The procedural narrative of The Church in the Darkness

We talk about 1970s religious cults with Paranoid Productions' Richard Rouse III.

The Church in the Darkness isn't your average stealth infiltration game - the setting a 1970s cult is one thing, the fact that the narrative and situation is procedurally generated is another. We had a chat with Richard Rouse III about the intriguing premise and his inspirations.

"The Church in the Darkness is a topdown action infiltration game set inside a religious cult in the 1970s," says Rouse III. "But it has a story that changes every time you play. The collective justice mission is this group, this progressive religious movement in the US that is feeling persecuted by the government and they have radical ideas about wanting to be socialist and wanting to live a certain way so they all move down to South America to build a place their were they can live. They build a place called Freedom Town."

"From this sort of story people may think, well that sounds maybe creepy or weird or whatever, but the interesting thing in all the research I've done about these types of groups and cults is that sometimes they go a dark way and we tend to hear about those in the news. but there are lots of other groups that just try to start a commune, try to start something and maybe it doesn't work out, or maybe it succeeds but we don't hear about those as much, because we hear about the ones that make headlines."

One of the truly unique features of The Church in the Darkness is how the narrative changes between playthroughs. The guiding principles of the cult changes, perhaps they are completely pacifist or perhaps they are dangerous militants or the motivation changes - so that the player's choices may vary depending on what sort of cult you're faced with.

"A lot of narrative games have choices in them, there's a few ways to approach it. Somewhere it's like the good choice and the bad choice and you kind of decide do I want to play evil or do I want to play good. Then there are games that have really difficult decisions like The Walking Dead was really good at this, decisions are not good and bad it's just which one do I think I should do. But it's still in most of them every time you play the game it's still the same choice so if you're going to back and replay it you're forcing yourself to make the opposite choice, just to see the other content. Here you're making the opposite choice cause the whole situation has changed."