Wolf Haus Games has unveiled the open world cult survival game Join Us.
The Unreal Engine game is coming in March 2027 for the PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 platforms.
Unlike some past games, it’s not a horror or combat game where you fight an evil cult. Your goal is not to escape from a cult. Rather, it’s to enjoy life in the cult and recruit more people. For sure, it’s got a satirical tone to it, but it’s a bit unusual, and edgy, for Microsoft to be promoting a game that is about building the best cult. I played it at the Xbox booth at Gamescom last week and interviewed the leaders.
This somewhat wacky take on the cults is the brain child of John Dietsch, CEO of Wolf Haus Games, a filmmaker who started working on the game as a solo project during the pandemic in 2022. Dietsch showed it some friends and they got excited. In turn, they rounded up 13 developers in Montreal to form Wolf Haus Games and worked on the title.
At the outset, you start out in a tutorial where you go through a kind of boot camp for the cult. You ultimately meet the leader of the cult, who has a droll sense of humor, and then you’re enrolled into the cult. You learn how to use a gun and grenades. I used a grenade in the tutorial to blow up a pig, only to learn later that I did not have to blow up the pig.
I met the holy founder of the cult, as angelic music played. And he asked me to go and create a new branch of the cult in a compound. My job was to go out in the woods, assume control of a compound, and then proceed to turn it into your cult’s base.
As soon as I got to the compound, I found I had to use my weapons because a bunch of thieves had come to steal the vegetables and other property. So I mowed them down and then got to work. Eventually, my job was to recruit members. The graphics looked reasonably good, but I wasn’t able to get very far in my playthrough.
The game can be played as a single-player game or with up to four-play co-op. I played with a keyboard and mouse, learning things like getting my mission from the fax machine (it’s set in the 1980s) and then building things like a garden to grow food for the cult.
The cult is based in a fictional Beford County, and it draws inspiration from dark humor and cult themes, with influences like Grindhouse and Wild Wild Country (a Netflix series) and the old THQ game Saint’s Row, Far Cry 5 and State of Decay.
“We are build a little doomsday cult open world survival game,” Dietsch said. “You are recruiting followers from the game world. You are training them. You’re building a new cult’s compound. There is a full narrative campaign.”
He added, “It started as a solo dev project for me. We built a team around it. We’re a very small team, but we love the game. We love working on it. We have a lot of fun making it, and we want people to have fun.”
Pierre-Olivier Chartrand, tech director and CTO, said “Joe was solo-devving. (Around 2023), I asked him what it was. I was just so blown away at how great it looked and how fresh it was.” Chartrand called a friend and Facetimed the game screen. The friend said, “What studio are you at?” And Chartrand replied, “The studio we are going to create.”
By late 2024, they raised $2.9 million from Lifelike Games, a game venture capital firm headed by Randy Lee, and Krafton, publisher of PUBG. Michael Abbott, COO and executive producer of Wolf Haus Games and a friend of Dietsch since film school, said that Lee was a guide for the team and they eventually asked him to invest.
Abbott said the original name of the game was Cult. But they felt later that Join Us was more satirical and funny.
“It put a preconception in people’s minds that this was some serious cult game, and we had to really extinguish that and let people know this is really dark humor,” Abbott said.
I asked him why Dietsch took the edgy approach. I had seen Richard Rouse III’s game, circa 2018, dubbed The Church in the Darkness. It was about infiltrating and escaping a cult, but it wasn’t an inspiration for this team. But I never saw a game where you were on the side of the cultists. It’s kind of like playing the bad guys in Grand Theft Auto (which, by the way, everybody does and no long bats an eye).
“Our take on the game is always that we know cults are bad. The player, we assume, knows cults are bad, and we’re going to get together and pretend that they’re this imaginary thing, but they’re not. I think that’s where a lot of the humor in the game comes from. It’s very ridiculous, but it takes itself very seriously.”
I hope you follow that, but I suspect many parents who find out about this game will not like it. That’s why the game starts out with a warning that begins, “Warning: Cults are real.”
When the team was working on the title, they didn’t know if it would work. There were no big hits in the indie space they were aware of, like the recent Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which was made with a team of 30 and went on to win more than 400 awards.
Abbott said, “We’re not making fun of cults. Cults are, in reality, like an alternate world. In this game, you’re just having fun. And it’s an alternate reality where you’re just having fun. If you apply to other things, it’s like Grand Theft Auto. There’s violence. We all know people who commit crimes and harm people on the street are bad. Here you are an observer. We’re trying to present something to you with a feeling or tone of humor and escapism.”
The game has a big narrative, with 15,000 lines of dialogue, all performed by voice actors, with details like disc jockeys. I found the hum of the fax machine, where you get your mission assignments, to be realistic and distinctive.
“There’s a significance to it,” said Chartrand. “Every choice is not done only for humor. There’s a fair bit of twist in the story.”
Abbott said the team has enjoyed watching people doing playtests, particularly when the players laugh.
“I think we speak to everybody, and everybody wants to laugh,” Abbott said.
The game doesn’t have religion or sex. It’s a realm of escapism, rather than extreme realism. It’s mature rated, based on the violence, but it isn’t extreme as a game, Abbott said.
Abbott said the studio setting in Montreal was great because of the access to gaming talent. The timing worked out well for funding in 2024, and the team scaled up slowly. People wore multiple hats. They started coming up with things that should be in the game, like snake guns.
“The ethos of the company is that we really want to foster creativity as a team. So even though everybody owns their lane, we find that like everybody’s voice is important. Everybody’s creative ideas are taken to the table, and honestly, this is a team effort on a creative level as well,” Abbott said. “We wanted to control our destiny. We werent’ trying to bloat anything. We wanted to make something great and be scrappy.”
Microsoft agreed to publish the game and it has been supportive, the founders said.
Dietsch said, “Something I’m kind of grateful for is to have the experience of having come up with an idea. It’s just yours and you own it by yourself. And then I show Michael, and then it’s kind of Michael’s idea. And then we show Pierre and it belongs to him. And we build a team around that idea. Then that idea kind of belongs to a small group of people. And then I think the part that I’m really looking forward to is being able to share that idea with players, and then it belongs to everybody.”
Chartrand acknowledged there is a downturn in the industry and it’s a tough time. He recalled going to GDC in San Francisco and seeing people screaming about the industry in a park. He felt that the Montreal community stuck together and helped others out.
I asked Dietsch what would have happened if it just worked on the game himself. Would it have shipped?
“I probably could have worked on it forever,” Dietsch said.