Neil Druckmann seeks to tackle religion and faith with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet

Neil Druckmann might be looking ahead to next month's premiere of The Last of Us Season 2 on HBO right now, but in terms of games, he's got Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet in the timeline, which promises to be the start of a new franchise for Naughty Dog.

Speaking with fellow zombie enthusiast Alex Garland of 28 Years Later, Druckmann spoke a bit about the themes he hopes to include in his latest game. "With The Last of Us 2, we made certain creative decisions that got us a lot of hate. A lot of people love it, but a lot of people hate that game," he began.

"The joke is like, you know what, let's do something that people won't care as much about. Let's make a game about faith and religion," he continued. The world of Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is set 2000 years in the future, and the planet we'll be playing on has been abandoned for around 600 years. Its religion and culture remains a mystery, but to escape we'll have to figure it all out.

"This new religion becomes pretty prominent and then we spend years just building out this religion like from the original prophet all the way [to] how it gets like changed and sometimes bastardised and evolves over all these years," Druckmann explained.

Something else he hopes to tackle in this game is a feeling of isolation and loneliness. You won't have any friends to help you in Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, and so it's up to you to figure out your way off the planet.