【Switzerland】

Most of the time when video games tackle the subject of cults it’s to give heavily armed players more robe-wearing demon-worshippers to fire rockets at. Richard Rouse III’s The SwitzerlandChurch in the Darknesstakes a different approach.

The game’s cult, the Collective Justice Mission (CJM), has more in common with real world cults like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, of Jonestown Massacre infamy. But -- and this is where Church in the Darknessgets really interesting -- the CJM isn’t always doomed.

The game’s narrative elements are randomized. In one playthrough, you might meet a group of gun-toting fanatics; in another, they could just be hippies that want to live in the woods.

In any version of the story, you stealthily infiltrate the CJM's jungle compound to learn the fate of one of its members. The random nature of the story -- and endless replayability it offers -- borrows from the "roguelike" genre, while the controls and top-down view of the world are reminiscent of twin-stick shooters like Geometry Warsor Robotron 2084.

"You can play the game a lot of different ways. You don’t have to kill anybody at all to finish the game, or you can choke guys out one by one," Rouse told Mashable.

"If you go in and you find out they were just separatists who wanted to do their own thing and you killed them all, then you’re the asshole, right? But if they really are dangerous, you can decide ... to assassinate the cult leaders."

Rouse, whose previous work includes The Suffering horror games, is developing Church in the Darkness with his company Paranoid Productions. The cult focus comes from Rouse's own fascination with these fringe groups.

“From the outside [cults] always seem to be weird or dangerous, but often they’re not dangerous, they’re just some weird guys who want to go do something and they’re not going to hurt themselves and not hurt anybody. But then sometimes they are dangerous," Rouse said.

That's the thinking behind the game's randomized plot. Cults can take many forms, and the definition of what one actually is varies.

"I think modern software companies are cults sometimes, right? They have that strong figurehead, everyone follows and doesn’t question, and just does whatever Leader X says," Rouse said. "I’ve worked at companies like that."

The Collective Justice Mission is led by preachers Isaac and Rebecca Walker, voiced by Team Fortress 2’s Patrick Lowrie (the Sniper) and Portal's Ellen McLain (the villainous GLaDOS). At Sony's recent PlayStation Experience 2016, Rouse and his team handed out pamphlets inviting attendees to come visit “Freedom Town,” the cult’s 100-acre South America compound, "where all are equal."

"By building Freedom Town, we have sent a message to the world," reads a quote in the pamphlet from Preacher Isaac Walker.

Your first goal upon entering Freedom Town is tracking down a contact who can point you toward the person you’re there to check on. That contact can be in any of a number of locations, and he’ll react to you differently depending how many of his fellow cult members you’ve taken out or alerted on your way there.

Most roguelikes have extremely simple plots like “explore the dungeon.” Churchis different, incorporating the narrative into that randomization system.

"This is very carefully and specifically designed around this setting. It’s sort of fascinating to me how these things develop, how they go wrong, how the people in them with the best intentions turn out badly, but also it’s a great setting for a game," Rouse said.

"They isolate themselves, create their own little world ... a lot of games like immersive sim-type games [like Dishonored 2] create like an ecosystem that you’re going into."

In making Church, Rouse and his team studied cults from throughout history, including the present day.

"The ‘70s was a unique time for [cults],” Rouse said. "We all thought we were going to die any time; it’s like, nuclear apocalypse was coming because of the Cold War and all that. People were sick of that and they saw what was going on in Vietnam etc., and they were like ‘Yeah, let’s go do something else. This isn’t working.’

"It was a time when it felt like maybe we could go do something else and it would work out."

The dev team looked at more modern cults as well -- up to and including those that have risen up since 2000 -- but Rouse thinks the '70s-era optimism that shaped earlier examples is absent now.

"There’s a group in Australia right now [the Divine Truthmovement] that’s out in Queensland in the woods," Rouse said. "The guy says he’s the reincarnation of Jesus and he has a Mary Magdalene and stuff, and all these people are moving there, giving him all their money, and he says the end of the world is coming in a couple of years."

Yet for all the many differences that informed different narrative paths in The Church in the Darkness, there is one universal constant, as Rouse sees it.

“A cult is always a weird thing where you’re sort of giving up your self-determination,” he said. As an intruder, the player in The Church in the Darknesshas no such problem.

The Church in the Darkness is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One sometime in 2017.