Today, we chat with Antoine Vachon, audio director on Hell is Us!
Can you tell us about your journey as a sound designer and how you came to be working on Hell is Us as audio director?
I’ve been working in the video game industry for more than 15 years now. Most of that time has been spent working on a multitude of indie games, notably Mages of Mystralia, Rainbow Billy : The Curse of the Leviathan and the PostKnight games series. My roles have been diverse, mostly revolving about music composition, orchestration, sound design and helping my teams with any production issues they encounter. Working for small indie teams definitely tests your creativity and problem-solving skills!
When I joined Rogue Factor in 2022, I tried to bring some of that attitude to my new work environment. The Hell Is Us dev team is still relatively small for the kind of game we made, so the leadership team really values each team member taking ownership of their features and bringing a lot of their personal ideas in the game. It’s a wonderful thing to be a creator in that kind of context.
When we talk about player-plattering design philosophy, we often talk about game mechanics, UI/UX design, etc, and rarely about sound, though it’s clearly an important part of Hell is Us. What was your approach to the sound design and how does it fit with player-plattering?
That's something we had to take into consideration in many aspects of the game’s audio. Music design, for example, had to be constructed in a very particular way. Each music segment and track had to accompany the player as he makes discoveries, but never directly hinting or spoiling information that haven't been made available to the player yet. To accomplish that, we needed to create a highly adaptive system while avoiding the typical pavlovian reward stingers, the obvious danger tracks, etc.
We made every effort for the music to still feel engaging and evolutive and filled with mystery, we hope players will enjoy the results.
Hell is Us features an impressive voice cast, both in English and French. Can you tell us a little bit about the casting process and what goes behind the decision to cast certain actors?
We received an overwhelming amount of auditions in both languages! My co-voice director Mathieu Larivière and me ended up parsing through more than 500 selftapes for the English version alone. Local talent agencies have been incredibly helpful in making that process smooth, pointing us towards the very best talent in Montreal.
We were really fortunate to work with so many talented actors, such as Elias Toufexis (Deus Ex: Human Revolution), Nicole Law (Tales from the Loop), Caroline Dhavernas (Hannibal), and so many more. An actor like Vlasta Vrána, who plays Ernest Caddell, while not that well known by name by the public, has been working in the movie and game industry for more than 50 years, even appearing in early 1970s David Cronenberg movies! He absolutely floored us with his performance.
All the voice overs were recorded in-house at Rogue Factor’s offices with a mostly local cast; what’s the biggest advantage of that versus doing it remotely?
One of the things that made a difference for us while working directly with actors, locally, is seeing how passionate they were about the source material. We provided them with the game’s lore bible, and they wanted to know every little detail about their character and the history of Hadea. Having actors come work with us directly at the office allowed for more emotional proximity, engaging in relaxed recording sessions and allowing them to deeply delve into the complex emotional state of each character.
Patricia Summersett (Zelda in Breath of The Wild), who plays Tania in our game, first worked with us when we worked on an internal demo in 2023. She was already so curious about the lore of Hadea and her character. When she came back subsequently for the final version’s recordings in 2024 and 2025, she already knew so much about her character, she came ready and wanted to know even more about every detail of the story. This kind of connection with the talent really pushes the performances to another level, and that’s all thanks to the high level of professionalism and engagement that the local Montreal talent has showcased.
Voice acting is such an integral part of what makes a game gel together, it was important for us to fully integrate that process to our workflow, and have full flexibility when it came to callbacks and last minute adjustments.
What were the biggest design and technical challenges in designing the audio of Hell is Us?
There were many! For one, the size and scale of the game, and the amount of details we wanted to put in was very difficult to achieve with the small size of our audio team. Excluding our outsourced voice actors, the entirety of the game’s music, sound and voice directing work was accomplished with our in-house team of 4 people: in-house composer Stéphane Primeau, sound designers Jean-Baptiste Arthus and Charles-Antoine Morin, and myself.
The world of Hell Is Us is rife with contrast: calm desolate landscape juxtaposed with the atrocities of war, the soft whispers of the desparate inhabitants of Hadea being drowned by the soaring screams of Hazes and Hollow Walkers. Sound wise, there needed to be a certain shock value to certain elements of Hell Is Us, but each of those shock moments needed substance, a reason for being, and the perfect timing, making sure they help telling the game’s story.
The alien-like distorted sound of closing a timeloop, the background music slowly evolving and slowing down as the player reaches the Lymbic Forge, the strangely human-like screams of haze when they are put to death by Rémi. Choosing those moments carefully and making them pop out of an already very complex soundscape was our biggest challenge.
What were your biggest inspirations, in video games and other media?
Again, there are so many! We’re all big gaming fans in the sound team, but we draw a lot of inspirations from movies and real life situations.
Some movies and artists that impacted me in the last few years, and influenced the way I see (and hear!) sound:
Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest for its harsh use of silence to help showcase the horrible contrasting situations.
Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool and its ominous soundtrack by Tim Hecker, using conventional rhythms in unexpected ways. To me, it feels like it's to music what the brutalist movement is to architecture.
Oneohtrix Point Never – his whole musical universe. We had the pleasure to attend one of his concerts in Montreal towards the end of production, and it had a profound impact on us.
Haruki Murakami’s novels. The way he constantly blends reality and dream to subvert expectations is something I often reflect upon when working with sound and music.
Some other inspirations or creators that have made a big impression on me lately: Bryce Dessner, Jonny Greenwood, Tadao Ando, Lee Bul, Bon Iver, and so many more.
Traveling is also a huge source of inspiration for me. Listening to soundscapes you are not used to, learning about different languages, cultures, musical codes; it changes the way you approach creation.
There is a way to record the “imprint” of a real location’s reverberation and feel, called an Impulse Response. You can then reuse those and apply it to any room in a game. I try to collect some of those when I travel.
Recently, in Seoul, I visited an old abandoned oil tank that had a wonderfully unique feel to its sound. Metallic and harsh, yet pleasing and musical in a way. You can feel the history and baggage of the place only through its sound. A few days later, I walked through the some underground caves on the coast of Enoshima, expecting long reverberation tails echoing across the huge tunnels of stone. To my huge surprise, it sounded nothing like that! It was dry, almost deafening in its silence. Right away, I thought this kind of contrast and play on expectations can be used in future creations.
I think it’s important to experience as much as possible in life and carry those experiences in our creations. Especially in today’s world, with the advancements of AI, we need to draw from our own humanity, our own adventures and our daily lives to create something unique, interesting, and hopefully relatable too. It’s with that philosophy that we’ll continue to create the best audio possible.
What are you most proud of in Hell is Us?
Creating a game that’s fun, engaging, genuine, but also thematically relevant to the challenges humanity continually faces. The writing team did not shy away from showing the real atrocities of war, and Hell Is Us never sugarcoats or glorifies violence in any way. I think it’s a hard balance to stay uncompromising in that regard, and still keep a focus on making a game that’s enjoyable.
Hats off to our creative director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête and our general manager Yves Bordeleau for having the courage to tackle a game like this. I’m incredibly proud to have been part of this journey.
Back to talking about you a little bit; what kind of gamer are you? Is there a game or type of game you always go back to?
I play a very wide range of games: survival horrors, action, sports, visual novels, etc.
But if I had to choose one genre I always go back to, it’s JRPGs. I’m currently playing the latest Dragon Quest VII remake, it’s a lot of fun. Final Fantasy, Nier and Xenoblade are probably my favorite series: flashy visuals, epic philosophical story mixed with contrasting sense of humor, gorgeous soundtracks.
I also have a soft spot for anything with a David Lynch-esque feel. What the people at Remedy have been creating with Alan Wake and Control really resonates with me!