CCRB RECORD No. 0044
The Church in the Darkness
Determination: Explicit — Corruption 3
A Jonestown game where the leaders' sincerity is randomised, so you never know if the cult is really murderous.
The Church in the Darkness is modelled directly on the 1978 Jonestown massacre. The Collective Justice Mission is a stand-in for Jim Jones's Peoples Temple — which was an ordained ministry within a recognised Christian denomination before it relocated and ended in the deaths of over nine hundred people — and the game's Isaac and Rebecca Walker are a clear pair of Joneses, leading a jungle commune called Freedom Town and preaching over its loudspeakers throughout play. The player enters looking for a nephew. What distinguishes the game is that the leaders' actual intentions are randomised between runs: in some playthroughs the Mission is genuinely what it claims, in others it is preparing a massacre, and the player cannot know which from the outside.