It has been roughly three years since the action adventure game,Hell is Us, was announced to grand anticipation. Meshing various compelling story elements of civil war and the manifestation of emotions, not to mention featuring striking combat and a rich world to explore, Hell is Us is shaping up to be a sleeper hit of 2025. We were able to sit down with the Creative Director behind Hell is Us, Jonathan Jacques Belletête, best known for his work on more at Eidos Montreal and Ubisoft, to talk more about what drove Rogue Factor to create their biggest and potentially best project yet.
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[Hardcore Gamer] It has been a long five years of development, but with only a couple more months from release, how are you and your team feeling about things?
[Jonathan Jacques Belletête]Really good I would say. Honestly, after 25 years in this industry, all in Montreal, most of the AAA studios – [by] most I mean Ubisoft, and then we left to start Eidos in 2007 to do Deus Ex – that’s beside the point. Honestly, for all the efforts we’ve had to do, because we’re such a small team, and the game is not perfect – I mean I don’t think there’s any game that’s perfect. It’d be stupid to say stuff like that, so the game definitely has its things, and it’s normal, and I think we’ve achieved something pretty interesting, especially for such a small team in terms of quality and the ideas and scope. The team is doing really well and something has happened that I have never seen. Very few people in a game development team actually play the game they’re working on; it’s a thing. You have to force people to play it sometimes to know what they’re actually working on to know what the beast is.
It doesn’t stop them from doing their job properly, but when the game has reached the state it is now when it’s entirely playable – [even with] bugs and rough edges – [our team is] playing it at night, at home. That is the game we would play, like Francois, our Lead Environment Director. He finished it, and [he wasn’t] playing to find bugs, [but because] that was the game he felt like playing. That has never happened in my career before. Not in Assassin’s Creed, not in Deus Ex, not on Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s always a core amount of people who do it, and they mostly do it to make sure everything works. But the team started to play out of fun, and I was like, “maybe something’s happening.” So people are doing well; they’re happy, I mean obviously, tired – but it kind of comes with it.
Over those five years, what have been some unforeseen challenges you’ve faced?
Unforeseen…because there have been a lot of challenges. We [knew] developing a third-person melee combat from scratch would be difficult. We were inexperienced, and it’s not a Montreal specialty; even though it’s a big video game city, in the 2000 and the 2010s we were making first-person shooters and adventure games, like even with Assassin’s Creed. The third-person melee combat took quite a while. It was mostly with Odyssey and Origins when it started to be a lot more crunchy. So anyway, we knew that we could foresee that it would be very challenging, but unforeseen challenges…I don’t know. I know it sounds weird. I’m not sure we – we didn’t know it was supposed to be a shorter development time at the beginning, and then you start realizing you need more time, and then you start getting into the politics of it, and your plan to approach your publisher, which is nothing new it happens.
Things like we never would have imagined would create this or that – I know it sounds weird, but again, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t challenging, it wasn’t like ‘how are we actually going to pull it off,’ but that one day there was a brick wall that we had no idea that was there.
Talking about the game itself, the story is fascinating because it meshes a little bit of realism with science fiction and demons. What are some of the themes you really wanted to focus on?
I think that the entire game is an excuse to talk about this thing that I truly believe is in all of us, which is, under the right circumstances, the right conditioning, we all have this capacity of absolutely atrocious barbaric acts. It has been proven over and over again throughout history that normal people, law-abiding citizens, under the right circumstances, decide their neighbor needs to be eliminated. People with minute differences or differences that were invented. For example, like in Bosnia, some of the differences – obviously some were Muslims and some were Orthodox, what people consider the most fundamental differences, but like language, they’re exactly the same people. They would invent differences and put them in books and textbooks just to say “they’re not like us,” and they end up in civil war and genocide. And that’s a western country.
I think the game is one big excuse to explore those themes, but at the same time, we’re very much gamers. What I mean by that is if I want to watch a movie or if I want to watch a TV show, I’ll go watch a movie or a TV show. When I want to play a game, I want my game to be gameplay – at least 75% of the time – but that’s my personal opinion. So we still wanted to make a game that’s very much a game that’s minute-to-minute gameplay, and you’re learning about the stuff through the game, but still deal with these very heavy themes, while still having fun like “oh my god it’s a game with big weapons and monsters” but how do you mesh all these things in a fairly credible world, basically we try to tell a story about people’s capacity to do horrors based on their manipulation of emotions and passion.
…the entire game is an excuse to talk about this thing that I truly believe is in all of us, which is, under the right circumstances, the right conditioning, we all have this capacity of absolute atrocious barbaric acts.
Talking about the visuals and overall atmosphere, it’s very striking. What have been some of the influences for designing the world and the story?
I think what’s very fascinating early on is that we had this idea of being a Hermit State, like they’re a closed-off country, and then building that was quite interesting because…well, the game takes place in 1993, they’re still a bit behind in time even more because they’ve been closed off. Obviously, Rémi (the protagonist) has equipment that’s way ahead of that, but there are lore reasons behind that. I think that gave us a lot of interesting things to play with, this idea of a Hermit State. Then this thing of typography patterns and cartography, the patterns in the Hollow Walkers and these typographical things are very present in the art direction. That gave us a lot of flavor, a lot of signature to the game. The mood obviously, it’s a civil war. Obviously, what’s happening in Ukraine isn’t a civil war, but look at images from Ukraine. Even if it’s sunny, a whole completely destroyed village is just a very gloomy thing to look at. This idea that the enemies are basically – on paper we said the enemies were going to be the physical manifestation of our emotions, of human negative emotions, the Hollow Walkers which are bipedal entities that are just husks, and those things that come out of them. We call them the Haze. That’s a human emotion.
In the Plutchik Wheel, you have eight really negative emotions – we took four: we have Grief, Ecstasy, Rage and Terror. We said we have these emotions – what does a human emotion if it’s floating in front of you look like? [Because] when you start from an idea like that [that’s] never really been done, you have to look into different things; you can’t make something clichéd. So we ended up saying ‘yeah, they can be these weird geometrical beings that represent emotions’ because nobody knows what an emotion looks like if it’s just hovering in front of you. And the concept of the Hollow Walkers come from the idea that an emotion cannot move on its own. If you wake up in the morning, let’s say you’re pissed off. Your anger cannot [stay behind as you go] to your office, because you’re going to drive to your office and bring your anger with you. Maybe you’ll see something really cool on the way, and you’ll be happy and maybe that will lead to the joy that you bring to the office.
The idea was, if we go with that same philosophy of emotions, there needs to be an entity that is the anchor point and the emotion moves around it, and that one move as well. That is where the idea of the Hollow Walker came into be. Basically, they’re a facsimile of a human being that felt that emotion, and they’re hollow inside, and they can have the emotion in or the emotion out. You get these ideas, and they push you, and they push you in a very specific aesthetic direction. I’m just a big believer of if your basic variables are fairly novel, they’ll just guide you towards what they should look like, or they should feel like.
Can you talk about the philosophy behind the open-ended mission design that doesn’t hold your hand for both the main story and side quests?
This idea of getting rid of the markers and quest journals, what I call the shopping list and your magical compass and your maps and mini-maps. I’ve been toying with that for quite a long time in my head. It’s like player agency. Like in real life, here’s a problem and how am I going to solve it. It’s this idea of being confronted with things and deciding [what to do] – it’s not emergent gameplay, but it’s still kind of giving agency to the players. And if we get rid of all these things, how are we going to guide the player, though? How are they going to find their way? Basically, it’s like in real life. If you remember before our cellphones and GPSes – let’s say you threw a party at your parent’s cottage, you had to tell your friends “you take the 480, and you drive the exit 63, then you get out there, then when you see the first gas station you turn left, then you’re going to see a house, it has all these bird houses attached to his tree – when you see that, turn right, then keep going until you see the big boulder that’s painted red, turn left and the first cottage is mine.”
It worked. It always worked, [so] I thought ‘why couldn’t this work in a game?’ The game has to be completely thought out to support that, it can’t be an afterthought. If you think about it, visuals in game are either decorative or to express themes and metaphors, which is great, but they’re not there to tell you what to do. NPCs are the same thing. If you look at RPGs or adventure games, NPCs tend to talk and talk and talk. You don’t have to pay attention, because once they’re done, there’s a quest marker that appears where you’re supposed to go.
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We still get involved in the story, we still read them, sometimes beautifully written. But technically, it’s irrelevant because there’s going to be a quest marker after. In Hell is Us, that’s why the conversations you get into NPCs with, their texts are quite short, because what they’re telling you is information you really should be paying attention to. It’s going to guide you after that. We wanted to make sure that if we just had crazy text and the important thing is lost in there, it’s not going to work. It was the same thing with the environments. We had to learn how to do this, but it really came from this idea of exploration in those games that fundamentally, while their themes are about adventure and exploration, that’s not really what you’re doing. You’re doing it, but you’re doing it thematically, because when you find something, it’s pretty much been given to you. It’s like, ‘oh, you need this guy, he’s in an inn somewhere.’ Well, then you’ll have a quest marker that’ll bring you across the street. When you’re across the street, the quest marker will move to the door where the inn is, and once you enter the inn, the quest marker is above the NPC that you’re supposed to talk to. Getting rid of all this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, it’s just how we do it.
Quest design, we call them investigations, and side quests we call them secrets and mysteries. They just naturally evolve, like how they’re built, they’re informed by that philosophy. It didn’t completely change how level designs or quests were done, but certain things had to be done in very specific ways for this philosophy to work and it just got informed by the idea, and we trialed and errored, and we had people play prototypes, and very early on we saw, if we do it that way, it works and people are having fun. Obviously, a game that can go all the way to forty hours, some places work better than others. No game is perfect, but it works pretty well, I think.
How do dungeons fit into everything? We were able to go through one in the preview and it almost felt segmented, like a loot run. Is that what they’re meant to be or do they have a bigger meaning in the story?
The way we organized the previews, the dungeon was disjointed from the rest of the story. In the game, why you end up learning about them? Why are they there? What is their link to what’s happening in the country? What’s their link to the deep history of the country? Why do you have to go there? It’s all very much part of the experience. There’s always something very specific you have to do – you don’t always know exactly what it is. Sometimes the goal of a dungeon and why you’re going is clear, while others you discover while you explore it. They’re meshed into the whole narrative of the lore and your quest in the game. I think we narratively made sense of them. It’s like how we had to justify why we have to use these old weapons, and it stemmed from the fact we wanted a third-person melee combat originally. But then we wanted the game to be contemporary, so we had to find a story that meshed all these things together. I’m sure there are a few holes in the story; there always are, but I think, for the most part, they make sense. Obviously, in a fantasy story, our reasoning works why these places are there and who built them and why they’re part of the story.
Let’s talk about the audio and sound design. It really immerses you; it’s almost horrifying with all the creatures and their presentational abnormalities. How has the audio and sound department shaped the design of Hell is Us?
Our audio director, Antoine Vachon, is extremely talented. What we’re lucky to have is our composer is in-house, which is very rare. Usually, composers we hire them for a project, and they’re not part of the studio and when they’re done, they go on to do something else. So Stephan is someone who has been with Rogue Factor for a long time, and he’s extremely talented, extremely technical. The idea to begin with was, one of our references was the movie Annihilation, but they needed to find their own signature as well. It’s not a copy of Annihilation, but there’s references there.
They’re just extremely creative. In terms of the audio designers, there are three, with the director and the composer. With the Haze and all the research for the sound design for the enemies, when you fight the Haze you can hear [that] they sound like monsters, but there’s a bit of human voices mixed in because they’re basically emotions. Again, just very informed by our themes and our ideas of the game, and it just threw them in uncharted territories, and then you create something that stands out a little more.
Hell is Us is available September 4 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and PC.
Hell Is Us
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