Bad news: the world is coming to an end. Good news: you can survive this doomsday event by joining a cult.
There was also a man riding a pig. You don't see that every day.
I couldn't just walk away from a trailer like that, so I talked to Joe Dietsch, co-founder and CEO of developer Wolf Haus Games, to get a few more details about Join Us.
According to Dietsch, in Join [[link]] Us you're sent by an "omnipresent cult leader" into a rural area of the country, and "it's your job
to essentially start a new franchise there. You can kind of think of it like you're franchising a Burger King. There's the HQ, but you're being sent out to start your own version of this cult in a new environment."
Once there, it's time to start converting the locals to your cause. The world is full of NPCs, and you can start recruiting followers to help out at your growing compound.
"All characters in the game have levels," Dietsch said. "Someone's going to be better at farming, someone's going to be a doctor, someone's going to be a craftsman. So you might walk down a street in the game, and you can sort of observe people's skills using your cult vision, and you can say, 'Hey, this guy at the gas station is a level 10 scientist.' And that's something I really need in my cult, that can unlock my hydroponic farms."
Since your cult is a hive mind, you're also able to directly control any of your cult's members by hopping [[link]] into their bodies (as in a game like State of Decay), which Dietsch says also functions as means of fast-travel.
"I see [a cult member] out on the far side of the map at their outpost you've set up for them," Dietsch said. "I can swap into them, and now I've essentially traveled there. So if there's a mission I'm trying to take care of on that side of the map, I can immediately get there, and then I'm able to complete that objective."
But you're not just hiring workers, you're leading people on a path to salvation: the end of the world is coming, remember? Choosing the various tenets of your cult are some of the most important decisions you'll make in Join Us. In some games you create a build for your character, and in Join Us you create a build for your cult.
"There's a dynamic skill tree that evolves as the game goes on," Dietsch said. "So [if] we want to be a cult that's into violence, we can become a very violent cult. If we want to become a druid cult, we can go in that direction. If we want to get into UFOs or ghosts, all of those things become options, and then those affect your player narrative as the game progresses."
There may be some tradeoffs or disadvantages that come with unlocking certain ideologies, however. As an example, Dietsch describes becoming a cult that throws sumptuous feasts for all its followers. That'll be a big draw for prospective members, but could lead to supply problems since you now have to produce more food on a regular basis.
To offset that constant need for feasts, you can unlock ritual fasting as a tenet of your cult, so people will start eating less. And at the end of that food-based branch of cult beliefs, you can explore, shall we say, alternate food sources.
"We're continuing them down that branch, and now we've unlocked cannibalism," Dietsch said. "Now we're a cult of cannibals. And now the police are after us. Everyone hates us. We're a cannibal cult, and it was because we wanted to have, you know, a fancy dinner party."
As you might guess from the pig-riding and UFOs and weaponized school buses and rampant cannibalism—Join Us isn't a serious game.
"When you're looking at conflict, it can either express itself as comedy or as anxiety," Dietsch said. "I think a lot of survival games lean into anxiety, which is why you get a really great offering of horror-adjacent or fully horror-based survival games. But I think comedy is the route less taken. I think for us it was a fun one to explore."
Join Us is coming out in 2026, so let's hope the world doesn't end before then.