gonna Suck". Either way, the extra dialogue serves to warn players that they're facing an Elite Mook.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Each moon contains "branches" that differ from the regular path in terms of environment and enemy spawns, and at the end of each branch is a special level filled with tough enemies and better rewards than the moon's standard levels.
• Chainsaw Good: Chainsaws are one of the deadliest melee weapons available in the game, capable of doing massive amounts of piercing damage.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: The Nightmare update introduced this as an effect if the player deals enough damage over an enemy's max health — and on the Nightmare difficulty itself, is required to permanently kill organic enemies.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Unless the language filter is set to "Clean" in the settings, the marine will swear basically every other word.
• Critical Existence Failure: Downplayed, as wounds result in accuracy-reducing Pain, though Marine characters can use Adrenaline to nullify existing Pain and heal for half of its amount, while their Angry Motherfucker trait straight-up boosts damage in proportion to your missing HP.
• Critical Hit: Present, though it's mainly seen with the specific traits. In particular, the Son of a Gun trait adds 20% critical chance to pistols and SMGs (in addition to boosting their accuracy by 10%), and investing an additional point in it brings that up to 40%. It's especially big when you possess a revolver or a deagle, which have a 20% critical chance of their own, meaning that every 3 shots out of 5 will score a crit.
  • The Scout and Technician have Deadly Precision and Headshot respectively. Deadly Precision not only gives the Scout an aim bonus to crit chance but an increasing level of crit chance per shot, which dovetails nicely into the Sniper mastery, which gives an increasing level of crit chance and damage based on how far away you are from your target. Headshot is a pistol trait which gives a crit chance bonus for the next shot and has a cooldown after each use, which synergizes nicely with the Sharpshooter trait, which gives a damage bonus with the pistol at max range.
• Deadly Euphemism: "Processing", as revealed by the terminal messages. It's the term CRI's management use when they quietly kill off troublesome employees. One message has a request for leave answered with an affirmative and a summons to Processing to get them ready to leave, in a way that makes it quite clear that the poor sod in question is being Released to Elsewhere.
• Disc-One Nuke: With a good bit of luck, one gets an ADV weapon with great modifiers and stats as early as Callisto Level 2.
• Do Not Run with a Gun: Interestingly, the player themselves can choose to tilt towards this playstyle by obtaining a Steady shot trait as the Marine or Scout classes, which rewards them for taking a turn to wait and improve aim before firing by retaining that accuracy bonus for every consecutive shot, up until they move from that position or change targets.
  • This is an okay idea for the Marine class due to synergy with Sustained Fire, which grants a 10% accuracy bonus on every consecutive turn of shooting at the same target. For Scout, however, this is far from great, as much of their skill tree is about retaining or increasing the dodge bonuses, which are added when the character is on the move, and rapidly diminish when staying still.
  • Scouts with Gunrunner or Gun Kata master trait are encouraged to invert this trope: Gun Kata makes you automatically fire at enemies in range when you're moving while wielding pistols, while Gunrunner reduces fire time after moving.
  • In normal gameplay, especially in early levels, Take Cover! is emphasized, as you won't have many healing items if you make a mistake and barrel down a hallway with enemies in it. The Cover Master trait in particular rewards you for taking cover, and has the added bonus of severely cutting down splash damage from enemies.
• Dual Wielding: The Technician's Blademaster master trait allows you to do this. However, you only gets block bonus from your first melee weapon, and until you hit level 3 with the trait you suffer attack time penalty.
• Elemental Powers: The Beasts often possess these as their ranged attacks.
  • Playing with Fire: Fire fiends throw fireballs, which will set the marine on fire for 3 turns. They are also predictably immune to being set on fire themselves. Exalted Hellfire Reavers will also be able to throw fireballs. Finally, Warlocks, in addition to buffing monsters around them, can lay the hurt on you with an AOE fire attack.
  • An Ice Person: Cryoreavers and Ice Fiends throw large "snowballs", which slow the marine down. Cryoberos, a variety of late-game Kerberos, can do the same. The Cryomancer boss of Europa can unleash a powerful ice-based AOE which can kill you in short order if you're not careful.
  • Poisonous Person: Toxic Fiends, Toxic Reavers, and Toxiberi can throw corrosive projectiles that inflict the toxic status. Their poison lasts for multiple turns as well, often requiring the use of medkits to get it off unless you have a means of protecting against it like a gas mask, the Toxicologist trait, or a relic that protects against toxic effects.
• Elite Mooks: Every single enemy can have an Exalted variant, which has boosted health, awards more XP, and can have one of a dozen additional buffs applied. These range from things like accuracy increases, boosted armor, double damage or HP regeneration to possessing elite weapons they were not normally meant to have. Oh, and they'll spawn in groups of three as well. In summary, they are quite capable of ending your run if you are unprepared or careless.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar:
  • This is available for a Marine class with the Bloodhound trait: any enemy you have already seen once will stay on your radar until it dies. Or, as the game puts it, "Once you set your eyes on your prey it can run, but never hide." The trait can eventually be upgraded to reveal all enemies on the map at all times.
  • The Scout class's Ghost mastery reduces the cost of Stealth and allows them to detect and track enemies at long range even through walls, and can eventually see the position of every enemy on the map when maxed out.
  • Not to be outdone, the Technician class has a trait called Sysop, which not only gives you extra charges at health, mod, nano and ammo stations, but can also reveal the locations of stations, terminals and even loot boxes when fully maxed out.
  • By spending multitools at a terminal, one can not only get a full layout of the level, but also track enemies. The Hacker skill reduces your multitool costs for doing this, to the point of being able to do this for free every time you hit a terminal.
  • Finally, with enough levels of Whizkid, you can mod your helmet or visor to give you Heatvision, which reveals enemy positions around you in a radius equal to its rating, and Bot Scanner, which reveals the positions of bots and turrets on the minimap.
• Enemy Summoner: The Summoner Final Boss, who is able to summon hordes of enemies to back him up. The Harbinger from the full release can do the same thing.
• Evil Versus Evil: Several floors of Io and Dante Station pit unpossessed CRI Marines and their 'bots against the demons. Make no mistake, they'll still gladly drop everything to ventilate you.
• Exploding Barrels: Present and accounted for, as they were in DRL. The primary difference is that explosions don't destroy items and that the effect they leave behind (poison for toxic barrels and acid for acid barrels) only sticks around for a short while unlike DRL's acid and lava barrels, whose effects stay around for the rest of the level.
• Frickin' Laser Beams: Archmedusae, the Guardians and Sentinels of Dante Station, and the final phase of the Harbinger can all bust out lasers on you. And all of them hurt.
• Gatling Good: All of the commando-type enemies wield chainguns. Normal soldier-type enemies can also possess them if they were lucky enough to have spawned Exalted and with a Heavy modifier.
• Guns Akimbo: If a Marine or a Scout character puts two levels in the Son of a Gun trait, Gunslinger becomes available, which enables wielding two pistols, revolvers or SMGs at the same time. Of course, it also takes twice as long to reload both guns, and the combined fire time is 1.5 longer, though upgrading this trait reduces both handicaps somewhat. Scouts can pick the Gun Kata master trait to allow them to fire on the move while going akimbo, while Marines gets Bullet Storm, which allows them More Dakka with two guns.
• Hack Your Enemy: Turrets and bots can be hacked with multitools. The Technician class can obviously learn to do it better than the other classes, and is eventually able to perform hacking remotely. With the right traits, they can even become a petmaster with an army of bots.
• Hand Cannon: The .44 Deagle, which has all the advantages of a revolver with practically none of the downsides.
• Hand Wave: The description for the micro launcher (a version of rocket launcher that fires up to four smaller rockets instead of a single shot): "Focused rocket launcher with a magazine. No idea why standard rockets still fit it."
• Heal Thyself: The Marine class can do this with Adrenaline skill, which heals them for difficulty-dependent amount of health and convert part of Pain for extra health.
• Hollywood Hacking: Played for laughs in the Hacker skill description: "You're the geek in the squad, and you know your way around falling-letter screensavers better than the average moviegoer."
• Katanas Are Just Better: The Katana, first found on Io, is one of the deadliest weapons you will find in the game aside from the Chainsaw and the Soulstealer.
• Large Ham: Mark Meer absolutely delivers the ham as the marine, from wishing he could mainline medkits to calling you out for leaving him idle for too long.
• Limit Break: All of the Kerberos variants will become Enraged once their HP drops below 60%, and will move 30% faster and attack 50% harder for the next 10 turns.
• Ludicrous Gibs: If you manage to do enough damage to an enemy, they will explode into several bloody chunks. Even if the weapon you were using is just a 9mm pistol or a knife.
• Magikarp Power: Think pistols of any variety are weak? As in DRL, if you take the right combination of traits and enhance your guns with all the mods you can find, pistols can carry you through the whole game.
• Magnetic Weapons: Rail rifles are the third tier in regards to sniper rifles in the game. In addition to regular rail rifles, you have the Railgun, which pierces cover and targets with an unusually high gib factor; as well as the unique Shadowhunter, a powerful rail weapon whose shots can jump to multiple targets for high damage.
• Meaningful Name: The final zone, Dante Station, where the game's most hellish enemies await you.
• Monster Closet: Vaults. They contain chests with rare items, but are also chock full of enemies to make you regret opening their doors.
• More Dakka: Chainguns and SMGs are all about this trope. It's exaggerated further with the 9mm firestorm SMG, which expends its entire 22-bullet magazine in just 2 turns worth of firing.
  • The Sustained Fire trait of the Marine and Technician also increases damage dealt from the automatic weapons when they are fired over a period of multiple turns.
• Noodle Incident: One terminal message inside Dante Station stresses the need for CRI to avoid a repeat of the "Mars Incident", quite possibly a reference to the game that this game was inspired by.
• Optional Stealth: The Scout class is able to go undetectable for 8 to 12 turns by activating stealth, although it'll be instantly broken once they attack.
• Regenerating Health: This is the trait of some exalted enemies, as well as of the Summoner boss. The Survivor master trait also grants this if your health is below a certain threshold. Finally, the Marine class regenerates a small amount of health on starting a new level. ADV armors can also grant new-level healing as one of their randomly-generated buffs.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The .44 revolver deals the same damage as a .44 hunter rifle, which is 1.5x the damage of a 9mm pistol, even doing slightly more raw damage per shot than a CRI plasma pistol. Unlike the two of them, it has a 20% critical bonus that stacks with all your other critical modifiers. However, its chambers fit 6 bullets instead of 8, its range is inferior to a plasma pistol, and it is reloaded bullet-by-bullet.
  • There is also a rare JS .44 revolver, which is slightly more damaging than the normal version, makes enemies explode upon gibbing, and also has a better accuracy and a 30% critical chance. However, its chamber is limited to three bullets.
  • Guard-type enemies will always carry a .44 revolver in addition to either a basic 9mm pistol, or a plasma pistol if they used to be CRI. Unless they are normal, unpossessed CRI, in which case, they'll only carry a plasma pistol.
• Rocket Tag: Per the tagline, Jupiter Hell, while being turn-based, is much faster-paced than a lot of roguelikes, in keeping with translating Doom's fast-paced nature to a turn-based RPG — enemies die quickly, there's less emphasis on status effects, overall game length (even on a winning run) is towards the "coffee break" end of the scale, and moving/taking turns are instantaneous.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: The shotgun is an excellent weapon for clearing out crowds of enemies, but suffers on higher tiers due to its Slashing damage being resisted by enemy armor unless you're a Marine with the Army of the Dead mastery, which converts all shotgun damage to Piercing. Tier 3 introduces the plasma shotgun, which not only does more damage than the regular shotguns, but does plasma damage.
• Shout-Out: The default name for the PC was initially Flynn Taggart; it was changed to Mark Taggart by the release.
  • "You idiots are gonna pay for shooting up my-!" was obviously meant as a reference to Duke Nukem 3D.
  • The Marine will often say "Groovy" upon picking up a shotgun for the first time during a run.
  • The description for the .44 Deagle mentions that it's "Often used by terrorists, mostly when they rush B."
  • One of the marine's lines upon finishing a level is straight out of Die Hard: "Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers!"
  • As well as "Blood for the Blood God!"
  • One of the marine's possible entry lines when you get to Europa is "All of these worlds are yours... yeah, right."
• Smoke Out: The unique ability of the Technician class is to deploy a smokescreen, which lasts for 8 turns (12 with Skilled trait), and reduces the line of sight of everyone inside it to 1.
• Socketed Equipment: All weapons and armor can accept a limited number of mods that run the gamut from bonus damage, bonus accuracy, and faster reloading/bigger magazines. All classes have a Whizkid trait that enables them to stack more (and better) mods onto guns. The Technician class specializes in the Whizkid trait, being able to take it at the start of the game (while other classes need to gain a few levels first).
• Stock Video Game Puzzle: The Infernal Lock special level is the set of locked rooms each with a switch that locks/unlocks specific doors. To get out of the level, you need to unlock the western locked door, but note that going through will lock you out of the puzzle, including the eastern locked door at the start with a special reward. Unlocking the eastern door is actually impossible the normal way, the intended solution is to block the doors from closing by dropping items on them.
• Take Cover!: A new game system created in order to bring back corner shooting while correcting the fact that corner shooting is a bug that has quite a number of balance problems. Being in cover reduces the chance of enemy hitting you with ranged attacks, and you can also wait in cover in order to get hunker down bonus, which reduces damage done to you. Of course, the enemy can do the same. Both the Marine and the Technician also have access to the Cover Master trait, which grants further benefits for staying in cover and also reduces splash damage taken.
  • The Technician class can specialize in this due to one of their talents allowing them to retain Hunker Down bonus (and get 25% more bonus) as long as they don't move, unlike normally where the bonus is lost when you shoot back. The Entrenchment master trait makes this even more powerful since now you get extra flat damage reduction.
• Take That!: The Early Access launch trailer at the end claims that the game is available exclusively on Epic Store… "HAHA, just kidding!"
• This Is Gonna Suck: The marine will sometimes give a "Well, fuck!" or "Oh, fuck this thing in particular!" when facing Exalted enemies.
• Weak Turret Gun: Averted. All three of the turret varieties have a respectable 30 HP, which is equivalent to the high-level Hellish/former CRI humanoids, though still weaker than either the elite beasts, or the bulky bots.
• What the Hell, Player?: If you leave the game idle for too long between turns, the marine will periodically make a snarky quip at you (one example being the stinger at the bottom of this page).

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Turn-based doesn't mean idle, pal!