Marketing a game about building your own cult is a delicate creative challenge. Wolf Haus Games, the Montreal-based indie studio behind the upcoming Join Us, found one answer to that challenge: skip the influencers and find four people who actually lived it. The studio recruited real former cult members — Jaga, Javier, Ariel, and Elena, with a collective 50+ years of experience across their respective groups — to play the game together in co-op at Gamescom 2026. The resulting footage is simultaneously funny, genuine, and a little difficult to sit with in the best possible way.
One of them is having the time of their life growing virtual tomatoes. Another looked at the camera and said, flatly, “no one’s going to like this.” That’s the range of reactions Wolf Haus captured, and to their credit, they released all of it.
Who Are Jaga, Javier, Ariel, and Elena?
Wolf Haus bleeps out the names of the actual cults throughout the video, which is both legally cautious and tonally appropriate — the point isn’t to identify or spotlight specific organizations, it’s to understand the people who lived through them. What each of the four participants shares about their experience is enough to paint a picture.
Ariel talks about his former belief that a UFO was coming to take him “home” on a specific date: May 12, 2001. He describes it with the slightly detached clarity of someone who has had years to process how completely he once believed it. Watching him encounter UFO elements in the game and react to them carries a weight that no scripted marketing campaign could manufacture.
Javier describes his time in what he calls a “holistic rejuvenation centre” — a community that grew all of its own food, lived off the land, and operated with a set of beliefs around self-sufficiency and communal living. His in-game enthusiasm for farming mechanics, and his excitement about digitally growing tomatoes, is one of the genuinely charming moments in the video. The connection between his real experience and the game’s survival farming systems is unexpectedly touching.
Jaga mentions that her group was one of peace, used only knives, and had a stark philosophy about non-violence — which makes her wielding guns throughout the gameplay footage both absurd and quietly meaningful. The contrast between her actual background and what the game is asking her to do is the kind of thing you can’t write.
Elena’s experience is discussed more briefly in the footage, but her presence in the group — and her reaction to the gameplay — contributes to what Wolf Haus describes as the “mixed” reception the experiment produced. The person who declares “no one’s going to like this” delivers that verdict with complete conviction, and the game’s over-the-top satirical elements clearly land very differently for someone who lived a version of this versus someone experiencing it purely as dark comedy.
What Is Join Us Actually About?
Beyond the marketing stunt, Join Us is a genuinely ambitious-sounding debut from a 10-person studio. First revealed at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct in September 2025 and shown at Summer Game Fest 2026 before its Gamescom appearance, it’s a co-op open-world survival game where players take on the role of a devoted cult member tasked with establishing a new chapter of their group in a fictional rural US county. The leader gives the direction, but the day-to-day operation of the cult is entirely the player’s responsibility.
The core gameplay loop involves:
- Recruiting followers — growing your cult’s membership through propaganda and persuasion
- Managing your compound — building and expanding the physical infrastructure of the cult
- Defining beliefs — using a Teaching system that functions as a dynamic skill tree, mixing and matching belief combinations to shape the cult’s identity (moon-worshipping cannibals and alien enthusiasts who ride bears are both apparently viable options)
- Surviving the apocalypse — third-person combat against enemies, with the survival stakes escalating as the narrative progresses
- Keeping followers happy — because, as Wolf Haus puts it, “a cult leader without any followers is just a lonely weirdo.” Members will leave if they’re not satisfied, adding a management layer that isn’t just about combat or building
The full experience includes a 15-hour-plus scripted narrative campaign alongside a sandbox mode, playable solo or with up to four players in co-op. Critically, there is no single protagonist — players can inhabit any cult member at any time, with an “omnipresent antagonist” driving the narrative rather than a central hero. That’s an unusual structural choice that positions Join Us less as a character story and more as an emergent system story about collective belief and collective action.
The Tone: Dark Comedy That Earns It
The game opens with a PSA warning that cults are real and life-altering before immediately pivoting to the suggestion that maybe they’re also “kind of cool.” That’s the exact register Join Us is operating in — aware of the serious reality its subject matter touches on, but committed to treating it as material for darkly comedic satire rather than earnest commentary. Early preview hands-on coverage noted that the game produces genuine laughter within minutes, with the development team clearly prioritising absurdism over solemnity.
The decision to use ex-cult members in the marketing rather than hiding from the real-world dimension of the subject matter is consistent with that approach. Wolf Haus isn’t pretending this game exists in a consequence-free satirical vacuum. They’ve brought in people who actually experienced these environments, let the camera record genuinely mixed reactions, and released the footage unedited in terms of its emotional complexity. That’s a more considered approach than a lot of studios take with sensitive subject matter, and it makes the marketing piece itself more interesting to watch than most game trailers.
Everything Confirmed About Join Us
- Developer: Wolf Haus Games (Montreal, 10-person studio)
- Engine: Unreal Engine 5.7
- Release date: March 2027
- Platforms: PC (Steam and Epic Games Store), PS5, Xbox Series X|S (all simultaneous at launch)
- Players: Solo or 2-4 player co-op
- Campaign length: 15+ hours scripted narrative campaign, plus sandbox mode
- Genre: Open-world survival/action with dark comedy narrative
- Steam wishlists: Surpassed 200,000 since the first trailer in September 2025
- Original trailer views: Over 10 million across all channels and reposts
- PS5 announced: Gamescom 2026 (previously PC and Xbox only)
March 2027 is the target window. Between the Steam wishlist numbers, the Gamescom gameplay showcase, and a marketing campaign that’s already generating more genuine conversation than most — Wolf Haus is doing a lot right with a very small team. The ex-cult members video alone has earned them coverage across gaming media in a way that’s impossible to manufacture with a conventional trailer. And one person’s opinion aside, plenty of people are clearly going to like this. If you want to keep up with everything else making waves right now, Fable’s full difficulty and customization system just got detailed in a way that’s genuinely impressive, and the Nintendo Direct September 10 situation is building fast with more signals pointing toward a confirmed date by early next week.
