Two leads behind the upcoming dark action-adventure game Hell is Us reckon that too many games water down exploration by pinpointing where you need to go on a mini-map, so they’re going the other way.
As part of a deep dive at The Future Games Show Summer Showcase, executive creative director and art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete and studio head and executive producer Yves Bordeleau delve into their thought process.
“Almost all the variables connected to the exploration and connected to your discovery are given to you on a silver platter,” Jacques-Belletete says. “So we look at it with the inverse in our game because we got rid of all these things.”
Bordeleau adds: “I remember chatting to John about the old Zelda games. How it was straightforward, and you had just enough to know where to go but not too much.”
To round off, Jacques-Belletete says, “It’s basically how life works if you think about it, right? We orient ourselves by sight and hearing and what people tell us.”
As an example of what that looks like in-game, we see our character talk to an NPC who says she doesn’t know where a group of baddies went, but she did see them go towards an odd-looking monument that we can see off in the distance behind her.
There’s no marker on a mini-map to tell us where to go, instead, we go for a wander ourselves before piecing together where our targets are – partly through luck, partly through using information for guidance.
If you’ve been out of the loop, Hell is Us takes us to an isolated country ravaged by infighting to discover secrets about our past and deal with the repercussions of a mysterious calamity. With a release date of September 5, 2025, there’s not long to wait until we get to play this one ourselves.
If you’re looking for more excellent games from today’s Future Games Show, have a look at our official Steam page.
