Mikael Hedberg makes video game nightmares

“You fool! Warren is dead,” snarls Mikael Hedberg, oozing menace. The Swedish game developer has just finished retelling one of his favourite short stories by author H.P. Lovecraft, The Statement Of Randolph Carter, which is about two occultists that go looking for a portal to the underworld. As you may have guessed, it ends badly for plucky investigator Harley Warren – who disappears into a monster-infested Louisiana crypt and is never seen again.

Chatting to NME via Zoom from Copenhagen, Denmark, a short drive from his home, Hedberg is faring much better than poor Warren. He’s one of the key writers behind video game Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a creepy modern-day classic that rocketed indie developer Frictional Games to fame. He followed it up with deep-sea scare-a-thon Soma, and is now directing Alone In The Dark – a reboot of the gothic 1992 survival horror that inspired Resident Evil. If he wanted a snappy slogan for his website, it could soon be ‘the Stephen King of video games’. That’s how fast his star is rising.

Ask him though, and he’ll say he owes more to Lovecraft. As well as devouring the author’s short stories, Hedberg obsessed over role-playing board game Call Of Cthulhu. Based on the 1928 tale, Call Of Cthulhu tasks one player with running the game while everyone else tries to unravel esoteric mysteries without their characters dying or losing their minds to supernatural terrors. “We played the hell out of that one,” laughs Hedberg. “I found that I was often the storyteller… I especially like that type of horror – diving into the existential.”

Yet Hedberg wasn’t drawn in because of the green, tentacled monsters. “I don’t know if I enjoy horror as much as I enjoy telling the stories of horror,” he admits. It’s not the gore and violence of the form that captivates him, but the twisted way in which his heroes invite their own doom. “If somebody gets eaten by the monster, it’s like, alright,” he says, with a small shrug. “But if you put yourself in that position, where it’s like, ‘Oh shit – the thing I was worrying about, that was sort of inevitably going to happen, has happened?’ I like that stuff.”

It’s a theme that runs through Hedberg’s work. Daniel, the protagonist of Frictional’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is forced into a Prussian castle and hunted by supernatural monsters due to his own horrific experiments. The 2010 game had a massive cultural impact. It launched the careers of now-famous YouTubers like PewDiePie, and inspired a wave of developers.

It was Hedberg’s breakout role as a writer, and he remembers the small studio punching above its weight by intelligently exploring the nature of evil. “It’s become a cult hit, but while making it, you couldn’t have known. It was just a few guys trying to make a game,” says Hedberg. “We were basing it on the Stanford experiment [a controversial psychological study that turned students into prisoners and guards at a mock prison], and trying to understand the mentality of being a prison guard at Auschwitz – really lofty ideas. It almost makes me laugh thinking back on it, but it was one of those things where you aim for the stars and end up in the treetops.”

This kind of optimistic metaphor is typical of Hedberg. Despite his macabre day job, we find him a bouncy, cheerful man. He’s quick to poke fun at himself, joking that Amnesia’s success didn’t make him rich, and goes on long, excitable tangents before realising he’s forgotten the question he’s supposed to be answering. He’s thoughtful and articulate when it comes to discussing his craft, and although Amnesia’s impact didn’t reach his wallet, it teed up the next big chapter of his life.

“You have a voice in your mind while writing things, but when somebody actually says the words, something happens”

We’re talking about Soma. Released in 2015, it’s a terrifying game set deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, in a research outpost overrun by mutants. Its themes about “the nature of being human and the human experience,” are, again, lofty – but like Amnesia, hit the mark. In 2016, it was nominated for three awards (including Best Storytelling) at the prestigious Golden Joystick Awards, and went on to sell more than one million copies on PC alone. Hedberg describes it as his “proudest moment”. Importantly, it also introduced him to the world of voice direction.

When Hedberg flew to London to direct the game’s voice acting, he discovered actors are “really interesting” to work with. “You have a voice in your mind while writing things,” he explains. “But when somebody actually says the words, something happens. They imbue it with value – I always love that part.”

His experience came in handy when he was approached by Pieces Interactive, a Swedish studio, to direct Alone In The Dark. A noir reimagining of the ‘90s game of the same name, Alone In The Dark tasks players with venturing into the American deep south during the 1930s, where artist Jeremy Hartwood has gone missing in the haunted halls of Derceto Manor.

The game begins when Hartwood’s niece, Emily Hartwood, hires private investigator Edward Carnby to help find her uncle. You can choose to play as either, and how the story plays out depends on who you pick. Hartwood, who struggles with grief and loneliness, is more emotionally invested in the manor’s supernatural goings-on, while Carnby brings grizzled professionalism to the spiralling investigation.

Originally, it was going to be “much cheaper” but when publisher THQ Nordic saw development was “going places”, Hedberg was asked to put together his dream list of actors to play the game’s two protagonists. Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer was brought on board to play Hartwood, while David Harbour of Stranger Things fame was cast as Carnby. A “huge restructuring” of the project followed, says Hedberg.

In Stranger Things, Harbour plays a character that’s very similar to Carnby – troubled sheriff Jim Hopper, whose job plunges him into a supernatural mystery. Hedberg says he wrote much of Carnby with Hopper in mind, but Comer was the one who connected deepest with the work. Hedberg says Comer made key changes to Hartwood’s dialogue which resulted in more time spent dissecting her traumatic past – and less of the lighter back-and-forth that originally drove her interactions with Carnby.

“You will never trump your own imagination – it’s impossible”

“[Jodie] latched onto something I had almost forgotten: that she’s the tragic character of the game,” says Hedberg. “Her uncle is stuck in an asylum, and she feels she’s afflicted by a family curse. When I heard her [in the recording booth], I was like: ‘This is so much better!’”

As a result, Hartwood is more serious than Hedberg originally envisioned. It’s a change that he’s “very thankful” for, and he suspects that his writing had been influenced by the title’s lofty reputation. “There’s a level of prestige to Alone In The Dark that wasn’t in Amnesia or Soma,” he says. “They were much darker – starker, almost – and it’s kind of tragic. But here, it had almost gone the other way, in that I’d been leaning too far into the prestige. I’m very thankful for discovering the sadness and tragedy a bit more again – looking back on it, I wish we could have leaned even more into that.”

If Alone In The Dark is half as scary as Amnesia or Soma, we’ll be in for a petrifying experience when it launches in March. Hedberg says he’s used all of his clever tricks this time around, but was careful not to overdo it. “To me, horror is more like a colour on the palette,” he says, before referencing the post-apocalyptic, hugely popular Fallout series. They’re action games, but usually include small, deeply frightening areas – such as Salem’s Museum of Witchcraft in Fallout 4, where you’re stalked by a bloodthirsty mutant Deathclaw, or Fallout 3’s haunted Dunwich Building. “If a game or story uses too much of that colour, you call it a horror game.

“As a genre, I think it can sometimes be a little bit too much,” he adds, laughing. “I enjoy that shadowy land between the horror genre and plain drama.”

In building up to the perfect scare, Hedberg stresses that a state of normality is crucial. Tip-toeing around spoilers, he says that Alone In The Dark plays out “in a way where the player can’t, for sure, know if things are happening or not,” so they aren’t constantly asking why Hartwood and Carnby haven’t just “run for the hills”.

Additionally, Hedberg knows that true fear doesn’t always come from grotesque monsters, charging at you down a dimly-lit corridor. It’s the dark shadows around them – and what they might be hiding – that keeps people on edge. When the beasties do finally emerge, Hedberg says he and his team are at a disadvantage compared to authors like Lovecraft so they have to work harder.

“I enjoy that shadowy land between the horror genre and plain drama”

“[Lovecraft] will say things like ‘It was the most horrible thing you could ever imagine’ – then I tell my art director, and he’s like, ‘fuck you, because now I need to make ‘the most horrible thing’,’” says Hedberg. “You will never trump your own imagination – it’s impossible.”

Trying to do so in Alone In The Dark has been a massive undertaking for Hedberg, who was keen to tell his own story rather than rehash the original with a direct remake. He still remembers getting a “little too creeped out” playing the first game back in 1995, and recently got to discuss his version with series creator Frédérick Raynal. “I feel like I’ve found six statues in a museum, and I felt an obsession to make a seventh,” Hedberg remembers telling Raynal, referencing the series’ six games so far. “I destroyed all the existing ones so I could build a new one from the old pieces – I had to burn everything down so I could make something new.”

During our chat, it’s fitting that Hedberg chooses to retell The Statement Of Randolph Carter. Although the story marks curtains for Warren, it’s also the beginning of an incredible, often terrifying journey for Carter. Hedberg is on a similar trajectory. Last September, he won a Lifetime Achievement Award at 2023’s Horror Game Awards. Now, his debut game as director is just months away from launching. For horror fans, those months of waiting will seem to go on forever – but if there’s anything Hedberg is good at, it’s building suspense.

‘Alone In The Dark’ launches on March 20 for PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S