Hell is Us: New trailer and emotional insight from the creative director

Rogue Factor’s mysterious and brutal action adventure, Hell is Us, is clawing its way out of our darkest dreams and onto PlayStation 5 September 4. With an atmospheric new trailer fresh from the depths, the game’s Creative and Art Director, Jonathan Jacques-Belletête took me through its secrets to reveal more about the game’s enemies, dungeons, and emotional commentary.

What was the inspiration behind the Hollow Walker enemy designs and the strange blue Haze (around 1 minute in)?

There’s no singular inspiration. I look more to creating themes that we want to explore. So we wanted the enemies to be a physical manifestation of human emotions, and I then started thinking about how those emotions behave. Hazes are expressions of the emotions, using Robert Plutchik’s emotion wheel as inspiration for their colours, and the Hollow Walkers are white and emotionless, acting as a sort of facsimile of a human being that is emotion’s anchor.

We could have just made regular monsters that were expressions of emotion, like a rage monster, but I thought it would have been a little cliché. What if it was more cosmic horror, something unexplainable?

How many types of Hollow Walkers can we expect in the game?

There are five types – the Primeval, the Feral, the Protector, the Artillery and the Negator – each having three tiers, so a total of 15 variants. And then there are the Hazes, which are four emotions – grief, ecstasy, rage and terror – each with three tiers as well, which makes 12. So that gives us 27 enemies in the game.

Which ones are you most fond of?

So the Primeval, which is kind of the more basic and humanoid one, is the most iconic. I quite like it because it looked really cool in the early concept art.

The Feral is cool too, because I’m always going to remember the motion capture sessions. They walk on these pointy, weird arms, so we hired dancers for them who literally had stilts on their hands for the mocap, which was really interesting.

The Negator also has these weird ears that are actually his legs, and the way that he attacks with them is quite clever, but yeah, I think the Primeval is our little baby Hollow Walker, so that’s my favourite.

Can you tell us a bit more about the Hollow Walker with multiple Hazes we see at the end of the trailer?

It’s definitely one of the most memorable moments of that specific dungeon. The game isn’t really about typical bosses as such, but more about meaningful fights at key moments in the story. When multiple Hollow Walkers are connected to one Haze, we call it a Herder, but what we have at the end of the trailer is a Fervent, where a Hollow Walker – a Protector in this case – is attached to multiple Hazes.

What you see at the end of the trailer is the end of Act One. That Act is very much about grief, so you’re going through all the stages of grief, with each Haze having a name based on those stages. The combat loop is that these Hazes split out after you kill one, a bit like enemy slimes from RPGs, and the final one goes inside the Protector, which you then have to kill.

In the trailer we also see a dungeon which incorporates water wheels, while one is more like a mountain mine. Can you expand on the ideas behind these specific dungeons?

Each dungeon has a theme, and they’re related to a specific emotion as well. That’s also tied to the story of why this particular place exists. What was very important for me at the beginning of the project was having dungeons which weren’t contemporary even though the game takes place in a contemporary setting. I wanted them to be these impressive, fantasy things that feel out of this world. And we wanted to have fun with the types of puzzles that we couldn’t have had in a realistic, contemporary dungeon, like an abandoned factory or metro station.

Some of the dungeons have a lot more puzzles than others, some are more about combat, and some have a lot of environmental changes, like the one in the trailer where you have to play with the water levels and things like that. So they’re all different and tied to lore, which you sometimes need to understand in order to solve a puzzle. One of our themes is ‘history always repeats itself’, and even though you figure out these artefacts from ages ago, you realize that it relates to what’s going on right now. There’s lots to discover and play around with.

What other details would you encourage players to take a closer look at in the trailer?

So at around the 1.45 mark there’s a huge pile of something which you should maybe pay attention to. See what’s there. And then imagine how many things this represents. Because you could just think it’s a rocky hill in the middle of the dungeon, but if you pay attention to what it actually is, you start to ask questions. How did this happen? How did they create this? What was the machinery around this? It could be quite horrific, but interesting. There’s symbolism everywhere.

Hell is Us launches on September 4.