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Hell Is Us hands-on preview and interview – ‘design distinction creates desire’

2 October 2024

Hell Is Us – creepy and weird, in a good way (Nacon)

A brand new IP from a little known developer is one of the most intriguing titles for 2025, with a mix of Dark Souls and This War Of Mine.

There’s always been a debate over when the best time is to announce and show off a new game. Previously, the average was a year or two before release, with a regular stream of trailers and preview events in-between – depending on the nature of the title. More recently though that has shrunk to less than a year and sometimes there’s no proper hands-on previews at all, if the publisher thinks the game is sufficiently high profile that it’s not worth risking any negative feedback.

Hell Is Us was first announced in April 2022 and we admit we completely forgot about it until this preview, and initially assumed it was being unveiled for the first time. It might as well have been though, as that first teaser trailer didn’t give much away and our first half hour with the game was equally perplexing.

Director Jonathan-Jacques Belletête initially spent some time explaining the back story to the game, of a civil war in the fictional country of Hadea, designed to be reminiscent of the various warring Eastern European countries of the 90s. You play as Rémi, who has defected from the UN to try and find his parents. Everything seems rather bleak and hopeless… and then the monsters turn up.

Considering Canadian developer Rogue Factor only has 50 developers, the first impressions of Hell Is Us are extremely good. The graphics are great, with a very realistic looking forest and a foreboding atmosphere, even when nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

Initially, you’re simply searching for your parents, but since you have no real idea where they are this involves looking for any signs of life and trying to work out from the few remaining locals what has been going on and where everyone has evacuated to.

Although it looks like it’s going to be, the game isn’t actually a survival title, but it certainly does a very good job of making you feel that everything in the world is against you, as you explore abandoned cow sheds and make your way through dark forests with no signposting – either literal or in the video game sense of the term.

Belletête is very keen to point out that there is no GPS (the game is literally set in the 90s) and no waypoint markers or other guides to tell you where to go or what to do. You don’t even have a compass. Nevertheless, the first proof of this – when a wounded UN soldier asks you to go back to his camp to retrieve some medical supplies – works very well. You’re told to follow lights hung in the trees, but these are not as obvious as the soldier makes it seem and you have to carefully trace your steps in order to avoid getting lost.

As simple as it sounds this is great at building tension and encourages you to take great care with your movements, since you risk getting even more lost if you stray off the path (although we later realised the starting area you’re exploring is a lot smaller and more enclosed then it first seemed). On reaching the abandoned camp the game starts to shift tone, as you find weird vials of unidentified liquid and what is implied to be some sort of mini-crop circle.

Returning to the soldier you then have to make your way into a castle-like structure and suddenly the game serves up a Resident Evil-esque puzzle that comes across as downright silly; especially as it’s something that was meant to have been sitting out in the open air for centuries.

At this point we had no idea what was going on, or whether it was aliens or supernatural creatures we were dealing with, but the interior of the dungeon-like castle finally gave way to a large room housing a bizarre humanoid figure – entirely white but with no face and with a strange pulsating red object connected to it by an umbilical cord.

Hell Is Us – this is where things start to get really odd (Nacon)

It used the object, which changed shape several times, as a cudgel but while we were defenceless suddenly a woman armed with a strange sword intervened and… got killed. Picking up the sword ourselves we managed to defeat the creature, which is an involved process involving attacking the red heart-like object first.

As you might be gathering, there’s a lot of different inspirations going on here and while the game certainly has an element of survival horror to it, it’s not gory and seems to be going for spooky rather than scary. We came across several variants of the creature, as we explored further and made it back outside, and after a further taste of the combat it’s hard not to make comparisons with Dark Souls et al.

The game’s not that difficult, and the open world element doesn’t look or feel like Elden Ring at all, but it’s certainly riffing on some of the same ideas. Nevertheless, Hell Is Us is very much it’s own thing and we have no idea where it’s going – which we consider to be the most encouraging news possible with a new game and IP.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC
Publisher: Nacon
Developer: Rogue Factor
Release Date: 2025

GC: So hang on, when was this unveiled, exactly?

JJB: We released a teaser trailer two and a half years ago. It was CGI…

GC: That’s a long time ago.

JJB: It had a good success on the PlayStation YouTube channel, it had like a million views. For a game that came out of nowhere, from a small studio and a new IP, it had a really good impact. We were really pleased with it.

GC: So, I’m going to guess that the concept of signposting is something you’ve been thinking about a lot over the last few years.

JJB: [laughs] And before that as well! It was something that I spent a lot of time thinking about, ’cause I think one of the fundamental joys of video games is exploration and discovery. Even more than exploration is the discovery. And if you think about a lot of open world games, when you discover something it’s not really a true discovery, because you were basically just following mechanisms that are meta.

So, it was really something that I was always kind of thinking about: how can we get away from that? Which is kind of how games were in the 90s. But games were a lot rougher back then, so I thought, ‘How can we do this but with the contemporary flair and everything we’ve learnt about game designs and game development since then?’

I wanted to kind of merge the two, like a modern game that employs the philosophy where we drop you in the game and just figure it out, but it would still work with an audience from today.

Hell Is Us screenshot — Hell Is Us – instead of GPS you ask for directions (Nacon)

GC: What was your initial pitch for the game? What’s the focus? Is it a third person combat title? A survival game? A horror game…?

JJB: As a studio we were pretty sure that we wanted to make third person melee combat with medieval weapons. I also wanted to make sure that the game had none of the usual meta tools, to know your way around the game. We wanted to make sure we didn’t have that. And, also, we wanted the game to be about a civil war. We wanted the game to be about the brutality of humanity, of human beings.

We all have this capacity, under the right conditioning, to wake up one day and decide that our neighbours, that we’ve been friends with our entire lives… because of imperceptible differences, we decide that we’re literally going to kill them. That’s what most civil wars are. That’s what happened in Rwanda, that’s what happened in Bosnia… Sometimes lines are drawn across religious lines, sometimes it’s ethnic things… this is something that’s fascinated me my entire life and I wanted to make sure we tackle it.

But I also wanted it to be contemporary. So how do we make the third person melee combat with medieval weapons, within a civil war, in a game where exploration and discovery is central? So those were kind of the directives, and what I find is that when you start with something like that, some elements are bottom-up and some elements are top-down, they kind of meet in the middle and that’s where you create this new flavour.

You have to sit down and say, ‘OK, what kind of world do we have to invent to make all this work together?’ And this is what we created with Hell Is Us. And obviously you haven’t even scratched the surface yet, because you’ve only had half an hour, but there’s so much happening and there’s so much lore behind what’s happening in the country and all this is going to be discovered as you play. It’s what creates flavour, you know what I mean? And that’s what’s really, really important to us.

GC: It’s an interesting combination of elements; when you were first explaining the plot I thought you were going for a This War Of Mine type game and then you get this weird… is it supernatural or aliens?

JJB: [laughs] You don’t know that yet.

GC: I like how weird they are. You could’ve gone for something more traditional, but they’re really odd and that means you don’t know what to expect from them, which is great.

JJB: It’s because we need to be distinctive and it needs to be our own thing and it needs to be different. So my motto’s always been, even back when I was an art director: ‘design distinction creates desire’. And it’s how everything works, right?

You still need a base of things that people can relate to. If everything is completely out of nowhere… if there’s no anchor point you’re gonna lose a lot of people. You need a base that people can relate to but above that you need a thick layer of distinctiveness, and that’s what gets people to ask questions. They don’t understand but they want to understand. They want to participate and usually they want to acquire.

The creatures are very much things in that mould. Have we succeeded? I don’t know, it’s not for me to say. But the intention comes from there. So, we could’ve used all sort of aesthetics that are used all the time but what does that say about us? What does that say about the game? Nothing! So we went for something that belongs to us. Really, it’s out signature.

GC: Is there a good excuse for why he’s not just shooting them?

JJB: [laughs] Of course, of course! You’ll see in the first cut scene, she shoots and it just passes right through a creature. And there’s a reason why they can’t be hurt by conventional weapons. There’s a reason why it’s those weapons, where did they come from? What’s the link between those weapons and the country? There’s themes of archaeology and deep history in the game, when we’re talking about 10, 12, 13, 14 thousand years ago. Things like… historicity is very, very much part of the game.

What’s the role of the country, of Hadeia, in what’s happening? What’s the link between the civil war and those entities, with those weapons? So there’s something big there in the core of what’s happening. And this gives reasons and meanings to all of these things. So we end up learning why those weapons are a solution to hurting them, and where they come from… it’s all thought out. Now, is it well thought out? Not up to me to say! [laughs]

GC: I assume you’ve been looking at games like Elden Ring, and that sort of thing, in terms of an open world game that isn’t covered in arrows and waypoints. But where do you draw the line between allowing for discovery and just being obnoxious?

JJB: It’s a very good question. So, interestingly, first of all, Elden Ring was not a reference at all and I’ll tell you why: we started the game before Elden Ring came out!

GC: So they’re copying you? [laughs]

JJB: [laughs] No, because we’re not out yet! [laughs] But no, these are musings that I’ve been working on for quite a while in my head. And I remember when I read – obviously I’m a fan of Dark Souls and Bloodborne and all that – so when I read the first articles about Elden Ring and the way he was describing it, I was like ‘This sounds a lot like what we’re doing.’

With our game we realised, because it’s so open, that your stamina shouldn’t get reduced when you run in the world. Because if you look at all the previous games that Miyazaki did, if you run you lose stamina. But when he did a much more open world game he realised, ‘No, no, no. Only in combat we should lose stamina.’

It’s interesting we both realised the same thing, but then we’ve been on this quite a while and we’re a small team.

Another thing is, in your data pad you have the database of information and all the people you meet… because basically you’re doing your own investigation. At the beginning you’re looking for your parents. Are you going to find them eventually? Once you do, is another arc starting? Every time you meet a new NPC that’s part of the story.

Every time you find a new location or item they become basically a clue, we call them a datum, and this is part of your investigation wall, which you have in your datapad. It’s like a detective investigation wall but we made it into more of a digital form. It’s where your clues are recorded and if you’re asking yourself what you’re supposed to do or who you’re supposed to talk to you go back to your datapad and you look at the clues you’ve amassed.

So we have provided some tools to help you. And also, if you stop playing for a week or two, and you come back, then that’s where the datums really become useful.

In the game itself there’s a lot of experimentation. When you walk a path that’s never been walked before – or not that much – you have to experiment. At first, we had to figure out how to make sure that the players don’t get lost too much and I think we’ve found some interesting solutions. It’s not always perfect but we’ve worked really hard at it.