This year’s Summer Game Fest showcases were some of the best in recent memory. Kingdom Hearts 4 fans finally got a new trailer and release details, RPG sickos were treated to reveals of Persona 6 and Final Fantasy 7 Revelation, and there was, of course, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake.

There was almost certainly a little bit of something for everybody, but survival horror fans may have feasted best. Alien Isolation 2 received its first gameplay trailer, , and the heavily rumored Resident Evil Code: Veronica remake was revealed to boot, as well as new dinosaur survival horror The Lost Wild rearing its head. We also got another look at the brutally gruesome ILL.

After appearing during PlayStation’s State of Play, I sat down with Maxim Verehin, game director and co-founder of developer Team Clout, and Christina Omelchenko, director of communications at publisher Mundfish, to discuss everything we can expect from the team’s upcoming Resident Evil-inspired title.

Winning The Hearts Of The Masses

Team Clout started small. Fewer than ten developers started work on ILL. Just a few years later, with the support of Mundfish, it is 50 strong, and work on the title is well underway. But while the team is growing, seeing the game on the grandest stages of all remains a delight.

“The amount of work we need to do to prepare for these shows is crazy; it’s always a fun journey and never gets boring,” Verehin tells me. “It motivates our team tremendously to see the project among the biggest of them and see that we are showing something that people are so excited about.”

Back in 2025, the game appeared during Geoff Keighley’s SGF summer showcase; this year, it was at the PlayStation State of Play. That was all by design.

“Last year, seeing the response from the PlayStation community to the trailer was such an inspiring moment for the whole team. After that, PlayStation came to us and suggested we participate in their blogs,” Omelchenko says. “We continued the conversation, and appearing on the State of Play was a natural journey for us.”

Last year, seeing the response from the PlayStation community to the trailer was such an inspiring moment for the whole team.

Having had time to reflect on the trailer and fan reactions, I asked Verehin what the overall sentiment was like.

“If you compared it to Steam reviews, it would be somewhere between Very Positive and Overwhelmingly Positive,” he tells me. “This trailer was something new for me as a creator. The previous trailers were just us showcasing lots of stuff, this one was super hard to make because it had structure and showed story.”

As of right now, ILL is one of the top ten most wishlisted games on Steam. It’s holding its own against titles like Ark 2, Light No Fire, Fable, and Valve’s own Steam Machine. The Team Clout developers must feel like they’re onto a winner.

“It’s overwhelmingly cool on one side, but on the other, it puts a lot of pressure on you. We’re just using it as fuel, though. It motivates us to move forward and deliver the coolest project possible in all things we promise,” says Verehin.

ILL's Place In The World Of Survival Horror

The survival horror genre is reaching a new peak. The Resident Evil series is more popular than ever, Silent Hill is back to its best, and while less prolific, Alan Wake 2 set the world alight less than three years ago. Where does ILL fit into this?

“I think we fit right in,” Verehin tells me. “I’ll try to be humble. I don’t think our project is going to replace Resident Evil or Silent Hill, but it’s definitely going to carve out its place.

“We are trying to mix more physics-based action into the game. And, story-wise, the overall journey is going to feel more like the Half-Life 2 experience. It’s less Resident Evil. We'll see how it turns out. It's something new, but at the same time, it's really familiar. If players like the Resident Evil series, they'll probably enjoy our game too.”

Horror has such a storied history, and there is so much inspiration to draw from across both games and movies. I wanted to see what ILL pulls from.

“We are all huge Resident Evil fans, but Dead Space is a big inspiration for us, because it has the dismemberment mechanics. ILL is also constrained to a single location with many biomes; there will be a lot of diversity, just like the Ishimura,” Verehin muses. “Another game that inspired us is Mouthwashing. I love this game so much. Its story is amazing, but also the pure horror atmosphere and the way the protagonists interact with each other. It was really inspiring.

“Half-Life 2 is also a huge inspiration for us. How the physics worked in the games, and how fun it was to just play the game. The story structure, when you see a lot of new places and go on a linear journey, we take a big inspiration from Half-Life 2 as well.

“In terms of movies, we love the old-school horror genre. It’s not about ghosts. It’s not about deep trauma and seeing things; it’s all about the monsters.“

Half-Life 2 is also a huge inspiration for us.

In some of its marketing materials, ILL promises to ‘challenge even the most seasoned veterans of the horror genre’, a bold claim, and one Verehin is happy to explain.

“We just try to bring something new in terms of horror concepts. We want you to say ‘wow’ a few times per chapter. Our concept for the main evil in the game, we try to utilize it in all manners. We try to make it original so that it’s super scary and f**ked up, but also entertaining. It’s not funny, but it’s so scary it will make you laugh.

“We’ve seen playtesters laughing, and we realized this was something we needed more of. They thought the game was about zombie-like enemies, but then a huge head breaks a wall, and we have giants. Nothing is off limits, and you should expect the unexpected. We’re really directing the experience; enemies won’t just appear in front of you, but they’ll smash walls, fall out of the ceiling, break through doors.”

Dismemberment is a key feature of ILL, and it has been a focal point of the trailers so far. Verehin and his team are working hard to ensure it meets expectations.

“We are trying to make the dismemberment work so that there is an underbody, like the skeleton of the characters, and you can shoot every part of the body deep down to the skeleton, and then dismember the skeleton as well,” he says. “Of course, we're still a small studio, and we don't have all the resources in our pocket, but we are trying to do dismemberment the way that it's going to be just fun to play. You need to feel it in terms of animation, the sound design, and once you see how the enemy behaves, like the animation, how he reacts to the hit, and losing all his necessary parts.”

As a relatively small team, Clout has run into a range of technical difficulties while creating this system.

“The most challenging thing is to keep this fidelity of graphics that we’ve shown to people for the release, while also making the game interactive. Many modern games turn their backs on physics as graphics improve, and it's really hard to maintain both graphics quality and world interactivity,” Verehin says. “We showed cool graphics and we showed dismemberment. We are trying to find ways how to deliver both, but definitely it's challenging.”

Leon Kennedy And The Future Of The Game

While not directly inspired by Resident Evil, ILL has one major overlap with Capcom’s series: Nick Apostolides. The Leon S. Kennedy actor will be flexing his horror muscles in Team Clout’s title.

“It’s a really funny story, how we got Nick. We posted some concept art, and Nick wrote to us on Discord, saying, ‘I’m a big horror fan. I play a main character in Resident Evil’, and we basically shook hands there,” Verehin recalls. “We’re now at the point where we’ve started working with him directly, and it’s been so cool.”

Apostolides isn’t the only big name in the game either, with Verehin teasing me that there is more in store.

“I won’t name names, but some movie directors have asked to do scenes in the game, and we were like, ‘sure’. There’s also another big surprise actor, but I can’t tell you now because Christina will kill me. We’ve not pursued stars for the game; it just happened, but it’s more about fun.”

Some movie directors have asked to do scenes in the game, and we were like, ‘sure’.

Like many developers, Verehin says that during the creation of ILL, ideas came and went, but this is great, and the game leaves itself open to future entries.

“I found myself thinking that we have material for the next two games. Even the idea where this game is going to take place, what's going to be happening, and what protagonist is going to be there,” he says. “There is already an ILL universe, and we are trying to make some sort of alternative history world just for ILL. I cannot wait to actually start doing it because ideas are super cool, but we cannot add all of them into the first game.”

At present, ILL has been confirmed for PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam, leaving the Switch 2 out to dry. With games like Resident Evil Requiem and Final Fantasy 7 performing so well on the platform, I asked Mundfish if it had plans.

“For now, there are no plans, but we really want to,” says Verehin. Omelchenko adds, “We're focusing on PC and consoles like PlayStation and Xbox. I'm not saying we're never going to do that or not doing it, but for now, we're just not committed.”

ILL Like Follow Followed Action Horror Survival Horror Shooter Systems Released 2027 Developer(s) Team Clout inc. Publisher(s) Team Clout inc., Mundfish Engine Unreal Engine 5 Number of Players Single-player 12 Images Close
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Genre(s) Action, Horror, Survival Horror, Shooter Powered by Expand Collapse