I would normally play more of a game before writing a review of it, but Solium Infernum is an unusual title that breaks a lot of rules. It is a turn-based strategy game that was originally released over a decade ago. It was made by a single man, Vic Davis, and sold directly from his website as an executable file. It ran in some strange Adobe PDF program, and it had no tutorials of any kind. To learn how to play it, you just had to read the manual. The AI was poor, but it was really designed to be played with other people, like a board game, and even supported play-by-email. Now, in 2024, a surprisingly opulent remake has been released into a turbulent video game market, and it risks being overlooked once again.

To Reign in Hell

Solium Infernum literally translates to “The Throne of Hell.” Satan has abandoned the throne of Pandaemonium, and now Hell’s greatest archfiends must politick, scheme, and wage war to seize it. In Solium Infernum, you take the role of one of these archfiends, and your decisions will determine if you become the new lord of Hell or are to remain simply one more damned being in a land full of them. While certainly grandiose in theme, mechanically this means that you need to either A) be elected by the Conclave by having the most Prestige at the end of the game or B) hold Pandaemonium itself at the end of the game via military power (which will pretty much guarantee a desperate, free-for-all war).

The simplicity of the objectives belies how complicated achieving them can be. Hell is a strange place, and there are many strange and byzantine rules restricting what you can do. By default, you may only perform two actions per turn, which includes such essential tasks as moving armies (referred to as Legions) or gathering resources or more esoteric things like plotting a scheme or increasing your rank in the Conclave. There are dozens of actions that you could take each turn, but the severe restriction on how many actions you can take forces you to weigh every choice carefully. Do you spend your hard-earned resources on a new Legion to bolster your military might? Or do you upgrade your stats to improve your actions and even unlock more actions per turn? Games only last 30-70 turns, so you don’t much room for missteps.

Frankly, describing all the many systems in place and actions you can perform would make this review extremely long and unreadable. The short version is that you will be doing the things you do in a typical 4x, but with many strange restraints that reflect the aristocratic bureaucracy of Hell. There are four resources that function as currency, but they come in coins that can hold up to nine of each resource, and you can only spend a maximum of eight coins in a transaction. Sending a diplomatic missive takes one turn to send, a turn for the opponent to reply, and then another turn to get back to you, so any diplomatic decisions won’t be made until two turns after you send the initial communication. Waging war requires you to wager precious Prestige points on an objective, and you’ll lose them if you fail to achieve that objective within the time limit that you set. On and on it goes, strange rule after strange rule.

None of the many systems are particularly complicated or difficult to wrap your head around, but there are so many, and so many competing pressures, that learning Solium Infernum can be a daunting challenge. Fortunately, the remade game features a thorough tutorial that covers most of what you need to know. You’ll still have to learn some things as you play, but it does as much as is reasonable to help you learn without holding your hand to the point of annoyance.

Hell Is other People

Solium Infernum is really intended to be played against other humans. The AI is not especially good, although making an AI that could play the game well without horrendously cheating might well be impossible (although a single-player challenge mode exists as both a test of skill and a sort of advanced tutorial/trial by fire). Solium Infernum is a 4x, but it is also a social game like Werewolf or Betrayal at Hill House. Many of the systems are designed to be hidden to other players, and every turn could see someone pull some kind of bullshit maneuver that nobody else saw coming. It’s chaotic and deliciously fun, a game of backstabbing bastards constantly looking for an edge.

To facilitate this experience, the game features two multiplayer modes. The first is a straightforward, normal game: you play it, one turn at a time, until the game is over, for however long the game lasts. I believe in this format you can save a game and return to it later, but you and your opponents must always be playing at the same time.

The other multiplayer mode is more intriguing, however. Asynchronous play allows you to play with others at your leisure. Turns play out simultaneously using a system where a new player goes first every round, so everyone gets to take a turn at the same time. Playing asynchronously allows the game creator to set up games that may allow up to a full week for all players to submit their actions for the turn. This means that games could go on for months, with players only spending a few minutes a day or week pondering their moves. It works shockingly well, with Steam notification integration allowing you to be notified that your turn is available even from your phone.

All that Glitters

For being a very niche indie game, Solium Infernum is simply opulent. Sure, the textures are never at the highest modern resolutions. But the game drips with fantastic art direction. The playable archfiends all boast extremely characterful models, and your own selected archfiend will vogue from the corner of the screen as you take your actions. I’m particularly fond of Andromalius, a fallen angel who has retained his stereotypical angelic beauty but who takes downright orgasmic pleasure in being evil.

Hell itself, meanwhile, bubbles with rivers of blood (or slime, or wine, or something) and is dotted with bizarre Places of Power that provide Prestige as well as bursts of strange architecture. There are not unique 3D models for any of the Legions or their commanders, Praetors, but each and every one has a gorgeous, semi-animated card showing them in all their glory, and a detail encyclopedia contains not just all the details you could need on the rules but reams of flavor text.

The sound design is similarly impressive. Ominous choral music provides pleasantly oppressive accompaniment for your nefarious schemes, while the landscape of Hell features howling winds and sizzling magma. When the Titan erupts from the ground to show the archfiends that they are not even truly the masters of Hell, it delivers its kaiju roar with subwoofer-rattling fury.

It’s been a long time since I played a game that simply felt like such a piece of art. It’s fun to just poke around and enjoy the aesthetic in the same way you might find in some of Nintendo’s games.

Conclusion

There isn’t really any other game out there like Solium Infernum. If you don’t mind learning a complicated, weird little machine of rules, and you enjoy the social aspects of gaming, I think it’s an easy recommendation. Even if you simply like the aesthetic and don’t demand challenging AI in your games you might well get a kick out of it. But if you think you’d like the game that I’ve described, you shouldn’t sleep on it. It’s the kind of game that people will look back on and bemoan its niche success. I hope to see you in Hell, fellow archfiends.