TimeWasters  highlights many of the excellent Web-based/lightweight downloadable titles that you can dive into within the space of a lunch break. This week, Chris Gampat explores Go To Hell.

For those of you that like Dante’s Inferno, think of Go To Hell as its prelude (if it were set in modern times and your hero looked vaguely like Carrottop). It’s an engrossing game that requires you to think strategically in order to accomplish your goal, but once Go To Hell is over, it’s over.

Go To Hell is about a dude that literally just wants to travel to hell. In order to do this, he needs to dig his way there. While that in itself sounds like quite a task, he needs to ensure that he can survive on the way down there. That means that the dude needs to gather together medical supplies and food on the way down. Pay careful attention to your meters up top and listen to him when he speaks. If he is hurt, you’ll need to heal him. If he is hungry, then digging will cause him pain. If he is underwater for too long, then he will need to go get air.

Water isn’t entirely your enemy. You’ll run into lots of underground water that can be used to drown monsters, and put out fires. There are also movable rocks (characterized by the brown color) that can change the flow of the game and dig through dirt once they’re pushed off a ledge and land. Later on, you’ll encounter lava—which may help you develop symptoms such as hotheadedness, or just getting hurt from it.

If you think that that’s all, no way in hell. Players must also collect 50 coins during the journey in order to gain entrance into hell. Be careful about the choice you make though as digging a lot to get to a coin could wear down your little guy and force you to find food and medical supplies.

The controls for the game are very simple. Up allows players to jump and swim. Down allows players to dig and swim downward. Left and Right move the player, let the player dig in that direction, and also makes them push rocks.

The gameplay is very challenging. In fact, it is actually on par with some puzzle games that are available for the Nintendo DSi. You may find yourself dying often depending on the choices you make, so make sure that you grab those extra hearts to give you another chance. Part of this is also your limited field of view as you will not necessarily know when your next medkit or pieces of food will come. Similarly, you don’t know when a great stash of coins may appear, so you’ll have to make your choices carefully so that you don’t expend too much energy or lose too much oxygen.

Constantly keeping tabs on the character’s well-being quickly grows annoying. Still, making the game this difficult was a great decision on the part of the developer as it keeps players coming back. Once one beats it, there isn’t much incentive to play again besides to challenge the high score as there isn’t much replayability.

There isn’t much of a sound scheme to Go To Hell. When your little guy gets hurt, he sounds a bit like a chipmunk. The soundtrack is very repetitive—it’s the same song being repeated over and over again. After a while, it will simply stop (until you die and come back to life). In that case, it just starts all over again on loop until it dies down again.

The graphics are positively 2D and 8-bit. For what it’s worth, there are loads of colors. Expect your enemies to be moving about in a synonymous jerky fashion to what you would see in Super Ghouls and Ghosts.

Overall, Go To Hell is a good game that doesn’t offer any reason to return to it once beaten (other than the brainteasing puzzles that are difficult due to the limited field of sight). Go To Hell would have been better with multiplayer features that allow players to work with one another to accomplish more goals and tasks in order to get to hell.