WWGW - The Church In The Darkness (Gameplay Footage Only)

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Published on September 22, 2019 4:32:58 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIIPuXi6fNg

Game:

The Church in the Darkness (2019)

Duration: 24:22

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8

A quick look at gameplay from THE CHURCH IN THE DARKNESS and Analysis below.

In it you're trying to track down your nephew who joined a Cult and relocated with them to their own new "utopia" in the Jungle to become entirely self-sufficient. With the help of a number of sympathetic members and other oppressed cult members, you've got to locate him and make your way out of the camp before disaster of the usual paranoid "lets all die together" type occurs. Now, most people take that to be "drink the koolaid" voluntary sheep-to-slaughter mindlessness. Though the very premise of TCINTD shows that its certainly not all like that, with many who clearly don't want to be there anymore, let alone die for the place. The "true story" of any death-cult isn't of masses killing themselves blindly, it''s how a concentration of power in the most deluded and devoted drags the rest into their graves with a mass-murder majority the minority is hopeless to defy.

TCITD plays out kind of like one of the MSX/NES "Metal Gear" games with the 2D top down stealth format and base sneaking. However its amplified with more modern Medal Gear Solid game design. Outside of that pure stealth vs pure combat design school, you're given non-lethal alternatives for knockouts and more of an "open-world" level design, unleashing you onto this huge compound to figure out your end goal. You'll hide bodies, change costumes, sabotage gear, and interrogative guards and informants. The biggest difference to being some top-down Metal Gear, this is a game built on a core of replay. There's an array of 20 endings to unlock, and your different play-style/story choices can end up yielding different impressions of people, or unlocking divergent aspects of knowledge about the cult.

We've seen a lot of "wacky" cult game releases in recent years, but this is one played deadly serious. The type of cult, the backstory, the setting--and even potential ending--directly (and overtly) parallel the Jonestown Massacre.... including the aforementioned description of death cults. It's easy for a lot of people to forgot--well if they ever knew--that Jim Jones and The People's Temple didn't start out on the notorious end of history. Jones was a well respected minister in Baptist communities; he was avid support of the Civil Right's movement and used all his power for its progress; his words were respected by the most prominent local politicians of the time that his reputation even lasted after relocating to their own Commune in Guyana. It's really after where the the movement parted from roots in racial and economic equality, becoming something else. I hold that the title here is an allusion to Conrad's "In The Heart Of Darkness." It's the same Darkness that we see in the novel; in Apocalypse Now; in the real Jonestown; and in "The Church In The Darkness,"... There's a madness of control and societal isolation in the dead heat of The Jungle. There's a calling to the madness of man. For the people of Jonestown that call would be answered in-full the day in 1978 a Senator and three others were gunned down trying to leave this isolated 'outer heaven', and reach-out to the outside world about all they had seen. Here in the story of "The Church In The Darkness" you'll find the story of Jonestown, but also a tale of madness far older and far greater. A madness that still lives. A madness that will outlive us all.

The many incredibly overt connections to Jonestown politicize its art, laden with real world commentary. We mightn't have adapted to this sort of "ripped from the headlines" approach in gaming the same way we have to television and films--even nihilistically so in "Law and Order"'s often glib and shallow lip-service to reality to keep going after 20 seasons---though its something that will overtake us eventually and is a necessary step towards the medium's ability to produce meaningful commentary. It couldn't be more appropriate perhaps then that the general gameplay basis for the story makes for a game similar to that of Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series which likewise repackages meaning and expression via important historical interactions as well. "The Church In The Darkness" is a game all the more scary for its real world parables and parallels, and perhaps all the more deserving of that post-game moment of reflection as to what it all even means. That, though, is up to you.

Check it out on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/339830/The_Church_in_the_Darkness/?curator_clanid=32660416

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