What do you do when your game is a darkly comedic simulation about running a doomsday cult? If you are Wolf Haus Games, you find four real-life former cult members, sit them in front of the game, and let them play it together. That is exactly what happened at gamescom 2026, where Join Us landed its biggest showcase yet — confirming a PS5 release, revealing co-op details, and delivering one of the stranger marketing moments of the year.
What Join Us Actually Is
Join Us is a 1–4 player co-op, open-world survival game built around the premise of starting your own doomsday cult. Players recruit followers, build a compound, customise their cult’s belief system, and fight enemies while trying to survive an incoming apocalypse. Every NPC on the map is a potential recruit — but winning them over requires spreading propaganda and making the cult appear appealing. Keep your followers happy or they will walk. As the developers put it: “A cult leader without any followers is just a lonely weirdo.”
The world is a hand-crafted, fully explorable 6 sq km open map with a complete voice-acted narrative campaign. Followers have individual strengths and weaknesses and can be assigned specialist roles — farmers, doctors, and others — depending on what the compound needs at any given time. Wolf Haus Games is a Montreal-based indie studio; Creative Director and CEO Joe Dietsch has described the project as a natural extension of how cults themselves work: “Doomsday cults are a fairly communal concept, so it felt natural that Join Us should reach the widest possible audience.”
PS5 Confirmed — With Full Co-op Details
The main announcement at gamescom was that Join Us is now confirmed for PlayStation 5, joining the previously announced Xbox Series X/S, Steam, and Epic Games Store versions. All editions launch simultaneously in March 2027. The game will also be available on Xbox Game Pass on day one.
“Join Us will reach the widest possible audience and, of course, include an optional co-op mode.” — Joe Dietsch, Creative Director, Wolf Haus Games
Alongside the platform confirmation, Wolf Haus detailed how the co-op structure works across both modes. Up to four players can tackle the narrative campaign together or free-roam the open world map independently. The gamescom show floor also hosted the game’s first public play sessions, run by the development team.
The Four Former Cult Members Who Played It First
The most distinctive part of gamescom coverage for Join Us was the trailer IGN exclusively revealed alongside the gameplay footage. Wolf Haus enlisted four real former cult members — Jaga, Javier, Ariel, and Elena — who between them have more than 50 years of experience in their respective groups. Their histories include a cult preparing for alien beings to return humanity to its original home planet, a peaceful group centred on martial arts and self-defence, and a holistic rejuvenation community.
The concept: Four former cult members with over 50 combined years of experience played Join Us together in co-op and reflected on their own histories while reacting to the game’s mechanics. It is unusual. It also works.
The footage shows the four playing through several in-game scenarios together, discussing what rings true and what diverges from the cults they actually experienced. It is a genuinely unusual approach to a preview campaign — and for a game about recruitment, belief systems, and social manipulation, arguably the most fitting one Wolf Haus could have chosen.
