"A Lot Of Ideas Came Out Of It:" Join Us Devs Break Down How The Grimly Hilarious Cult Game Evolved

Published Oct 18, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

Brandon Zachary is a Lead Writer for Screen Rant's New Movie Team. He also writes or has written for Comicbook.com, CBR, That Hashtag Show, Just Watch, and TVBrittanyF. Brandon is an Emerging Screenwriters Semi-Finalist, co-writer of a Screencraft Quarter-Finalist, a seasoned on-screen interviewer, and a MASSIVE nerd. You can reach him at bs.zachary@gmail.com

The open sandbox approach to video games has allowed plenty of developers to craft wildly different experiences and worlds. Take Join Us, Xbox's cult-centric adventure. The game gives players a massive world to experiment with and craft their own approach, all while keeping the experience completely their own.

The cult-centric game is Wolf Haus Games' debut title, serving as a strong proving ground for the team. Wolf Haus Games CEO Joe Dietsch spoke with Screen Rant about the origins of Join Us, the ambition behind the game's development, and striking the right balance of horror and comedy for the game,

The Cult In Join Us Is All Yours To Make

Join Us benefits from a massive sandbox approach that lets players forge their own path. Players are quickly tasked with expanding their cult into the wider world, using a mix of soft and hard approaches. Players can help out the townsfolk to earn their loyalty or carry out brutal attacks on figures within the community.

This lets players focus on their preferred approach to gameplay. With The Sims-style mechanics, it adds innate personality to the NPCs that join the ranks of your force. The challenge isn't forming the cult but maintaining it, turning the experience into a deceptively compelling game.

"My background was originally in future film commercials. I've played games since I was a kid. I've always loved that space. In 2021, I got really interested in looking at the technology for gaming. We can use this so that a small team can make a big game. Movies take a really long time, and you have to ask for permission for a lot of things."

Joe Dietsch noted that the early conceptions for the game came about more as a hobby than anything else, an interest spawned by a lifetime as a gamer. However, as he developed the concept and gave it a grimly hilarious touch, the idea started to connect with his peers and the team at Xbox.

"For some reason, the idea of a cult game was something that really stuck. I think a cult is a very specific human concept. It's not quite a religion, it's not quite a family, it's not quite a workplace, it's not quite an army. It's its own thing, and when you break it apart into game mechanics, there are a lot of ideas that come out of that."

"We decided to approach it from the perspective of, as developers, we know cults are bad. The player knows the cult is bad, but what if we all got together and pretended they were a good time? That kind of became the joke that underlined everything. We're gonna take it seriously, but not nearly that serious." A key influence on the game's tone of self-aware gallows humor stemmed in part from Grindhouse cinema -- especially Russ Meyer.

"They're somewhat serious but at some point they're just having fun. I think that when you make a game, when you've been living in it every day for years, you don't want to be living in a horror game or a serious one about cults. Maybe that's a challenging way to spend our day. We wanted to have fun. We hoped that if we had fun making it, people would have fun playing it."

Join Us Is The Cult Game You Didn't Know You Want

Getting that balance right between the gallows humor of the premise and the tricky nature of the subject matter was an interesting challenge for the team, something Dietsch and his team really leaned into during development. "The challenge of writing the game, with our writers Joe Dietsch and narrative director Louie Gibson, who's been my writing partner on the film side of things for twenty years now.

"The three of us got together and wrote the story. The challenge then became: how do you take a survival game and add a narrative? A survival game has a buy-in as a player: you're in the woods, you have to find your feet, you have to sleep. Once someone's there, the question becomes whether we can tell a story there. I would describe it as a through-line story in the campaign, with twists and turns and an impending apocalypse."

Join Us is a tricky beast of a game, especially coming from such a small and specific team, with plenty of challenges and surprises catching Dietsch's attention. "Both from a development and a gameplay side, I think what surprised me personally going through this process was being able to build a team around it. This is all of our game. It belongs to everyone on the team.

When the campaign is over, the game is definitely not.

"I think that was an idea I had, and there was a brief window of time where it belonged to me. Then Michael Abbott came on, Pierre Olivier, the whole team came up around this game. It belonged a little bit to everyone. You got to see everyone's personalities come through different parts of the game. There's going to be little gnome side missions. That was their thing.

"You start to see the team reflected in the game. It's definitely not yours anymore. I think it's been cool to see how people gravitate to being a part of this weird world that we live in. On our Discord server, everyone gets to sign up and be in the cult. People suggest teachings on them, and some people want to contribute something.

Join Us has a lot more going on under the hood than expected: "We built this as a very open-ended game. When the campaign is over, the game is definitely not. That's something where we could always have more teachings, more wardrobe. It has that open-endedness. Our first step was to build a world, and then place a specific story inside it, which kind of captures the tone. It's not the end of the trajectory when this comes out."

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