The human brain is honed on a millennia of survival instincts, which means that we can often tell from a glance if something is bad news. Snakes. Lions. Roadworks. A twisted mass of muscle and bone, splintered ribcage blooming toward the ceiling while a slack-jawed head dangles from where its hips should be. That last one is admittedly quite specific to Ill, a first-person survival horror which has spent several years cooking since its reveal in 2022.
Though developer Team Clout has kept its debut body horror close to its chest, the studio has resurfaced at Summer Game Fest 2025 with a new trailer and news that it's now working with Mundfish Powerhouse – a newly-launched creative label from Atomic Heart's Mundfish – to bring Ill to life. "Before this, we had more questions than answers," Max Verehin, creative director at Team Clout, tells GamesRadar+. "With Mundfish we still have a lot of questions, but now we have people with answers."
Looking grim
There's a weightiness to everything we've seen from Ill so far. The protagonist's revolver looks powerful enough to take your arm off when it fires, while the game's monsters move with a shuddering awfulness. While Ill's research base setting and body horror leanings scream The Thing, I'm also reminded of Half-Life 2's infamous level We Don't Go To Ravenholm – which, despite being very combat-heavy, leans on its physics and environmental interactivity to create desperate reactivity.
"We love Half-Life 2, and we love games of that era," says Verehin, when I point out the similarities. "You remember when games around Half-Life 2, they all had this Havoc engine? You shoot a bunch of barrels and they all fly by? We're trying to make that in Ill as well, because we like it. You enter a room and start fighting with the monster. The monster drops dead on the barrels, the barrels drop, and it's a mess. After the fight, the area you fought in is completely different. You feel the world is alive."
Verehin admits the team is being "really careful" with balancing the randomness associated with more malleable physics. Too much is a recipe for jank and bugs – as anyone who's been killed by a wayward chair in Half-Life will attest to – but with restraint, with shelves rattling and objects falling over because something is over there, the sweet spot is found. "You feel the weight of the revolver, of the animations. It's one of the concepts that we are trying to bring from the earliest ideas of Ill toward the final product. You will feel how brutal and impactful the game [is], and we are pushing that."
"You cannot make a pure horror experience when players have guns"
Max Verehin, creative director of Ill
Outside of Half-Life 2 – which shares Ill's "Eastern Bloc [...] Mixed with sci-fi elements" setting – Verehin's own inspiration comes from his own tastes and digging into what other people find scary. "When browsing TikTok, there's a lot of inspiration in that," he explains. "You can see fucked up stuff that gives you ideas for the monster [...] You see something that doesn't have to be scary, and you don't expect it to be scary. I'm leaning into that and trying to translate it into monster design."
While many of the best horror games struggle to keep those scares when you can fight back against their baddies, Team Clout plans to lean right into it. Combat is front-and-center in Ill, although getting the pacing has still proven a "huge" challenge for the studio. Besides it being action-heavy, players will have an "arsenal" of guns to fight back with – although for the sake of fear factor, they won't be able to kill everything in sight.
"We want to [include] the survival horror element, the classic PT-like horror genre where you don't have a weapon, you're just a victim," says Verehin. Certain sections of Ill will prevent players from fighting back, and even when you can go trigger-happy, Verehin circles back around to maximizing fear through sound. "Even if you have guns, [what if] there is nobody around? You can't kill them, but you can hear them. You can see fucked up stuff that you cannot kill, but it can kill you."
"It's [a balancing act], but this is definitely a challenge," explains Verehin. "You cannot make a pure horror experience when players have guns."
Ill doesn't fit as neatly into one box as, say, something inspired by Resident Evil's survival horror or Silent Hill's psychological tension. If anything, Verehin suggests it's an "action horror" more in line with "'90s horror movies" than anything else. But ultimately, Verehin believes horror players know what they like – however their tastes are categorized. "People are really eager to have another good fucking horror game," he suggests. "We are trying to deliver that."
Ill is planned to launch on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5 at an unspecified time. Meanwhile, our new games 2025 list has everything you need to plan out your year
