The Church in the Darkness

Procedural generation does little to bolster the one-dimensional gameplay and lack of a compelling narrative

The Church in the Darkness has some good ideas, but they're not properly realised. Gameplay never ventures out of its basic boundaries, while the narrative doesn't offer up enough variety or compelling subplots to engage with. The Church in the Darkness is competent for a couple of playthroughs, but it's an experience that you'll quickly forget about.

Wrapping up, The Church in the Darkness is a small well put together game. Personally, it’s not the kind of game I would play a lot. It is fun for a couple of hours, but with limited content and minimal rogue-like elements, it certainly won’t hold up in the long run. It’s not a bad game; it’s just not my type of game. For these reasons, I will objectively be giving The Church in the Darkness the Silver Award.

While interesting on paper, The Church in the Darkness is mostly just a collection of anti-capitalist audio logs blaring over harder-than-it-needs-to-be stealth gameplay. There's no love lost in this place.

You won’t find many games on the market that take on the subject of religious cults and presents them in an all too real light. In that regard, The Church in the Darkness does well by its subject matter, allowing you to investigate Freedom Town in a way that might actually change the way you look at the people who make up the Collective Justice Mission.

An unholy union of procedural generation, non-linear narrative design, and a Jonestown-inspired cult backdrop.

Overall, Church in the Darkness is an ambitious product and while I understand what they were trying to accomplish, I feel they are just slightly off the mark. It’s a fun game, and one I still find myself going back to, but purely in the interest of seeing what endings there are, rather than being pulled in by the story. It just wasn’t everything that I was expecting.

An interesting idea but mediocre execution. When your game is supposed to be replayed almost 20 times, samey gameplay becomes a major issue.

The Church in the Darkness is built on the mechanic of making numerous runs through the story with the aim of encountering all the different end games, but it just doesn’t hold your attention long enough to make it worthwhile sticking with it.

"The Church in the Darkness" takes the unsettling approach of realism. It's convincing as a story of a 1970s cult, and Freedom Town is a chilling look inside an isolated cult in the middle of the jungles of South America.