Herd Mentality

Join Us made a splash when it debuted during Xbox's June 2026 Showcase. The zany cult-leader simulator puts you in charge of your own chapter of a widespread doomsday cult, tasking you with establishing your compound and wreaking havoc in the small town in which you establish your home. I spent about 45 minutes learning the ropes and toying around with the strange sandbox title and now, I'm excited to start my own chapter.

After customizing my cult with a logo, color scheme, uniform, and naming convention (I opted to have my members named after inanimate objects rather than numbers or Roman-inspired designations), it's time to get underway. Join Us starts out with a brief tutorial, showing you the ropes under the tutelage of the overarching cult leader. I learned how to swing a baseball bat, crouch, shoot guns, and... blast a pig with a rocket launcher (the leader assures you that the pig is a "real piece of s---"). After spinning a wheel to determine your job, you land a coveted spot in the business branch, which means it's your duty to expand to new regions. Assigning jobs that way is obviously dumb, but the game is very self-aware, peppering in self-referential humor like, "Maybe it was a mistake to assign jobs by spinning a big wheel." 

After an opening cutscene, it's time to get to work. Driving through Bedford County, your assigned territory, you get a sense for the small-town vibes this game is going for. If you think that means they're going to leave you be, however, you'd be mistaken. As soon as I arrive at the soon-to-be compound, I come to the realization that we're being robbed. After dispatching the armed burglars, it's time to get to work.

Using a fax machine, I receive directives from the cult mothership. First, I need to gather resources, then build a conference table from which I will conduct business (AKA start missions). My first mission is to gather some food; you can hunt nearby wildlife, steal from the locals, or grow your own. I opt to do all of the above, taking down a bear, storming a nearby campsite, and planting some strawberries.

Next, I need some actual members in my cult. The home base airdrops some propaganda for me to hand out and tasks me with recruiting locals to my cause. To do this, I go to a nearby outpost of outcasts and pass out the paperwork. Each local has a level of susceptibility to your propaganda and recruitment techniques, depicted by a recruitment-chance percentage. Once you have someone in your stable, you can swap to play as them whenever you want, but be warned: They may not be as good at some of the tasks as you are. For instance, when I swapped to my first member, her ability to recruit a nearby vagrant was only 68 percent, whereas the leader's recruitment chance was a whopping 98 percent.

Once you have members under your belt and beds built for them, the real cult simulation begins. My members immediately start tending to the strawberries I planted, and working on any other projects I need to assign. Unfortunately, I shot an innocent bystander on the way back to the compound, so my members also had some police to fight off once we returned.

From my time with the early hours of Join Us, I'm already excited to experience the various emergent stories at play, as well as see just how over-the-top the story can get. The loose narrative elements, the recruitment options, and the zaniness make it feel like a strange combination of Goat Simulator and State of Decay, which the studio is completely embracing. The team tells me what I played is just the start, as things get even wilder as the world goes through different phases and the doomsday cult's prophecies may turn out to be true. I'm enticed to see how much more the studio pushes the envelope when Join Us arrives in March 2027.