Getting Ill: Understanding the grossest horror game in development and how it takes more than a few cues from Valve’s seminal shooter Half-Life 2

Ill’s been an attention-hogger ever since its Summer Game Fest 2025 reveal. It is, quite possibly, the grossest game in development. Startlingly lifelike trailers have given us a queasy glimpse at a fleshy world of bloated humanoid monsters we can shoot great, ragged chunks out of. Gore splatters, wounds geyser with blood, and skin hangs limply where it used to have something to attach to. Ill’s is a world of grimacing nightmares, and there’s a level of detail here we usually only see in the most expensive video game productions, or in something dedicated to disgust – like Scorn.

And here lies the mystery of Ill: we don’t know very much about it. It has come out of nowhere. We don’t know the team, we don’t know the game, and we don’t know what to expect. And I think that’s exciting; we don’t often get to say that about blockbuster-looking games these days.

What is Ill? The best place is to start at the beginning, with the creator of the game, Maxim Verehin. Who is he? Five years ago, the answer would have been much more simple, he tells me when we speak in a video call. “I would be a concept artist,” he says, matter of fact. He’s a relatively young-looking Armenian man in his mid-30s, with fairly pale skin, a goatee, glasses and a baseball cap. “I would consider myself as an artist,” he says. An artist who’s worked on some very prestigious brands, that is. In games, he’s worked on Diablo, Tomb Raider, Silent Hill, and Path of Exile, he tells me; and in film and TV, he’s worked on the recent It: Welcome to Derry series, and the 2026 comedy horror They Will Kill You.

It’s horror that attracts him. “I always was drawing bad things,” he admits, with a trace of a smile. You can see what he means on his Instagram page: eyes pop from faces and skeletal wraiths with rictus grins and multi-jointed arms stand threateningly in forests. It’s realism twisted with disturbia. It is, quite clearly, Ill. That visual style in the game is Verehin all over. “Thank god I didn’t listen to anyone and I stuck to it,” he says, because it’s this eye for the grotesque that brought him recognition and enough personal clout to realise a vision he’d harboured for many years: to make something of his own. To make a game.

The idea behind Ill was simple, he tells me. He gathered with some Armenian artist friends and “we just decided to create a dream project that we want to play ourselves”. To be slightly more specific, they wanted to make the kind of game they’d buy instantly if they saw it on Steam. A “bloody shooting horror” with gore and dismemberment, that felt weighty and physical to play. That day, Ill was born.

That day, however, was a long time ago. Ill began way back in 2020-2021 – incidentally the name, which never fails to subvert a sentence, was chosen because it was short and sounded “horror”, Verehin says, but there is apparently a connection that will “surprise” people now. Back then, Team Clout, as the team of friends organised themselves into, had no idea what it was doing. “We actually didn’t know anything about how to make a big game or how to start a project of this scale,” Verehin admits. “We couldn’t really understand how hard it is.”

What the team did know how to do, though, was make a good trailer, using lessons learnt in the film industry – lessons about scene composition and camera angles and timing. The game’s story was different then, set in a small, creepy town in America that the protagonist had to escape from, but the tone of those early eye-catching concept trailers was close enough to Ill now: claustrophobic, uncanny, decrepit, gory. And these trailers, alongside a Patreon, began to get Ill noticed. In 2023, Mundfish Powerhouse – the ’boutique’ publishing arm of the Cyprus-based but Russia-linked creator of 2023’s divisive shooter Atomic Heart – came on board. Shortly before Atomic Heart was released, a deal to publish Ill was signed, and Team Clout had the “elder brother”-like guidance it craved, as well as the resources for larger scale development. That year, 2023, production on Ill properly began.

But what is Ill actually about? It’s easy to believe from what we’ve seen that it’s all style and little substance. But there’s more to Ill than that, according to Verehin. There’s a story, which we got a glimpse of in a trailer a couple of months ago, that shows various characters talking to the player, telling us we just came out of a coma. It surprises me to hear Verehin reference Valve’s seminal story-based shooter Half-Life 2 as an inspiration, and numerous times.

“There’s a full journey that you’re going to experience,” he assures me, “and it reminds us of Half-Life 2, where in the beginning of the game, you find yourself in more familiar places, like a hospital, and facilities look like facilities in the real world. But when you go deeper and deeper, not only are the characters you encounter more complex and more secretive, but also you find yourself in locations that are more and more strange, and that tell the protagonist, ‘Hey, you are not just in a regular world: you found yourself in a really special and crazy place.'”

There’s also a link to Half-Life 2 in how the game works, in the physics-based approach it takes to combat, whereby enemies can behave in a variety of ways depending on what’s around them. They might pick up things to throw at you, if they’re available, and you’re able to deal with them in a variety of experimental ways as well – namely blowing off limbs and watching how enemies react to it.

“We want to make the game interactive,” Verehin says, “we want to see physics in our game, we want to see how the body dismembers and the impacts that monsters receive. It’s one of the main things that we promised about Ill, that it’s interactive, it feels alive, that you’re going to enjoy fighting monsters because there’s an element of physics with their behaviours.

“This is what we find fun about games, this interactivity, because for some time I was missing this,” he goes on. “I really like Half-Life 2, for example. This is a sandbox and you can play with the game, and there is some physics and stuff to explore there and be surprised by. We miss that in triple-A games these days.” That’s probably because it’s “super complicated” to make, he reasons, flashing a knowing smile. “We want to bring that, and deliver interactivity.”

Ill’s story today takes place in an alternate version of the 1980s, in the Eastern Block of Europe, which houses the large and mysterious facility you explore. Strange experiments are happening there, many of which we’ve seen in trailers already, and because there’s a mix of realism and sci-fi, there’s no tether restricting what horrors Verehin and team can create. “We are not restricted by the sizes or looks of them,” he says. “It could be a mix of animal and people, huge monsters, or a huge baby head that breaks a wall. Anything is possible in our game. And it’s not just random,” he notes. “It’s connected with the main cosmic horror that is happening, and people are going to find out at the end what it is and how it works. That gives us an opportunity to do anything that we want in terms of showing horror stuff on the screen.”

You mean anything like letting you kick baby monsters across the screen? Verehin laughs at the reference – it’s the infamous takeaway from Ill’s SGF 2025 reveal. “I was at Summer Game Fest that time in the audience,” he tells me, “and it was funny to see what things people react to in your trailer. At the end, when you kick a baby, the whole audience laughed as if it were a comedy, not a horror.” It was exactly as the studio intended. “We’re trying to bring that fun aspect into creation, not trying to be overly pretentious in a way that we are too serious and we are super dark, guys.”

In other words, there’s substance beyond the gory thrills. This story “isn’t just filler”, Verehin insists, and while Ill is a linear experience, there are moments of pause, be they through simple puzzles or exploration incentivised by collecting resources to craft with. “So you have a workbench mechanic,” Verehin explains. “When you find the workbench, you can craft a bunch of things for yourself, like healing items, and also you can upgrade your weapons using resources you found in the world, and you’re going to see these upgrades on them.”

What was started several years ago by a small group of ambitious friends – who admittedly didn’t know what they were doing – has become a proper game-making operation of 70 people, making one of today’s most anticipated horror games. It’s a game capable of holding its own among showcases of blockbuster productions. Indeed, Ill’s production values have often led me to wonder whether gen-AI is being employed here, but it isn’t, I’m pleased to say.

“Both Team Clout and Mundfish have strict AI policies regarding game assets and implementation,” Mundfish tells me in a follow-up statement sent after my interview with Verehin, perhaps because he tells me he’s personally interested in the technology, although the team is “sticking to the old ways” when making the game. Mundfish states: “All assets going into the production build of the game (game objects, audio files, materials, texture maps, lighting elements, shaders, VFX emitters, etc.) or used in the development process (concept art, level design, scripts, etc.) are hand-crafted and created by the team. That includes everything in the media assets folder and all marketing materials shown thus far.”

Oh, and while Ill featured in Sony’s PlayStation State of Play showcase, it is still very much in development for Xbox Series consoles as well, and for PC. And as for when it’s coming out: that’s less clear. We have a vague 2027 date and Verehin won’t be budged on narrowing it down. “I think we would like to keep room for the release window,” he tells me, probably wisely. Regardless, I’m excited. Ill may be the grossest game in development but through it, Verehin and Team Clout are showing it’s possible to break into the games industry and disrupt the established norms even if you come from – in a traditional games industry sense – a relative nowhere.