“People Are Going To Be Surprised What Is In Store For Them:” Team Clout Teases What Makes Ill A Special Horror Game

Even amid a sea of other horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, Ill stands out. Revealed earlier this year by developer Team Clout and backed by Mundfish Powerhouse, Ill is a first-person horror game whose trailer promises intense firefights, nightmarish monsters, and stark settings. Largely depicted in first-person, the trailer for Ill highlighted the intense action and fearsome creatures that are going to be stalking the player during their experience.

While little has been formally revealed about the game, the trailer has gone a long way towards making it one of the most anticipated debuts of 2027. Team Clout co-founder Maxim Verehin has ambitions beyond just this release, though. During an interview with ComicBook.com, Verehin discussed how Ill takes influence from past horror experiences while very much carving out a unique identity.

We’ve seen so many mainstream horror games lately — how would you say Ill stands out from the explanation?

I would say it’s a mix of things that these games don’t really emphasize in their vision. For example, we’re taking big inspiration from the Resident Evil series. The resource management, the item scarcity, the world exploration, and some of the level design beats. However, we are also trying to bring in a physics-based combat system that has a different feeling from Resident Evil. We are trying to mix that with the kind of physics that Half-Life 2 had, along with the overall scale and feeling of a linear experience.

We wanted players to uncover more and more fucked up stuff about the world. When you are in the hospital, you find out about the world. The more you find out, the crazier the locations are going to get. It’s a mix. We are trying to stay true to our vision of how horror works.

We’re big horror fans. Everything we create is horror-oriented. We have our own taste and style that we’re trying to bring into Ill, not just reference stuff from other games. The locations are different, and the enemies are different from what people are expecting. People are going to be surprised by what we have in store for them.

The rest of our interview with Maxim Verehin continues below, including Verehin’s ambitions for the future games, taking cues from film production for game development, and the importance of balancing tension with catharsis.

So much of the game is still a mystery to gamers. What can you tease about the world, the story, and the characters of Ill?

I need to be super careful about what I say [Laughter]. What I can say about the characters is that we want to make them experience a feeling that they’re real within the world. They feel real in terms of how the story is structured. We wanted to play with some drama. The interconnections between characters, how they react towards the protagonist, stuff like that. The protagonist is not just a random guy, either. Everything is going to be interconnected, and you’re going to feel that in the story. There are going to be some characters that are playing a role, providing guidance.

Some of them don’t tell you much about what they know, and they don’t necessarily know everything in the world. For example, there’s a doctor who is a helping hand, and he’s going to have his own story within the plot. I hope people like it. We wanted each character to have their own place in the world and in the story. They live in this world, and we wanted them to really feel like that. Some of the stories end within the first game. Some of them are spreading around towards the future iterations, and we already have a lot of ideas. Hopefully, everything goes well with the first game. We have ideas on how to develop the second game story by taking the characters that we have and making them really enjoyable for the audience to experience their stories in the future.

Going by that, it seems like the team has big plans for the future of Ill. How do you approach game development when you’re trying to nail a single experience while also laying the groundwork for the future? Is this a series you see as a continuous story or as one-off adventures in the same universe?

I think you have to balance it. We developed so many ideas for the first game, but they were not all going to happen in the first game. I catch myself with the thought that we already have such a broad universe that if we were to make a sequel, there is already an idea for what it could be and what characters would be in it. Vaguely speaking about the story for future iterations, I would like it to be connected to the first game. We need to see how the players like it, though. Then we can see where we can take it. It’s been really fun. I’m super excited to see how the world of Ill could be expanded in the future. There are just so many cool things about it.

You’ve worked in the world of film and television in the past — how have those experiences influenced your approach to Ill?

The taste of things we developed while working on films… we got a taste for how things should look to impress you. The fidelity of the visuals, the feeling you should be getting when you’re trying to be a realistic-looking game, all of that was important to us. That film experience gave us a hint on how to do that to impress an audience. People are reacting super positively to what they are seeing in the trailer. That’s only because I had knowledge on how to do it. There are things I learned in film pre-production, like the stages of the scenes, [that impacted how we developed Ill].

We are trying not to copy that experience exactly. There are differences between game development and making movies — but applying that experience to our game has helped us get a lot of good things from the production side of things. With Ill, you’ll see some cinematic bits as you see in modern games. You’ll see scenes with more cinematic influence, but then you’ll see things more in line with the gameplay. We have cinematics in third-person, even though the game is in first-person.

Ill looks like non-stop horror, which can be tricky. There’s usually something to break up the tension for the sake of the player experience. What can you tell us about the way Ill plays with tension on a gameplay mechanics level?

It’s challenging. On the one hand, we are trying to make an action-horror game. You can have fun shooting at enemies. At the same time, we are trying to make a really terrifying experience. People are going to be scared to death playing this game. In between that, we have to find ways to work around all of that. That way, the game can have these horror moments where we just scare people and create as dreadful an atmosphere as possible.

Then we have these small creatures run towards you, and you can hit them in the face. You can have fun with it. There are some moments to break [that tension]. It’s about finding that balance. Look at Silent Hill. Those games are serious. Their approach is to make the most terrifying atmosphere and experience possible. There is no room for jokes. With us, it has always been about being scary but still having fun and finding ways to break the tension.

What has surprised you the most about Ill?

When we started with the very conceptual trailers, the game was a lot smaller in our heads. It was a contained horror story, where you don’t experience too much variety in locations. The first iteration of Ill, we didn’t plan on making a whole long story. It was different characters. Ill is bigger now thanks to Mundfish Powerhouse. They’re helping us deliver on that bigger idea. This is a really ambitious project for a small studio. This is really our first big project. I would say that the bravery of that surprised us.

The bravery of that team to commit to the game has surprised me. I never thought a few years ago that we could make this huge a game. That we were going to have full-blown motion-capture performances in our game. That we were going to shoot it almost like a movie. I’m trying to stay humble, and we’ll see how it all turns out. But if you don’t try new things, you never get better. This is a lot of new things, and I couldn’t be more excited.

Ill is currently scheduled to be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC in 2027.