WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Potter

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◈ The Game Director that Returned from Hell ◈

Chapter 2

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I prided myself on my deep knowledge of fantasy.

And I wasn't really wrong.

I was a game director, after all.

Imagining things that didn't exist, planning them, developing their settings, and giving them a physical form to release into the world required plenty of reference material. In other words, input.

That was why I'd spent my life enjoying games, movies, comics, novels, and other forms of popular media since childhood.

Based on all that experience, I could say this.

“Yeonho! How long are you going to stay in your room?”

I'd gone back in time.

Back to a day in the fall of 2008, just after I'd finished my military service.

Back to when I was a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old.

Amazingly, the past had been waiting at the end of hell.

* * *

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't confused by my current situation.

I had definitely been a middle-aged man of forty-one when I died.

I'd left my job in 2023, and the game I'd developed alone had won its award in 2027, so that should have been about right.

I couldn't dismiss all those memories as a dream.

I had definitely existed in the future, and I had a way to prove that future was real.

[Ah! The Giants lose!!!]

“Ah, fuck! Those fucking bastards lost again! Again! I'm the idiot for believing in them!”

“What are you getting so angry about?”

“Goddammit! If I ever watch baseball again, I'm not human!”

Once again, I heard my father shouting outside. He was from Busan and a die-hard baseball fan.

In the 2008 postseason, the team my father supported had finally reached that glorious stage after a long absence. They had carried all their fans' hopes, only to betray those hopes with a swift elimination.

Events had played out exactly as I remembered.

What more proof could I need?

Putting aside the sad future in which my father would keep supporting that team for twenty years and prove himself an animal, my trip through time was now an established fact.

At that point, there was little reason to be surprised.

If my return to the past was real, hell must have been real too.

Or, looking at it the other way around, if hell existed, why should time travel be impossible?

There was no reason to turn away from the reality before me.

I simply had to accept it humbly.

It began the moment I made up my mind.

I lost track of time as I threw myself into a single task.

Scratch... Scratch...

With a pencil, I drew the landscapes of hell that still lingered in my memory on sheets of white A4 paper.

They were fragments of a wondrous world that made my heart race just by thinking back on it.

Turning what I'd seen into a game would be so much fun.

I wanted to share those sights.

That desire had stirred the unhealthy obsession that had ruled my previous life.

I felt a sense of urgency.

I was afraid these feelings might fade. Afraid time would wear away both the wonder and the memories.

As that fear took the shape of despair, I had no choice but to cut back on sleep and devote myself to recording that world.

I didn't stop at drawings. I added written notes and recorded every object that had made up that hell.

Throughout the process, my young brain worked like a well-oiled machine.

This was one step in turning those landscapes into a game.

What genre would it be? How big would it be?

What direction would the design take, and what level of performance could I achieve?

How much money did I have?

Time! How much time would I need?

The calculations never stopped.

I slowly narrowed the gap between reality and my ideal, searching for a point where the two could meet.

Then, when I'd more or less finished the first draft and the calculations...

'I can't wait.'

...I found myself so mad with thirst that I couldn't hold back any longer.

I went to the bathroom and washed my face to calm down, but neither the thirst nor the excitement faded.

All I saw was myself grinning in the mirror.

I couldn't argue if someone called me crazy.

I'd simply have to accept it.

But I was quite happy to do so.

No matter how many years passed, the thrill of having my creative drive stirred would never grow old.

At last, I made up my mind.

'Let's do this.'

I could do it.

This wasn't some impossible dream.

The doubts that had tormented me throughout my previous life were gone now.

If I'd truly returned to the past, and my previous life hadn't been a lie, then I was someone who was more than capable of doing this.

'I...'

...had already proved myself.

* * *

I pulled myself together and began planning in earnest.

A blank white page in a word processor filled my computer screen.

'First...'

I needed to assess my situation.

I already had a dream of what I wanted to make, but there was a lot to consider before I could shape it into something realistic.

In other words, I needed to know my limits.

I thought it through calmly.

'Funding is out.'

Right now, I was a twenty-two-year-old young man who had just finished his military service.

I had 2.4 million won saved from six months of tutoring after starting college, 800,000 won saved during my military service, and another 3.2 million won in an installment savings account I hadn't closed yet.

A total of 6.4 million won. That was all.

Then could I grow that money?

Unfortunately, no.

My knowledge of finance was far too limited to turn that 6.4 million won into enough money to do anything.

The only major financial crises I knew were the ones everyone knew about. Worse, I didn't even know exactly when they had happened.

Then did I have any other options?

Unfortunately, no.

'Staffing is out.'

I was in a position where I had to develop the game alone.

Complicated, labor-intensive work, or simply a huge amount of work, would be nearly impossible.

I couldn't recruit anyone either.

Even if I found someone who met my standards, they would have no reason to help a nobody like me make a game.

In short, I had nothing.

No money, no staff, and on top of that, this was 2008. Even the technology wasn't there.

'I'll have to compromise.'

Not on quality, but on scope.

There were only so many games I could make with limited resources.

An indie game. The equivalent of a low-budget independent film.

Fortunately, that was my area of expertise.

'Even better.'

I was someone who had won an award for a game I'd developed alone, after all.

Of course, the technological gap between then and now was enormous, but that didn't mean my know-how had disappeared.

No, considering that I could use methods and technologies that hadn't appeared yet, I was in an incredibly favorable position.

And wasn't 2008 right around the time indie games were starting to attract attention in the market?

I'd settled on a direction for development.

Now I needed to choose a genre.

Once I started settling on a direction, ideas poured out like water from a fountain.

'I can't make an indie game huge. I need to present the game in a way players can grasp intuitively, within a limited setting and a limited set of systems.'

What genre would let me do that?

Fear that made use of incompleteness.

An atmosphere that could make up for a low budget and a lack of staff.

Clear mechanics. In other words, straightforward controls.

An idea took shape.

'Pixel-art horror.'

It was a proven format.

The human brain had a tendency to piece together incomplete information and fill in the gaps.

From that perspective, the gaps in pixel art and its lack of fine detail were enough to stir the brain.

Several horror games had been built around that very idea. They had earned considerable recognition and praise, carving out a place in their era.

Of course, ordinary horror wouldn't be enough to hope for commercial success.

Horror games were a niche genre to begin with.

After all, how many people went looking for frightening experiences of their own free will?

If I made a game that only aimed to scare people, horror fans would chew it over a few times before spitting it out. That would be the end of it.

Besides, scaring people was far from my goal.

What I wanted to recreate wasn't fear, but hell itself.

I needed to change my approach.

Just like some of the leading games that had driven this market for years.

'Combine genres.'

A new kind of horror that wasn't limited to fear.

Combining it with another genre was the answer.

'There are already successful examples.'

There were horror franchises that had been loved worldwide from the heady days of the nineties right up to the present.

There were others that would begin winning that love in the years ahead.

Each had enough influence to spawn movies or television series, or even become a social phenomenon. All of them had tried combining horror with other genres.

And the most mainstream combination was this.

'Survival horror.'

It was “action.”

A genre where you didn't simply tremble in fear, but faced those horrors head-on and fought to overcome them.

A genre that offered catharsis through that struggle.

Survival horror action was one of the most popular forms of horror in the twenty-first century.

'I have just the thing.'

I immediately dug through the materials I'd gathered and pulled out a sheet.

A hell that suited this genre had come straight to mind.

It was a hell with very straightforward rules.

A smile spread across my face.

'It's perfect.'

The setting for my first game in this life would be the “Hell of the Self-Destructive.”

* * *

There was something I'd learned while walking through hell.

What that land called a sin was judged by standards different from the laws of the living world.

One of its many hells, the “Hell of the Self-Destructive,” showed that difference clearly.

“What did I do wrong?!”

That was what its prisoners said most often.

And they weren't entirely wrong.

Under human law, it was hard to call some of their sins crimes at all.

Hell accused them of one sin.

Failing to care for their own bodies.

And, by doing so, driving themselves to death.

...It was a hell I might have ended up in myself.

“I never hurt anyone else! Aaaaaagh!!!”

One sinner had ruined their liver and died from drinking too much.

Another had died after smoking rotted their lungs.

Those were the mild cases.

There were drug addicts.

There were masochists and people addicted to self-harm.

The crowning example was a man so deeply unwell that he'd done all of those things.

He always said the same thing.

“It's my body! I can do whatever I want with it!”

All he'd done was treat his own body however he wanted, so why did he have to suffer so much at someone else's hands?

But the jailer didn't answer him.

More precisely, the jailer was in no condition to answer.

Hairless blue skin, a scrawny body, and black rags.

Those were the first things I noticed about the jailers. A closer look revealed why communication was impossible.

The jailers' eyes and mouths were sewn shut.

Only traces remained of their noses, as though they'd been sliced off with a knife, and huge nails had been driven into their ears.

They represented the absence of communication.

With all their senses blocked, they carried out torture like machines.

They forced the prisoners into a position where no amount of screaming in agony would stop the pain.

Perhaps they were saying, “Now you can feel the despair your bodies must have felt.”

At any rate, this was what I'd chosen as the inspiration for my game.

“How long did you think we'd keep taking it?!!! Everyone!!! Let's kill those blue monsters!!!”

One day, a man had tried to free the prisoners.

He was the man I'd mentioned earlier, the one who had committed the greatest sins in this hell.

I had watched his uprising from beginning to end.

The prisoners and jailers had moved from room to room, locked in a vicious game of tag and brutal fighting.

Countless people had bled and fallen, but none had been able to die.

Hell was a place for those who were already dead.

“Aaaaagh!!!”

Naturally, it had ended in defeat for the prisoners.

Of course it had.

No matter how hard they struggled, there was nowhere in hell for them to escape.

What mattered was that the incident had given me more than enough inspiration.

An uprising in the Hell of the Self-Destructive.

I took that day's act of rebellion and gave it the form of a survival horror action game.

Art Director (1)

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