There’s something familiar about ILL. From a voice that sounds suspiciously like Resident Evil Requiem’s Leon S. Kennedy (aka Nick Apostolides) to the gory first-person melee and shooter action, I watched the latest trailer of the upcoming horror game with rapt intrigue. It came out of nowhere during June’s Playstation State of Play showcase, brushing the cobwebs off of a new game I’ve had my eye on for years and treating us the most violent display of the evening. It even gives Marvel’s Wolverine a run for its money, and if you’ve seen Logan’s brutality for yourself already, you’ll know that’s a bold (but fair) statement.
ILL, developed by Team Clout, looks like a hodgepodge of all my favorite horror games in one. It also seems to be taking from one of the best zombie games of the last five years when it comes to making a statement.
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Dead Island 2 totally changed the game when it comes to anatomical realism in horror games. Dambuster had its work cut out for it, inheriting the project from Dying Light studio Techland after a lengthy period of developmental hell, and it paid off in bloody spades.
Shortly before launch, I spoke with game director David Stenton about the dynamic FLESH system introduced in Dead Island 2. Each hack and slash has accurate anatomical payoff; you can melt away flesh to expose the bubbling yellow fat beneath, see the grey matter glisten on your knuckles after punching a hole through a zombie’s head, and lay down the machete whacks with near surgical precision to lop off specific parts of a limb.
It was a new frontier for the physicality of zombie-slayage, refining the logic behind Capcom’s precise gunshots and the force with which they knock zombies back in in Resident Evil 2 Remake.
I see shades of this technology throughout ILL as a decapitated head, pinned to a wall by a knife, sprouts tentacles out of the hole where its neck should be. A few seconds later, the protagonist punches what looks like a botchling from The Witcher 3 over and over again in its grotesque bloated head. A bullet rips through an eye socket, cheek tendons dangling from the wound like half-cooked strands of pici pasta. It’s glorious, frankly, and I love trying to connect the dots in theorizing what drove Team Clout to go so hard on the gore.
Dead Island 2 is my first theory, so it’s no surprise that, as the original Dead Island developer, I’m also getting echoes of Techland’s Dying Light games. There’s a shared sense of urgency as pockets of survivor militias pop up in the wake of a zombie-like emergency; ILL’s protagonist has woken from a coma to find the hospital overrun by humanoid horrors, while Kyle Crane has pretty much the same experience in Dying Light: The Beast.
I love trying to connect the dots in theorizing what drove Team Clout to go so hard on the gore.
There are shades of Resident Evil 7, too – close-quarters scares in tight, dark passages as the protagonist seems to grapple with a firearm for the first time in his life – but I’ll be honest that I might just feel that way because Nick Apostolides almost definitely voices the protagonist and I am deeply fond of his work as Leon S. Kennedy over the last 7 years.
It’s heartening to see flavors of the games and horror series I love given a fresh coat of red paint. ILL is doing everything I think all the best survival horror games should do by not trying to reinvent the wheel here. Instead, Team Clout takes inspiration where it’s due and runs with it, and the result looks like a thrilling new idea encased in familiar parameters for the perfect blend of novelty and nostalgia. Now if you don’t mind, I’m off to squeal over the trailer one more time and start preparing my stomach for 2027.
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