If you’ve been keeping an eye on the survival horror space, you may have caught one of the more unsettling trailers to come out of Summer Game Fest 2025. Team Clout and Mundfish Powerhouse debuted a new trailer for the realistic action survival horror ILL during Summer Game Fest, showcasing the game’s sleek graphics and grotesque enemies. The reaction from horror fans was immediate and overwhelmingly intrigued.
ILL is a realistic first-person action survival horror game that takes you into a dark fort overtaken by a mysterious entity. Unpredictable monsters, a visceral dismemberment system, and realistic physics create an atmosphere of relentless terror. The story follows a protagonist pushing deeper into a massive research fort to save someone precious to him, while a nameless evil and the monstrous creatures it spawns stand in his way.
What sets ILL apart from the crowded survival horror field is its pedigree. The developers of ILL are seasoned horror experts whose contributions can be seen in acclaimed films and series such as V/H/S/Beyond, Longlegs, IT: Welcome to Derry, Azrael, and various Sony Pictures horror projects. These aren’t game developers who just happen to like horror films. These are people who have actually built the monsters and shaped the dread in some of the genre’s recent standouts.
Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game’s physics system allows grotesque monsters to be mutilated and torn apart. Alongside a special binaural audio system, players will “feel the agony in every scream” when playing. On the gameplay side, players will have to maintain each weapon by checking for malfunctions, installing modifications, and upgrading it as they continue deeper into the fort. And yes, there is inventory management.
The survival horror revival is real. Games like Resident Evil Village, Silent Hill 2 and Alan Wake 2 have proven that there’s a massive, hungry audience for the genre done well. ILL arrives with some compelling advantages: cinematic horror expertise, next-gen tech, and the production muscle of a studio that has already shipped a 10-million-player game.
The wildcard, as always, will be execution. Mundfish’s own Atomic Heart showed that striking visuals and a great concept aren’t enough on their own. Polish, pacing, and storytelling matter just as much. But where Atomic Heart stumbled in narrative and occasionally in gameplay feel, ILL seems laser-focused: it’s not trying to be an open-world RPG shooter. It’s aiming to be the most viscerally terrifying first-person horror experience possible.
ILL doesn’t have a release date just yet, but horror fans can wishlist the game now on Steam. Given what the trailer showed and who’s behind it, it’s already one of the more intriguing horror titles on the horizon. Whether Team Clout can deliver on that potential is the question but with Mundfish Powerhouse’s infrastructure and expertise behind them, the foundation looks unusually solid for a debut studio.
Keep your eyes on this one.