“ILL”, which has recently become popular due to its ultra-bloody graphics, has been called one of the most disturbing horror games in recent years by many players. But what’s interesting is that while everyone is discussing severed limbs, flesh and monster design, the development team recently came out to talk about another topic: difficulty. According to an interview with Team Clout, they did not intend to make “ILL” a hardcore game dedicated to torturing players. On the contrary, the team believes that the most important thing about a horror game is not to kill players all the time, but to make players continue to feel pressure and fear.
If you die too many times, will the feeling of terror disappear?
The development team stated that they do not want players to be stuck for too long due to too harsh a difficulty level. The reason is actually very simple. Players may be scared when they are chased by monsters for the first time, but if they die more than a dozen times in the same plot, fear will often quickly turn into irritability. Therefore, the design direction of “ILL” is not to simply increase the enemy’s health or let monsters kill players instantly, but to maintain a continuous and tense survival pressure.
The real terror comes from insufficient resources!
Judging from the current public information, “ILL” is still a standard survival horror game. Ammunition is quite scarce in the game, and some monsters may not even be killed directly. Players sometimes have to run away, hide, or use the environment to survive. The team believes that rather than letting players die repeatedly, a more effective horror method is to keep players in a state of “almost dying”. In other words, it’s better to always feel like you’re dying without actually being dead all the time.
Players’ reactions were surprisingly polarizing
After this statement was made public, different voices immediately appeared in the community. Some players believe that horror games shouldn’t be too difficult in the first place, because repeated challenges will only ruin the atmosphere. Some people even cite works such as “Alien: Isolation” and “Outlast” as examples, believing that when there are too many deaths, the monsters will eventually turn from horror to trouble. But there is another group of players who believe that if there is no price for death, the sense of terror will naturally be reduced. Therefore, how to strike a balance between challenge and oppression will become one of the biggest tests of “ILL” in the future.
The developers want you to be scared more than to suffer!
In fact, judging from the current exposure, the biggest selling point of “ILL” has never been its high difficulty. It’s the bloody performance that is so exaggerated that it makes “Resident Evil” and “Dying Light” look much milder. So Team Clout’s idea is actually very straightforward. They don’t need players to die 100 times to prove that the game is scary. They only need players to play it once and not dare to turn off the lights and sleep.