Ash Huang on the Art of Limbo



"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"

These are the words in the poem that are inscribed over the threshold that takes Dante and Virgil on their epic journey into Hell. Likewise for the development team of Inferno, it also represented our first level during pre-production and the first stop of what would become an incredible journey of creativity for the art team.

From a visual standpoint, we always knew that while we could deliver on the fire and brimstone aspects of Hell, we also wanted to make sure we spent some time thinking about how we could offer new interpretations on old notions of Hell. In the early days, we had a pretty small team working on ideation on Limbo...and for that matter the game. Bringing on numerous visions during concept exploration, we decided why not contact Wayne Barlowe as he had done a fair amount of thinking on the topic of Hell. For those of you who might not know him, Wayne's an amazing concept artist whose body of work has spanned film, books, television, and videogames. He's done concept work for the Hellboy and Blade franchises, and his published work ‘Barlowe's Inferno' is an incredibly crazy cool book of paintings based on a journey through Hell....he was a natural choice and we were pretty stoked when he agreed to come onboard the project. In any case, one of our first reinterpretations was the design of Charon, the old boatman responsible for ferrying the Shades (aka the Damned) across the River Acheron. Typically, he's illustrated as a single old man in a small boat with a single oar. Given that we wanted a more epic sensibility, we worked with Wayne to re-interpret him into actually being the boat and one of a significantly larger scale - think cruise ship size. We ask a lot of ‘what if' questions during concept ideation and oftentimes it leads in pretty cool directions.

From an environment standpoint, we knew that we had to make sure that the player was aware that they weren't in Kansas in anymore. We wanted to imbue a sense of awe, mystery, and horror all at once upon arrival. It's important to note that Limbo isn't quite Hell proper yet...it's really the front door- the Ellis Island of Hell- where the Shades come to be processed and ferried to Minos who is the judge of the Damned. It is his responsibility to sentence and ultimately define where in Hell each of the Shades is sent to spend all of eternity. As we make our way through the first half of the level, we are surrounded by screaming Shades dropping from the sky, waterfalls of bodies, and huddled masses making their way to Charon. By the time we cross the mysterious River of Acheron and come to the shores of Limbo proper, we are greeted with a set of buildings that are suspended- fixed not to the firmament of the earth but held in balance...suspended much like the theme of the level. For the art team, it's important that visually we're amplifying the gameplay and the pacing that the story is developing so we wanted to make sure that the environment began to pick up the tempo as we moved towards the final encounter with Minos. We couldn't miss an opportunity to stage a battle with the Unbaptized babies during this part of the story and the audio on these guys is downright creepy (pay attention to the architectural columns in the Hall of the Unbaptized babies as well). For Minos' court, we wanted a sense of macabre theatricality...it is afterall, a spectacle of sorts where Minos holds court sentencing the Shades and spiking them on a wheel that defines what circle they will be cast to. For the architecture we rolled together stadium and theater design into an imposing architecture designed to frame and elevate Minos. While the battle itself is epic, Limbo really only scratches the surface of the surreal horror that the player will encounter in subsequent circles of Hell. In some ways, it is one of the more ‘tame' levels...afterall, it is only the doorstep into what will be a much darker journey of descent...we hope you'll enjoy the ride!


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