Interviews
‘Hektor’s “Jigsaw” System is a Dynamic Step Forward for Horror
From developer Rubycone comes Hektor, a first-person psychological game that visually calls to mind titles like Penumbra and Amnesia but features a quite unique little gameplay twist: as players explore the world, the world itself changes dynamically around them.
We have seen plenty of procedurally-generated games over the last few years but few-to-none which feature a system that shifts so dramatically during play, rather than during loading screens, between scenes, or after in-game deaths.
The members of Rubycone sat down for a phone interview all the way from GDC to discuss the particulars of Hektor just before its slated March 13 release.
The Jigsaw System
The idea came about when Project Lead Felix Nordanåker and Programmer Michael Notarnicola met on Reddit and began working together on a game idea, which eventually hit a snag and fizzled. The collaboration was re-sparked by a message a few months later, when Nordanåker told Notarnicola about the Hektor project and asked if he could design a system that could rearrange geometry and shift rooms around the player, a prospect that intrigued Notarnicola.
What they came up with is something they call the Jigsaw System, and it is the mechanic at the heart of Hektor. Notarnicola said, “It really is the core building block to the rest of the experience. We like to think of it kind of like the AI Director from Left 4 Dead.”
The Jigsaw System keeps a constant tally on players, as they make their way through the game, and the effect is intensified as players become uncertain or lost or afraid. It actually increases the level of insanity as players come into contact with monsters or other in-game effects.
Notarnicola said, “This insanity value that we are keeping track of over the course of your playthrough is essential, really, to all of the systems that branch off of it, such as the the dynamic music system that Shaun and Felix worked on.”
Players who get lost and lean toward insanity might experience darker, more foreboding environments — basements and so forth — as opposed to more sterile, well-lighted office spaces until they find their emotional footing again. It is sort of a cyclical system: players who get lost act more irrationally, which then drives the player increasingly insane.
It seems like an interesting way to keep players on their toes without relying on scripted jump scares, which only really work once. And for those worried about encountering a Shining-style maze moment, do not fret: the game constantly assesses the player’s location and can nudge the player in the right direction to keep the experience moving forward.
The Story
The story is sort of BioShock-ian in nature, since players are trapped in an abandoned, sort of dystopian underground facility in Greenland, and though the narrative came later, after the development of the in-game systems, it fits perfectly with a horror-themed game.
“Felix [Nordanåker] had the core idea of being trapped in this defunct mind control facility in Greenland,” Notarnicola said. “Once we kind of had that idea — we had done some research on it — but we knew from that point that that’s kind of a cool direction that we wanted to head in.” He later added, “At a later point, we did fit other aesthetics — a timeline, a story — that kind of melded into it somewhat naturally after we started with the core concept.”
One of the more compelling bits of pre-release footage was stock footage rendered as a documentary about the underground station where the game takes place, and Composer and SFX Designer Shaun Chasin put the game into perspective by discussing it: “Hektor is a very dystopian world, sort of the worst of the worst it could be, and so with that video, we almost thought about it as if it were a propaganda film, where the government puts it out and they’re like, ‘Look how grand everything is. Like, even the dog is helping out…but then it’s this terrible, terrible thing.’”
In addition to the creepy, ever-changing world in Hektor the game features a monster that will trail, menace, and attack you, but the developers are keeping mum about that particular aspect of the game. “When it comes to the details that haven’t been announced, we’ve kind of kept that under wraps. We don’t want to reveal too much. We want the first experience for every player to have a certain…finesse to it.”
One of those “core set[s] of things” as yet unreleased involves a monster deemed “The Predator.” Notarnicola said, “We’ve been really hesitant to release a lot of information regarding him, because we really are anticipating that first, initial reaction that players will have to seeing it.”
It is apparent, even without the revelation of what, exactly, this monster is, that combat is not in the cards for the protagonist of Hektor. And even though players can run, they are, for obvious reasons, encouraged to avoid any contact whatsoever.
The Music
The music, too, is dynamic, as is explained by Composer Shaun Chasin. They used a 40 piece string orchestra to give the soundscape some depth, but they also knew they needed to be able to construct an aural experience as varied as the visual one.
“We created this score that is able to change itself based on your actions and your behavior, as well as your progress into the game and specific events, [like] your insanity level,” said Chasin.
Additionally, each element of the game, including the monsters, possesses an original leitmotif or theme that accompanies an appearance in the game. If a monster looms nearby, its theme might be introduced and blended into the current musical score, and as players proceed into or recede from an encounter, the music changes to fit that experience, too.
To compound the feeling of paranoia within the game, the sound design is also meant to toy with the player’s sense of reality. Chasin said, “We’ve edited the audio in such a way and placed [hallucinations] in the game that you’re unsure, often, if it’s coming from your own mind or if you’re actually hearing that girl crying from behind the door or if you’re just imagining it altogether.”
He added, “You might go looking for a sound, and it gets closer as you get closer to the door, but then it sort of dissipates and some of them are quiet enough that you’re like, ‘Did I hear that at all? Am I actually going crazy while playing this game, or is it just the game?’”
Horror games have traditionally preyed upon the idea of messing with the player’s sense of sanity as a game construct, but until recently, those experiences had to be scripted and choreographed in a cinematic way to create tension. With games like Hektor, the scares will hopefully prove to be more organic and driven by player experience, rather than wrought manipulation.
Hektor is produced by Meridian 4 and will be available on Windows and Mac via Steam next week. You can find the developers online at meridian4.com.
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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