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Breaking free from ‘AAA' bloat: ‘Hell is Us' aims to rewrite the rules of big-budget gaming (VIDEO)
PARIS, Aug 21 — Developer Jonathan Jacques-Belletete has taken a gamble on forthcoming game Hell is Us, hoping to ape the budget success of indie hit Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to tangle with industry heavyweights.
'I'd had it up to here' with work on big-spending productions whose price tag can run into the hundreds of millions, the veteran of firms like Ubisoft and Eidos Montreal told AFP.
'I wanted to try something new, with more agility and creativity.'
After five years of development, Montreal-based studio Rogue Factor is at this week's Gamescom trade fair in Cologne to debut their action game for Xbox Series, PlayStation and PC before its September 4 release.
Setting itself apart with eerie visuals, Hell is Us drops players into a fictional country in Eastern Europe in the throes of civil war, fighting supernatural creatures with backup from a hovering drone that perches on the protagonist's shoulder.
Players are offered no map and no on-screen pointers to the next objectives or the stage in the game's story.
Creative director Jacques-Belletete said he wanted to 'break' with ingrained habits, offering a grittier experience to those players happy to die or run into game-over screens more regularly.
The 48-year-old has previous credits on series like Assassin's Creed and Deux Ex.
He also directed the game adaptation of Marvel superhero film Guardians of the Galaxy.
Now, witness what awaits in the full story trailer for For Hell Is Us. — Hell is Us (@HellisUsGame) August 20, 2025
Experiment more
'I'd seen just about everything' in the industry, Jacques-Belletete said.
Big-budget so-called 'AAA' games 'cost so much to develop that you have to sell astronomical numbers of them to recoup your investment' — leading to a lowest-common-denominator and 'rather lukewarm gaming experiences', he said at a Paris event previewing his own game.
Jacques-Belletete joined Rogue Factor in 2019, determined to try an alternative approach.
The 50-strong team worked with a 'much smaller' budget than typical for a major release, although he did not reveal a figure.
Jacques-Belletete argued that this choice had given them the freedom to experiment more, integrating new elements and features with a rapid prototyping approach that would risk being strangled on the vine at more hierarchical big developers.
That same formula paid off this year for small French studio Sandfall Interactive, whose first game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sold four million copies — a major coup for a relatively small team.
'When we saw the success they had, we were very happy, that's very much what we've tried to do,' Jacques-Belletete said.
Across the industry, 'there's something that doesn't quite add up any more', he said, singling out 'a kind of mania for big projects'.
At the same time, 'the industry has had huge difficulties in recent years' with waves of layoffs at major players like Sony and Microsoft — where smaller outfits 'seem to have held up better against the storm'.
'We're clearly blazing a very valuable, capable alternative path,' Jacques-Belletete argued. — AFP
