From the sunlit streets of Baghdad to the vast silence of AlUla’s desert, light is never just illumination, it’s storytelling. And for Jean Choukroun, it’s a language he has spent over six years at Ubisoft mastering.
In Valley of Memory, set in the desert of AlUla in the Medina regions of modern-day Saudi Arabia, that language takes shape across a world split in two.
To the south lies what the team called the land of the living. Here, light breathes. Warm tones wash over rich vegetation, creating a welcoming atmosphere, while golden-hour hues are exaggerated, enough to feel like a memory or a postcard you can almost step into. Through careful color grading, every ray is tuned for vibrancy, shaping a sense of abundance that invites players in.
But as you move north, something shifts.
The land of the dead tells a different story. Under the same sun, the desert becomes stark and unforgiving. Colors drain into a bleached, bone-white palette, “purposefully pushed slightly beyond realism,” Jean explains, until the world feels suspended, almost emptied out. The minimalism is intentional: by stripping back saturation, the vastness becomes overwhelming, and the silence engulfing the desert takes on weight.
And then, at 6pm, everything changes. The northern desert ignites in a dramatic sunset. The iconic Elephant Rock glows in deep reds and burning oranges, while a soft pink haze drifts through the air, volumetric fog hinting at sand carried by the wind. Sky and earth seem to merge, blurring the boundary between real and unreal for a brief moment.
Nightfall moves even further away from expectation. “We intentionally strayed from the One Thousand and One Nights’ vibe,” Jean says. Instead of fantasy, there is restraint, darkness, distant sounds, and a quiet unease that settles over the landscape, creating a unique sense of isolation.
Across the valley, light becomes more than atmosphere, it becomes direction, acting as the player’s compass. It guides the eye, subtly revealing paths, framing moments, and elevating the work of Level Designers and Environment Artists. Lighting transforms traversal into something cinematic. “Light ties everything together,” Jean says. It has the power to take already incredible environment art to the next level and to create snapshots that stay with players long after.
Jean calls it “capturing chaos and distilling it,” a philosophy borrowed from street photography. In Valley of Memory, that idea comes to life in every shadow stretched across the sand, every warm glow catching the edge of a rock.
