I Gave Dread Delusion A 4/10, Then Interviewed Its Creative Director. It Went Great

It’s a fact of life, you can’t please everybody. It’s also a fact that the job of the critic is easier than the job of the artist. Well, I’m a critic, and I wasn’t very pleased with Dread Delusion. In fact, I was so unpleased with it, I gave it a 4/10. One of the lowest scores I’ve ever handed out.

And then, at PAX West, I met James Wragg, the creative director of Dread Delusion and founder of Lovely Hellplace. Of all of the people I met at PAX, this was the discussion that I was most excited for, and the one I was most nervous for. After all, why should James give me the time of day? He, and a collection of a great many developers, put their hearts into Dread Delusion, worked for years on it, and then I came along and gave it what is, to date, its lowest score on OpenCritic.

To complicate things, in the time since I gave Dread Delusion a 4/10, I’d come to be quite a fan of James Wragg’s other work. The comics available on his website are some of the most fascinating surrealist works I’ve come across online in some time. His penchant for literary references is something I appreciate deeply. His animations are stellar. And his previous game Shatter, released as part of the first Dread X Collection, was a lot more up my alley than Dread Delusion.

Still, sitting on the couch at publisher DreadXP’s booth at PAX West, waiting for James Wragg to finish chatting with someone else, I regretted that score. Just a bit. Had James read it? Would he take it badly? Or would I just end up essentially dissing one of the reportedly kindest, most creative people in the industry?

Thankfully, the answer to all of the above was “no,” and even after being made aware of my less-than-favorable score of Dread Delusion, what followed was one of the most earnest and insightful conversations I had at PAX West. James Wragg is a captivating person, but I’ll let him prove that in the following, excellent interview:

Graves: Hello, James. Nice to meet you. I’m Graves. Do you want to introduce yourself to our audience?

James Wragg: Yeah! I’m James Wragg, the Creative Director of Dread Delusion, a low-poly, horror RPG set in a strange world with dark perils and interesting places to explore.

Graves: Yeah, I’m familiar with it, actually. I’ve played through Dread Delusion — I did so for a review a few months ago. More than anything, I wanted to let you know that I absolutely loved the world, from the Oneiric Isles to the Apostic Union. Before we get more into my thoughts on the game, let me ask about that: what are some of the inspirations that you took in order to create Dread Delusion’s fascinating world.

James: Yeah, yeah, it’s very interesting. Part of what it came out of — remember, most of the game takes place in these floating islands in the sky — so part of what it came out of was me just starting with game design. As I was messing around with Unity, I found it easier to make surreal landscapes just by placing these flying islands around. There is an ease to it.

I started out just experimenting with Unity, and just worked backwards from there. Making the art match, making lore to explain, sort of, how these floating islands got here. What’s on them? That sort of thing.

The funny thing was, once we funded it, and we had loads of money, there was no reason to stick with that. But, you know, by then, it’s a core of the game. And we are all very attached to that core. These islands, they represented so much. They grew out of ease and inexperience, but even when we started working harder and got more experience, they just stuck. We used that to polish them up.

And so, those floating islands, they were a limitation. They were a really good creative prompt, to come up with interesting stories. The whole prompt for the story came out of that game design, that Unity work, as a limitation. But it grew.

Graves: That makes perfect sense. You hear it so often how limitations breed creativity. And, it’s interesting, your limitations seem to lend themselves toward surrealism. But Dread Delusion is certainly not your first foray into surrealism, between your comics, your animations, and your previous games, there is something that seems to lure you toward surrealism, outside of just ease.

James: Yeah, there are some themes I return to a lot. Eldritch Gods and such, in a different way that you usually think of, yeah. I guess there are some themes that abstraction just lends itself to. For me, anyway.

Graves: I would definitely say your works that I’ve read are full of themes. It’s good that you mention Eldritch Gods because it sure seems that religion and gods are on your mind a lot in your work, especially Dread Delusion. Do you want to extrapolate on that?

James: Yeah, great question! Well, I guess part of that came out of the fact that, well… I’m from England, see? And England is not really a religious country. Like we aren’t usually — at least I was not — raised religious. And so it is easy to grow up in England without really hearing much about God, even though we are literally surrounded by churches. Big, old churches. But, I also think there is a negative side to atheism, and even agnosticism. Especially on the internet, where you’ve got these militant atheists.

Ultimately, I believe that it doesn’t really matter what other people believe, which, I think, is a common enough sentiment. I believe that whatever makes you happy, you know. That’s great.

But in Dread Delusion, you’ve got the Apostatic Union, who are kind of a reaction to this kind of toxic atheism. Even though I don’t believe in god or any kind of spirituality, they show what it is like to force others to be like that. They are militant, and they’ve just replaced religion with hate, and that’s my critique there. So, yeah, thematically, the factions in Dread Delusion are all very militant about their beliefs. Very unwelcoming. And whatever gaps they have in their beliefs aren’t filled in with anything.

And then there is also the aspect that having these militant atheists did make is easy to have these sort of big battles in the lore, between gods and airships. Ramp up the size.

Graves: I can see that, for sure. And I hear you about how cool it makes the world. One of the most iconic locations in Dread Delusion is a tavern built into the skull of a gigantic, dead god. One of the ones that the Apostatic Union killed. It really highlights how these themes can turn into design and aesthetic, both on the epic scale and the small details. Another example is the Clockwork Kingdom.

James: Yeah, those are amazing areas. I really like the Clockwork Kingdom. Our lead writer Io Brindle wrote that area, and her attention to detail is astounding. We also had Harry Tuffs write another area. And I wrote the Apostatic Union and the main quest. So a lot of those details just comes from having this amazing, small team. Everyone on the team had a wealth of ideas, of inspiration.

And we were each working on the things that interested us most, that we found most fascinating, and so we really cared to give them those small details. And then there is some extra effort in linking those together… The whole process, with all these creative people, it really makes the difference. Having the time and passion to focus on these ideas is what matters: if you have a group of writers, and you leave each of them alone with a piece of paper, the details… They just fill themselves in.

Graves: I’m a creative writer myself, and so I get that. You can start with a blank piece of paper, and just create. And you have this video game structure — what you talked about before, with limitations and a unifying idea — you have some direction to get you inspired. I’m sure with creative people like yourself and those on your team, it just flows.

James: What I’d also say is that when I’m writing up something, the main thing on my mind is to not do the obvious thing. Not only because, with Dread Delusion, we pride ourselves on being something a bit weird, a bit strange, but also because it makes the world more interesting. As long as you think “what’s the normal thing an RPG would do?” and then twist that just a tiny bit, you’ll end up with Dread Delusion how it is today. Something really special.

Graves: Definitely. You can see that in a lot of quests, and the decisions you make at the end of them. The moral choices are never the kind of simple, black-and-white choices that we see so often in games. There is no “right” answer to them, unlike in most RPGs. A lot of characters think they have the right answer, but the Prisoner [protagonist] in Dread Delusion has to make these choices where there just isn’t one. Focusing on that, what was the process for making these morally ambiguous, unorthodox quests in Dread Delusion?

James: Hmm… I’d really say that the moral choices, and why I lean towards them, is just a reflection of how I see the world. When you look at politics on the world stage — things like climate change, wars going on, more — usually, there isn’t a right answer. In spite of how games usually are, there isn’t one.

Like, if you were some kind of magical RPG character wandering the real world, with the power to make these choices, you couldn’t solve all the problems. The world isn’t a superhero movie. You can’t just point to the right way to do things.

I think this mentality is a very late 20th-century mentality. After World War 2, you had this devastating war where the Nazis really were the bad guys. They really were the simple, immoral villains, and there really was this strong moral cause. But after, in the later 20th Century, and into the 21st Century, that isn’t there anymore. Things aren’t open and shut. And so I wondered… Why are RPGs like that? Even the ‘morally gray’ ones still have good and bad choices, a lot of the time. And that’s just not how I see the world.

Graves: Wow. Great answer. And I can see that in your work. Not just Dread Delusion, but also your previous game Shatter, your comics like Waste and Something Real. Your vision comes through very clearly. It’s not nihilistic, but it’s this feeling that the world is more difficult, more confusing, and more difficult to navigate. A lot of people needing to find their own way through that, to find the right answer. It feels very pointed and modern.

James: I like to this so. But I also don’t want it to be so morally gray that there aren’t better and worse outcomes. That’s important because the other side of that black-and-white morality is to see the world as just the same shade of gray. And so, in Dread Delusion, you tend to help matters. You come in, and the choices you make are hard, and they don’t please everyone, but they ultimately tend to help more people than they hurt. I didn’t want to necessarily have a quagmire of hope, but I think you have to work for it.

I will say, there are choices I’d rather make in the game. There are some endings that are just worse than others, for example. Those are just morally worse because it’s not like everything is neutral after World War 2. But of the good endings… I know what I’d pick, but there are a lot of endings that have just as compelling arguments as each other. There isn’t a right answer, and some things are hurt no matter what, but there are better answers. You have to decide those better answers. You can always make the world better, but there are consequences and compromises to even the best decisions.

Graves: This makes a lot of sense. In Dread Delusion, at the end of many quests, you are often given a choice. And there is essentially never a time when you can just make the two sides — the Apostatic Union or the Old Gods they are hunting — get along. It can’t happen. Whatever you do, it tends to improve things, but you can never play down the middle: you either destroy, or aid the god.

James: And that’s a consequence of the world. Like I said, I think things are best when we let others believe what they will believe, do what they want to do. Pursue what makes them happy. And so, I suppose, what I’m saying is that you don’t have to change much to get there. We both, in England and America, live in countries with freedom of religion, but not everywhere is like that, especially across history. And that dial of freedom of religion only needs to be tweaked a little bit to end up somewhere quite dark. In Dread Delusion, the option to have that freedom, to do what you want, is gone. And so you have to make the best with the world around you; you can only change so much.

I think it actually applies to most speculative sci-fi or fantasy fiction. What you are usually saying with that, especially when talking about the dystopic side of that, is that not very much has to change in order to get there. It’s always a warning, or a condemnation: we are never so far from things winding up that way as we’d like.

When you consider all the things going on in western politics recently, I think we need to remember to fight for these things. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, democratic choice. These are the important things, what allow us to make choices in better ways. Dread Delusion shows a world where those middle-grounds have been burned, and so its warning is to not let it get to that point. Maintain those freedoms, so we can make those better choices.

Graves: Now we are getting into it. Making some educated guesses, I can’t help but wonder if there is some influence from the punk subculture in England in what you do? Your ideas feel like they’d fit right in there, as does the style of your art.

James: Yeah, yeah, definitely! What I love about punks is that they are often dressed quite aggressively, but they are often the nicest people you’ll ever meet. And they care about those things: freedom, democracy. All that. There is an element of that in the game; it’s very outlandish, violent, aggressive. But, there are also times when you can sit down with someone, have a nice cup of tea, and talk about things. You don’t compromise to do that, there is just both the aggression and politeness. I think that’s very punk.

Graves: I agree. To go back to something earlier: you mentioned speculative fiction, and that has me curious. Now, I’m aware that you are a very avid reader, and I do pick up on elements of that from your work. Junji Ito, Lord Dunsany, maybe Lovecraft. Are there any other literary references that went into Dread Delusion?

James: Yeah! While I was writing Dread Delusion, I got very into the kind of science-fantasy works from the 1970s. Things like the Book of the New Sun, Viriconium, these are the kinds of things I mean. In the 70s, you had a lot of novels where fantasy and science fiction really work. We do it less now —

Graves: I wish it came back into style.

James: Yeah, yeah. And that’s the thing. Dread Delusion is a mix of fantasy and science fiction. It has that bizarro quality. Nowadays, fantasy and science fiction are not only separate, but they have subgenres of subgenres. Very divided. But in the 70s, there wasn’t this stark difference, it was all just part of “speculative fiction.” And so, a lot of those works influence Dread Delusion.

There are also older works that influenced Dread Delusion. Things like Around the World in 80 Days, or really anything by Jules Verne. That sense of adventure.

And, of course, the influences on Dread Delusion aren’t limited to literature. Other games, as well, really inspired me. I was really inspired by Failbetter Games, who made Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, for instance. Some games from Itch.io, where I have a couple of games from years back. But, yeah, it all just came together. So much influence, but so much originality. Dread Delusion was a really big experience.

Graves: I can tell. But I noticed you said ‘was’. I know that Dread Delusion just put out a big update to the game. So, can you confirm that work on Dread Delusion is done?

James: Yeah, it’s all done. We’ve wrapped development. [Publishers] DreadXP was very kind to fund us forward in order to get out some free DLC, which includes a new giant, shelled squid in the sky that you can fly into and explore the intestines of. I think that’s a good way to end off development. You know, it started off with just me 4 years ago, and by the end of development we had 3 full-time developers (including Schera Wyss and Clara Pérez Fuentes) and almost a dozen contractors, and now we’ve wrapped on the game… It’s very good-looking back, and looking forward, with all the people now involved.

Graves: What is that like, going from most of your projects being by yourself or commissioned, to working with a team like that?

James: Well, it just scaled up slowly. DreadXP helped a lot. But it was never too overwhelming because people were added on as they needed to be. Though, it is very different managing a project compared to just doing everything yourself. Managing other people and helping them realize their creative vision is definitely a whole different skill set. But it’s hugely rewarding to work with people who love games, who you support and who support you. I’m so proud of the work we’ve all done.

Graves: And you should be! I make it no secret that I had some issues with Dread Delusion, which you can see if you ever go and read my review, where I gave it a 4/10. But, that said, I absolutely love your work, love what you do, and really want to see the team realize its full potential. If you can do what you did again, with the world and atmosphere, but tighten up the gameplay, I just know that your next game would get very, very high marks from me. So, that has me curious: is there anything in the works? Any other games you’re working on?

James: Oh, we’d absolutely love to. I can’t really speak about that, whether we know it’s happening. But I’m definitely planning more games. And I think you’ll really like what’s coming next.

Graves: I am very certain that I will. And even if I don’t, you don’t need my praise to make mind-bending, extraordinary works. Regardless, I know that I’ll be keeping an eye out, and will hope to hear more soon. In the time since my review, I’ve become quite a fan of yours.

But, we’ve gone on quite a while. We should probably wrap up, but I’ll let you get the last word in: anything you want to leave our audience with, before we finish the interview?

James: I love your mustache. Aside from that, nothing else from me! We’ll talk again sometime, yeah?

Graves: Thank you. And that sounds excellent. Until then, take care.

And so, no, my poor review score of Dread Delusion hampered nothing. Instead, what it allowed was for us to discuss religion, politics, life, morality, and literature.

It was truly a joy chatting with James Wragg and, though I personally didn’t like Dread Delusion, its great success and solid ratings proves that there are a lot of people who do like the game. If you think you might be one of those people, you can find it on Steam here. And, no matter who you are, I highly recommend exploring James’ other work on his site, LovelyHellplace.com.