Interview: How Hell Is Us Shows the Human Cost of Violence and War

In Hell Is Us, an information web connects all your evidence, leads, and clues, replacing the classic quest log so you can find things using your own deduction skills. It immediately reminded me of the information log in The Outer Wilds.

Funnily enough, Rogue Factor Creative Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête had no idea until after development of Hell Is Us was already in full swing.

"I played [Outer Wilds] for quite a few hours and I had figured out a few things, and I hadn't at all seen that," he said with a laugh. "It's literally last year that I said, 'Let's go back to it,' and I was like, 'Oh f***, they have this wall of clues interconnected.'"

Hell Is Us isn't the first time he's had this idea, either. Back when he was working on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the concept of an information web was already on his mind. As with many things in game development, though, some ideas can be lost for one reason or another.

"It's very common with designers. We have these things that we carry with ourselves for years and years and years, and then at one point is the right time to do it, you know?" he said. "It doesn't look it when you look at the system, but it's very complex to make. It's in terms of like how the interrelationships between the info and the updates and this and that."

Despite the lighthearted place where its core mechanic comes from, Hell Is Us is anything but lighthearted.

Hell Is Us and the Cycle of Violence

At its core, it's about a civil war between Palomists and Sabinians in the fictional country of Hadea, and the war has made it a no-go zone. As you explore, environmental storytelling shows how deep the hatred between them runs. The Palomists are religious by nature, so they paint the Sabinians as devils and heretics. On the flip side, Sabinians believe they know the country's true ruler, making the Palomists liars and cheats.

"They're the exact same people from the same stock," Jacques-Belletête said. "They have different religious beliefs, but it's also from the same religion. Think of the Protestants and the Catholics, right? And look at how much bloodshed has been from that.

"At the same time, the game is not about 'religion is bad' or 'religion is the cause of all suffering.' But it still had to be part of it, right? As you play the game more and you learn about all the history and where the hatred comes from, it's much more. It's really much more about what makes us decide that we're different."

Essentially, this conflict showcases the cycle of violence and human suffering. He compared it to other real-world conflicts, like the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda or the Bosnian War. Maybe it's my American slant, but I also see early moments of this along the political divide here. The division isn't as violent, but the "us or them" rhetoric strongly resonates with what I see.

"[Hell Is Us is] thematically saying, even though we're the same, humanity tries to find a way. We always find a way. And it's all about grievances and it's about who's got the most scars," Jacques-Belletête said.

Because of how raw and real this message is, the team at Rogue Factor landed on a middle ground in terms of realism. Hell Is Us is set in a facsimile of reality, where real countries like Canada and fictional nations like Hadea coexist.

Even the Organized Nations is an overt reference to the United Nations. Rogue Factor reached out to the UN to get permission to use its colors and some iconography, like the stencil lettering. However, the actual name and logo were off the table.

"We're talking about this capacity that I truly believe we all have inside each human being. That with the right circumstances, the right context, everything, we can wake up one morning and decide that our neighbors should be eliminated," Jacques-Belletête said.

"History just proves it, you know? Maybe a few people are immune to it," he continued. "The structure of society is in big part to keep that beast in check, in a way, right? So when those structures fall is when people just bloody lose it. So that was important for me, that all this was as close to the real world as possible."

Of course, it'd be quite a statement to specifically use real-world groups to convey such a difficult, harsh message. Thus, it made sense to create Hadea, a made-up nation where the people suffering are fictional, yet their suffering echoes some of the worst moments of human history.

Are the Hollow Walkers the Real Monsters?

When it comes to how you interact with Hell Is Us, though, the player won't ever fight another human, despite all the hatred in the air. Instead, all the combat is strictly against the Hollow Walkers, the pale, unsettling, human-ish monsters that you see in the trailers. This was very important to Jacques-Belletête—despite the barbarism on display, he didn't want the player to contribute to the violence against other humans.

So Hollow Walkers were the answer to that. They roam the land, and some have colorful, geometric entities attached to the giant holes on their torso via an "umbilical cord," per Jacques-Belletête. These entities, called the Haze, represent intense human emotions, as expected from people amid a civil war.

Figuring out what an emotion looks like was one of the big design challenges for the team at Rogue Factor. The big creative leap, according to Jacques-Belletête, was how the Haze ends up attached to the Hollow Walkers.

"An emotion cannot walk by itself, right? You can project it around you to a certain perimeter, depending on how pissed you are," he said. "It has an area of effect. But technically, you can't send it anywhere else. It goes with you, right? The Haze cannot just move by itself. It's kind of like the analogy to how much we can project our emotions around us."

In a fight, the Haze will come out of the Hollow Walker, and you have to neutralize it first before you can defeat the Walker. Otherwise, the emotion stays inside; it comes out as a literal fight or flight response, which is a pretty on-the-nose metaphor.

"Just like you, you decide how much you keep your emotions inside and how much you project them. So it's all these things that you think about that, and then it informs your designs and it informs your gameplay," Jacques-Belletête said. "I think that's how things should be created."

How Hollow Walkers are... made? born? manifested? is still a mystery that awaits us in Hell Is Us. The inspiration behind their designs, though, comes a bit from the horror genre, as you might expect. However, they've become less horrific across different design ideations, primarily because of how action-oriented the game is.

"Bloodborne is super— the themes are horror, the monster design are horrors, but I wasn't scared playing the game. I'm sure you weren't, but it's horror," Jacques-Belletête said. "But It's not like playing Silent Hill 4: The Room where you're literally s***ting your pants, you know what I mean?"

On the Industry at Wide

Speaking of s***ting your pants, while I had him, I wanted to know how Jacques-Belletête felt about the industry at large, considering we're amid an endless barrage of layoffs and turmoil. Obviously, Rogue Factor has weathered the storm so far, but I wanted to know his thoughts on everything that has happened in recent years.

For him and studio co-founder Yves Bordeleau, part of their vision is remaining a "small-ish," tight-knit team of experts that doesn't need $200-something million dollars to make a game. At the time of the interview in early May, the studio had roughly 50–55 people directly working on the game (not including business needs like human resources, finance, and so on).

I got the sense that, with Montreal being a historic hub for huge studios like Ubisoft, WB Games, and Eidos-Montreal, the veterans at Rogue Factor have lots of experience with large companies. This commitment to a tighter ship felt like a direct response to that.

"You don't build on [success] to get to a company that has 500 people. Because usually, in Montreal it's like, 'Oh, we have success, we get bigger, we get bigger,'" Jacques-Belletête said. "Especially in this city, the minute a studio has success, it's like, 'Alright, three projects at the same time now, blah, blah, blah.'"

Instead, at Rogue Factor, the goal is to be good at what they do, develop new skills together as a team, and keep getting better at what they can do. Hell Is Us let their third-person melee action skills bloom, and it'll only get better as they develop new worlds.

"Here, if we have success, it just makes the foundation stronger, and we build on it."

Jacques-Belletête attributes that core philosophy of staying small to how Rogue Factor has weathered these dire times. They're not recruiting hundreds of new developers or expanding the budget to ridiculous levels. And of course, having a publisher like Nexon doesn't hurt for maintaining the bottom line, either.

"It's not to say that it hasn't been hard, it's not to say that we haven't had to regularly go like, 'Oh my god, how are we going to make sure that it's not going to happen to us' or this or that," he said. "And there's a bit of luck always there, but you kind of make your own luck as well."

Before I went to Rogue Factor's studio, I wasn't expecting to be as intrigued with Hell Is Us and its message. In a way, it's a mirror that reflects the worst parts of humanity, but it's in that ugliness that we're able to learn and, hopefully, be better.

Even though I only played a small slice of the game, I found myself wanting to learn more about it—how and why these people hate each other, what gruesome extents they've gone to against each other. It's these sorts of thoughts that Jacques-Belletête wants the player to explore after the game releases on Sept. 4.

"If it stays in your head, if you think about it driving to work, if you go to bed and you're thinking about your next session or what does it mean, or if you just think about the themes, that's what it's all about."

TechRaptor interviewed Hell Is Us Creative Director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête at Rogue Factor's studio with accommodations provided by the studio and Nacon.