Inside the making of The Church in the Darkness

If your nephew became an acolyte of a cult in 1970s South America, what would you do to get him out. That’s the story behind The Church in the Darkness, a new game coming from director Richard Rouse III, who led the development on The Suffering and worked on titles like State of Decay, Quantum Break, Sunset Overdrive, and Rainbow 6.

I met Rouse as the organizer of the Brain Dump developer talks at the MIGS game event in Montreal. Now he’s getting ready to launch a top-down action-infiltration game where you have to infiltrate Freedom Town, a cult in the South American jungle. You learn the psychology of why people join cults and entrust themselves to charismatic leaders with ulterior motives. I interviewed him about The Church in the Darkness, which explores how far you are willing to go in uncovering the truth and saving the cultists.