Hell is Usis a third-person action-adventure game where players take on the role of a United Nations peacekeeper named Remi. After being smuggled out of his home country at birth, he returns to Hadea through the UN to find his parents. In doing so, he is exposed to the ongoing civil war and supernatural beings that emerged from some unknown calamity. Hadea is dangerous at every turn, but the horrors aren’t what’s on the outside. It’s what’s on the inside that counts inHell is Us.
After playing roughly three hours ofHell is Us, Game Rant spoke with creative director and art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête. We spoke about how exploration works, how the team at Rogue Factor brought the harrowingworld of Hadeato life, and a little bit about how the team designed the enemies/bosses in the game.The following transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Why Hell is Us Doesn’t Have Map Markers or Mini-Maps
Q: It feels like there’s a new trend where games are going all in on exploration and ditching things like map markers and mini-maps. I was curious what draws you to that as part of a design philosophy?
A:First things first, we started our design like five years ago, which is a little before that recent wave. I guess it had begun because you could tell there was a bit of fatigue for all thoseopen-world gamesor just games that give you everything on a silver platter. At the time, there were no real games truly doing this, so it came up out of what we felt like doing.
As we were developing the game, it was like, ‘Oh, the zeitgeist has started. It’s not just us." In a way, that’s exciting because it probably means we were onto something, but at the same time, it’s like, ‘Sh*t, other people are thinking the same thing.’ But yeah, honestly, no big game was doing it when we started. You could see a few things in the indies because they tend to be a little more experimental, but it was really just something we felt like doing and wanted to see how you could do it while making something digestible and approachable.
Q: What do you think it adds to the game that traditional map markers or mini-maps wouldn’t?
A:It’s the joy of discovery. It’s putting the players back in the driver’s seat of exploration, you know, so you’re not pretending to be exploring by following things. It’s like, when you play Skyrim—and don’t get me wrong, I’ve finished all theElder Scrolls games since Arena—Skyrim is the epitome of silver plattering. You can’t even look at a rock without getting a side quest, you know what I mean? It’s everywhere, and when you walk around, your compass is like, ‘Hey, here’s a cave, here’s some ruins, here’s this, here’s that." It’s overwhelming, not exploring, and it’s just walking through a miasma of things to do.
If you think about it philosophically, it’s really what’s happening. That’s not what exploration and discoveries are. I mean, you can play and put yourself into this fantasy of exploring, being on top of a mountain, being in this forest, but what you actually discover gets tremendously diluted because of that. The true joy is you making the cognitive decision yourself to see what’s in that direction, figuring out what this guy needs, and your instincts and gut feelings as you figure it out. You figure it out, then that’s you. You discover the end result of this.
I find games used to be a lot more like that for all sorts of reasons. Then, we figured out how to make them more approachable and whatnot, but I think we got a little lost in that. We’re trying, in our own kind of way, to bring that pendulum back a bit toward the middle.
That’s fair. I do like how I just walked up on a hermit and a random shed in the middle of nowhere.
A:It’s interesting because that guy’s secret and good deed are really like map-spanning. That’s what’s interesting because you have no idea in the game. Obviously, there’s the throughline and the main story helping you with datums, which is more clear and more blocked in your head. But like this guy, when you start with him, you have no idea where it’s going to lead you, and that’s part of theexploration and discoveryand all that.
Interesting. I wouldn’t have expected this guy to be a map-spanning thing. Is there a fair amount of asymmetry in these then between map-spanning encounters and one shots?
A:Yeah, there’s a mix of these things, yeah. Now, how much have we quantified the perfect balancing between them? I don’t know. These are still things that we obviously think about, but there’s definitely a mixed bag. Some encounters might have the solution there, others might be on the next map. Some might be map spanning, and some might be that it’s just you discover something and you need to figure out the solution. There’s a multitude of each of these.
Putting the Hell of Us in Hell is Us
Q: I know you warned us that we’d see corpses, but I was not prepared for a mass grave with a father crying in front of it with his, you know, dead child. That was rough. From an art perspective, how did you approach making this somewhat realistic and very gritty?
A:References, sadly enough. We don’t have a lack of those in human history. I’ve tried to be very considerate and careful with the team, the people who were more at the forefront of producing or thinking about these things. I’ve always asked if they were okay with it, let’s say like with the modeler, because a lot of the character modelers I knew already and I’ve worked with them on past projects. Some were new, so we don’t exactly know their personalities and whatnot, so I always asked if they were comfortable with working with this material.
Because there’s also children, right? One important thing is you never see the act, right? That was really clear from the beginning: I don’t want to see the act. As you notice, as a player, you never hurt any human being in the game because that was a directive. We’re going to show such dire situations that I don’t want to add, on top of that, you also causing them pain. For enemies, there are no humans, just the monsters. It was literally a directive, but I’ve tried to be very considerate to people.
With the Last of Us 2, I remember an article that went over the gore in the game. You cannot makevideo game visuals as goryas that without watching what truly ripping someone’s leg off looks like with a microscope. They obviously had to make sure the people who did it were okay, and I mean, we’re not that precise. We obviously don’t have the same budget because, trust me, that one scene must have cost half the budget of this game. We can’t get that precise to the point, but it wasn’t our intention either.
If you look at these scenes—I’m not saying you should, but if you do look at these “gore in war” situations—they’re just bodies. What you notice is bodies. You notice that clothes are made to hang onto living people. You realize clothes are always loose, and somehow they’re always half-naked. Once people are on the floor, they’re missing shoes, their pants are down, and that’s what we concentrated on.
In a lot of games when you need a dead body, you just take an NPC, throw them on the floor, and put blood under them. That’s not how it works in real life, you know. Blood quickly becomes so dark that you don’t see it often, and there’s not even all that much blood to begin with. It’s really how the clothes and poses we focused on, but there’s very little bloody gore. That doesn’t mean it’s not unsettling. Yeah, we looked at references. I tried my best to make sure people were okay with it, and the ones who weren’t, I didn’t pressure them or anything.
That is very great to hear. It was rough just walking up on that, I would say.
I agree, and that was also the goal. What we could do in real life is so much worse; that’s what the game is all about: what humans do to each other. Why are we like this? It fascinates me, not in the way thatsome people love serial killers—it’s not the personal, it’s the “why” as a whole. The ethnic side of a country can wake up one morning and say, “Yep, those neighbors now, the owner of the store that we would go to every morning for 25 years? No, we’re going to chop his head off now.” That’s how it works. That’s literally how it works, but why is that? It’s so insane. Even though you’re right, that’s why you’re right. The mass grave in the game is really impactful, as it should be, and I wanted it to be that way.
I definitely went in and got the wife’s letter that he needed. Yeah, I was like, ‘I’m not leaving this town until I find whatever it is.’
A:See? That was with no quest at all. It wasn’t some marker, it wasn’t a request, and you weren’t even sure if you really had to do it or not. The need for a real conclusion was in your mind, and that’s it. Does it work all the time? Probably not, maybe some are more efficient than others. It’s hard to do and we’re still learning, but that one caught you.
The Monsters of Emotion
Q: You mentioned the monsters a minute ago. Could you talk a little bit about how you approached designing them?
A:The idea is all about how the worst human atrocities have been barbaric and all that, which stems from our emotions. It’s not the sole reason, right, but it’s very much this irrationality that’s in all of us, right? History proves we all have the capacity to do these things under the right circumstances when the structure of society crumbles and all that kind of stuff.The game is about emotions, and as I said, I don’t want players to hurt any humans.
We knew we needed monsters, and we were like, ‘What if the monsters are literally physical manifestations of human emotions,’ right? Then it’s tied to the whole story and lore—you will discover why it’s like that, why they’re there, why they appear, and what forms them. Fundamentally, that’s why they are the manifestation of human emotions, but what does an emotion look like?
We could have made Rage a big monster with big arms, we could have done that, but it’s been done before. That led us to think about these weird, geometrical things that still have monster screams, but you can almost hear human voices in them at the same time.
Yeah, that caught me off-guard more than once.
That’s the idea. You also learn about why you hear that, where it’s coming from, and then you have the Hollow Walkers, which are humanoid husks, empty things. Then, there’s the Haze that’s the actual emotion. It sounds a little funny-slash-stupid and it is, but it shows sometimes you need to be guided. You need to inform your designs from all sorts of ideas, so something we focused on is how an emotion cannot move on its own. If you’re highlyemotional about anger, grief, or whatever, it can have an area of effect. If you’re angry in this room, there could be a “perimeter,” but it cannot move on its own. When you wake up angry in the morning, you cannot just send your anger to work. You have to get in your car, drive to work, and bring the anger with you, right?
Maybe along the way, you’ll see something that now makes you happy, and it’s joy you bring into work instead of anger. From there, we decided an emotion has a fixed perimeter, and its humans are the Hollow Walkers, which is basically a facsimile of a human being who’s experienced this emotion. Now, what causes it? What creates it? Why is it a facsimile? Is it from a real person? Does it come from somewhere else? No spoilers on that for now. But it’s only the Hollow Walker, like a human being, bringing the emotion inside of him, the Haze.
Now, the Hollow Walker can move and bring the emotion somewhere else. We just had this funky idea when you realize emotions cannot move on their own, and it just informed our design of the umbilical cord that connects the Hollow Walker and the Haze.
Q: I made it to the boss in the dungeon where the Haze splits into multiple enemies. Can you tell me a little bit about how you approach bosses?
A: Full disclosure, it’s not anindie game, but it’s definitely not a Triple-A game. It’s got a limited budget. When you consider boss designs, big boss designs, having them be unique, there’s a real cost to that: time, effort, assets, and stuff like that.
At the end of dungeons and other places in the game, we focus more on giving you a new experience, something you haven’t experienced anywhere else in the game, something a little more exotic. Sometimes we reuse assets, but in that one at least, we put in the least impressive of the lot. We go much further with the other ones. Some have new assets that feel more traditional like a boss, but it’s usually more of an event that happens. It’s a new challenge type you hadn’t experienced before to create a boss encounter, but it’s not like, ‘Oh my god, here is a dragon that was made just for this’ because it really is a budget thing.
Some games with a similar budget have really unique bosses, but it was a choice that we made to verify that money goes to other areas of the game. But trust me, those challenges are there, they feel unique nonetheless, and they have their own thing going on. We still wanted to make sure that there were cool finalities to these moments.
Yeah, I had fought a few Hazes before, but I was not expecting it to split. It was a cool moment.
A:We’re still very much fine-tuning the combat to find the right middle ground for the default experience. What you haven’t seen yet, which will be in the release build, is the more traditional story, normal,super hard difficulties, stuff like that. Also, you’ll be able to change and play with the levers and notches for your personal experience, but the base experience is something we’re still fine-tuning and making sure that the AI works well. That boss, for example, we’re still very much playing with it to verify it’ll be more “perfected” for release.
Q: What do you hope players take from the game once it’s out?
A: For me, when people are finished with a play session and they turn off their console or PC, I hope it stays in their minds. They’re thinking about what they’ve seen, what they believe, what it means, and what they’re going to do in their next play session. To me, that’s the definition of a good game, a game that hooks you. The game and mechanisms might not be perfect, but it stays with you, right? Take BioShock, for example. Theshooting itself doesn’t compare with Call of Duty, but the game itself is a bloody masterpiece, you know what I mean? The experience stays with you when you’re done, and the shooting was quite fun nonetheless.
That, to me, is the proof of a good game. You turn it off, and it just lives with you. That’s what I would like.
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