Why Hellboy: Web of Wyrd Doesn't Include Abe Sapien (Exclusive)

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd is here, and the new game based on Mike Mignola's comic is surprisingly light on familiar faces. In addition to Hellboy, his "father" Professor Broom is the only familiar face that pops up which readers will recognize. The events of Hellboy: Web of Wyrd are set at a point in the timeline of the character where other characters could appear, they just don't. Speaking in an exclusive interview with ComicBook.com, Upstream Arcade co-founder Adam Langridge revealed that the exact setting for Hellboy: Web of Wyrd was chosen so that they could include Hellboy's pal Abe Sapien in the game in some form. Unfortunately they ended up having to scrap the idea, and their reason is a pretty good one.

"We were in and out regarding whether to get Abe there, and we actually picked a year where technically we could, we couldn't have had Abe in there, but we just realized that for the story we were trying to tell, there wasn't really...Abe came along with almost unkept promises to the player a little bit. It's like, oh, here's a cool, I love Abe, can I play him? So we sort of denied ourselves the pleasure of getting Abe in the game as well, which was quite painful, to be honest. I remember quite a bit of sadness about that."

The specific time frame of Hellboy: Web of Wyrd was also chosen not only for the potential to bring in other characters, but for potential newcomers to Hellboy comics to not have anything spoiled for them about the story. Hellboy: Web of Wyrd takes place in the 1980s, well before the events of the first Hellboy comic storyline, Seed of Desctruction, and with very few hints about where his story goes from there.

"We wanted to introduce (newcomers) to Hellboy in a way that set them up to read on from Seed of Destruction essentially," Langridge said. "So we were very, very careful about not giving away too many spoilers about what happens in the future. There's nothing really about his horns or crown stuff going on. We wanted to be more, almost a bit of an exercise in his earlier days at the BPRD and not hint too much about anything bigger. So it was quite a challenge to try and get that set up as the most, a standalone adventure that could fit into the canon, but doesn't give too much away at the same time. So that's why we sort of try to land there. We thought, oh, that's a good place. We have a cool adventure there. And it's before Seed of Destruction. And still during his fairly high adventure BPRD time before he goes off on his exodus and all the other cool stuff that he does later on.|

Hellboy: Web of Wyrd is available now on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. If you'd like to learn more about this new Hellboy game in the interim, you can check out its official description below. 

"Developed by Upstream Arcade, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd is an original story created in partnership with Dark Horse Comics and creator Mike Mignola. Like the comics, the game sends Hellboy on a series of vastly different and wholly unique adventures; and while those stories stand on their own, they are all tied to the mysterious legacy of The Butterfly House. 

Built in 1962 by occultist Pasquale Deneveaux, The Butterfly House is more than a mere residence; it's a gateway. Its perverse angles and non-Euclidean geometries were designed with a singular foul purpose in mind: to open doorways into a terrible and fascinating dimension called The Wyrd."