The burgeoning “friendslop” genre isn’t prepared for its scariest — and most personal — entry yet. Eyes of Hellfire is an upcoming co-op horror game in which 3-5 players must collectively survive in a house of horrors while working to deduce who they can and cannot trust, and the developers at its Dublin-based studio, Gambrinous, want you to play it with your real-life friends.
The game (which is published by Blumhouse and set to launch sometime in August) includes both board game and tabletop elements, and is set in an explorable environment that’s full of puzzles to solve and violent entities to face. But in Eyes of Hellfire, players will be tested by more than paranormal enemies — friends, too, may become the source of conflict. Polygon spoke with the studio’s co-owners, game director Colm Larkin and art director Fred Mangan, to dig up the dirt on this uniquely macabre take on the co-op horror genre and find out why it’s best played with those you hold near and dear.
Naturally, our first question was regarding the game’s vivid title.
“So it comes from this historical place outside Dublin where we are based, called the Hellfire Club,” Larkin told Polygon via video call. “It’s an old ruin dating back to the 1700s, late 1700s. In the ‘90s onwards, it’s a great place for urban legends. It’s on a kind of hill just outside Dublin that you can hike to, and it’s a desolate ruin and all these cool urban legends that [Mangan and I had] both heard of when we were younger, [rumors] about like, you know, ‘Oh, go up there at night and you’ll see the devil.’ Things like that. And we were kind of looking for some cool setting for a new game concept. Fred and Len, our writer, put this [idea] together, hedged around the historical Hellfire Club at Dublin.”
“It’s worth saying as well that in addition to the more modern urban myths around the place, it always had rumor and suspicion of [these] kinds of ‘dark happenings’ going on up there,” Mangan added. “Even back in the 18th century when it was a gentleman’s club, effectively.”
But Irish folklore wasn’t the only source of inspiration for the team. Gambrinous has a long history of creating tabletop games and board games, and says that those roots are tangible in Eyes of Hellfire.
“Our studio DNA here is tabletop and board games,” Larkin said. “That’s kind of our pool of inspiration. You can see that in our past titles — Guild of Dungeoneering, Cardpocalypse — and we’ve been experimenting with group play. So this is our first foray into multiplayer.”
Larkin describes the game as “friction co-op.” Players are ultimately working as a team, but each of them is given a curse card, cursing them with a more self-serving goal they must complete to lift their curse.
“[Eyes of Hellfire] is walking a little bit of a line towards hidden role gameplay, which exists in board games going as far back as like, Werewolf and fun social games like that, really popularized by Among Us, which is kind of like, ‘find the traitor,’” Larkin explained. “That’s the gameplay in those two [games], we’re trying to do something a little subtler.”
A player’s curse card may require them to get revived three times before the group goal is met, a challenge that might make one more likely to act in a manner that would not serve the group — for instance, wandering off alone in hopes of getting attacked by a spirit. Players can revive each other as many times as needed, but each time a player is revived, their maximum hitpoints are reduced. If all players are downed, it’s game over. Gambrinous is working on a variety of scenarios for players to explore, each with a different group goal: escape the building, get into a locked room, find or steal something of importance. But that goal is complicated by each player’s curse.
“Everyone is given a private agenda to achieve. That’s their curse, lifting their curse through the couple of hours of gameplay [in] a scenario, and that is not always team-friendly. So you’re asked to keep [the curse] secret, and you need to kind of figure out a way to achieve this while playing for the team,” Larkin said.
Players can win as a team by completing their group goal, but there’s a twist: One of the curses is called Eyes of Hellfire. At the end of the game, the player who had the Eyes of Hellfire curse card is challenged to correctly guess the curse of one of the other players in the group. Should they guess correctly, the player cursed by Eyes of Hellfire can wrest the win away from the rest of the team.
“At the end of gameplay, the Eyes of Hellfire player — you don’t know who it is — has been watching, and if you’ve made it too obvious that your hidden agenda, say, was to steal three items from other players over the course of the game, me, as the Eyes of Hellfire player, might be able to guess that and basically snatch the win from you,” Larkin explained. “So there’s a group win — you want to achieve things together — and then there’s an extra personal win of lifting your curse.
“The Eyes player is never a full traitor. They have the opportunity to kind of steal the win from someone at the very end of the game, but not cancel the whole group. Actually, as the Eyes [of Hellfire] player, you need to win, you need to escape together [or] whatever your [group] goal is in this scenario. You need to cooperatively win, but also figure out what one person is up to and catch them out.”
Players navigate through Eyes of Hellfire’s creepy lodge in their own small pools of light, but it’s hard to see things without getting close to them, and the game’s environments are unforgivingly dark and riddled with danger. Proximity chat also makes wandering off alone a dangerous feat, but venturing into the dark alone is an integral part of the game, and the game’s turn-based design includes meetings each round during which all players can hear each other, discuss what happened in the last round, and call for help if they’ve wandered too far away to be heard via proximity chat.
“We’ve got quite a punitive light system, you might say, where the player walks with a very small halo of light around them, and a lot of stuff happens in the darkness,” Mangan said. “So we’re pushing for players to explore the space. Traditionally, where you’d see a room in a game, and you might hover your mouse over things and know that they’re interactable. [In Eyes of Hellfire], until you actually move across and stand next to something, you don’t know if it’s interactable or not. So we are encouraging the player to go explore in those spaces. If there’s someone with them, great. If not, then they’re hearing all the kind of creepy stuff. So [we’ve] deliberately taken [out] some kind of usability or gameplay systems that people are quite used to, like showing the interactables — we won’t let you [see them from a distance]. You have to approach things.”
Visually, the game employs a black-and-white watercolor aesthetic with jarring blots of red highlighting its more horrifying elements.
“Thematically and story-wise, our writer, Len [Cunningham], is a huge horror fan, and they kind of drove the story behind it, but they’ve drawn from a very broad spectrum of references and inspiration from back to the romantic Gothic novelists: the Shelleys, the Byrons,” Mangan said of the game’s artistic and narrative inspiration. “Oscar Wilde plays a bit of a part in there. Dorian Gray is a bit of a reference — there’s a few references in there — and Bram Stoker is a local boy [to Dublin] as well. So, yeah, there’s certainly features from Gothic horror, sort of traditional kind of things. Art-wise, similarly, it’s drawing a lot from kind of the romanticists and the Gothic horror kind of stuff. So all of the etchings that would famously feature in those Gothic novels are a big draw for us, certainly.”
Larkin says the game is definitely creepy (especially given the limited sources of light and proximity chat limiting communication), but assured Polygon that it’s not an experience that relies on repeated jumpscares.
“So drawing kind of on the Gothic horror experience, it’s not combat heavy, and it’s not intense jumpscares heavy,” Larkin said. It’s slower paced, [there’s a] sense of foreboding, exploring spaces together, the feeling of kind of not wanting to go off by yourself, though sometimes you’d be drawn to.”
The game allows for a great deal of deceit as well. For instance, if a player’s curse requires them to steal from other players, they can easily do so while reviving a downed comrade.
“So for example, if a player gets downed by a monster, other players need to come and revive them,” Larkin explained. “While you’re standing there, you can very easily steal from them. It’s a good time to get away with that, because you also could then revive them, and it’s kind of [a] good cover.”
The secretive nature of Eyes of Hellfire’s gameplay naturally leads to players pointing fingers at each other, growing more suspicious with each round as they all try to achieve both the group goal and their private curse card challenge. For that reason, Larkin says Eyes of Hellfire is best played with real-life friends. In fact, the game has no matchmaking mode, but players can visit the #matchmaking channel on the studio’s official Discord server to meet other players and group up. The game also has lobby codes that can be shared between players.
“This [game] is really intended as a friends group game, not to be played with total strangers,” Larkin told Polygon. “Because [with friends], you’re investing in a very different way. You have proximity voice chat on, you need to do that with your friends. And then the idea of friend group accusations coming from a history of [playing] other games [with each other] sometimes is really powerful. We’ve seen that in our [sessions] — I’ll be accused of being power-gaming, and ‘He’s always lying to try and get ahead!’ And this comes not from our own game sometimes, it’s from our other past history of doing that in other games. So [a] friends group is important there.”
The finger-pointing often becomes even more chaotic when The Host — a mysterious figure (voiced by Irish actor Liam Cunningham of Game of Thrones and Three Body Problem fame) who invited each player to the Hellfire Club — offers struggling players a deal mid-game.
“A bit into the session, you might have failed your chance to lift that curse,” Larkin explained. “There’s a chance then the host will appear to you — and only you — and offer you a deal, like, ‘Oh, do you want to get a new curse? Do you want to get a second chance?’”
But second chances and secret deals come at a price.
“[The] payment for that kind of deal is usually anti-team, so you all pay,” Larkin elaborated. “So a lot of accusations and finger-pointing is [going] around: ‘Did you just take a deal? Is that why we all got knocked over?’ It’s that kind of cool, like, ‘Who did that?’ moment. When that payment pops up, there’s always discussion around who it was that has triggered that.”
There’s a lot going on in Eyes of Hellfire, but Larkin summed up the game quite succinctly when prompted.
“It’s the gothic horror experience for a friends group where you explore a lodge, where not everything is as it seems,” he told Polygon. “Including your friendships.”
Eyes of Hellfire is set to release on Windows PC sometime in August, but if you’re eager to get your hands on it early, you can request access to its upcoming beta, which goes live July 30.
