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The Join Us game is a darkly comic cult-management simulator that combines base building, recruitment, resource gathering, and chaotic action. Revealed during Xbox’s June 2026 Showcase, it puts players in charge of a chapter of a doomsday cult, with the goal of establishing a compound and causing trouble in a small town. An early hands-on session offered a first look at its systems and deliberately over-the-top tone.
Join Us game: Building a cult from the ground up
Before beginning the campaign, players can customize their cult’s logo, colors, uniforms, and naming style. A short tutorial then introduces basic actions such as swinging a baseball bat, crouching, and using firearms. Its absurd humor is apparent early on, including a sequence involving a pig and a rocket launcher.
The tutorial also assigns the player a job by spinning a wheel. The outcome puts the leader in the business branch, responsible for expanding into new regions. The game pokes fun at this arbitrary process, establishing a self-aware comedic style rather than treating every cult activity with a straight face.
Tip: Pay attention during the tutorial, since it introduces the basic controls and the tasks that feed into the larger management loop.
Establishing a compound and gathering supplies
The story moves to Bedford County, where the player travels to a site intended to become the cult’s base. Trouble arrives immediately: armed burglars are robbing the location, and the player has to deal with them before starting work on the compound.
Instructions arrive from the cult’s headquarters through a fax machine. Early objectives include collecting supplies and building a conference table, which serves as a place to launch missions. A food-gathering task offers several approaches: hunt wildlife, take supplies from local residents, or grow crops. In the preview, the player hunted a bear, raided a nearby campsite, and planted strawberries.
These options let players approach basic needs in different ways. When deciding what to do, consider the resources available and the risks of creating trouble with people or the authorities.
Recruiting members and managing their abilities
Once the compound has its initial supplies, the next task is bringing in new members. The player receives propaganda materials and can distribute them to locals at a nearby outpost. Each potential recruit has a displayed chance of responding to the recruitment effort, based on their susceptibility and the character attempting to persuade them.
Recruited members can be controlled directly, but their skills may differ from the leader’s. In the preview, the first recruit had a 68 percent chance of persuading a nearby vagrant, compared with the leader’s 98 percent chance. Checking these percentages before assigning a recruitment attempt can help players choose the character with the better odds.
Members also need beds and can be assigned to ongoing work. The first recruits began tending the strawberries and helping with other assigned projects. However, actions outside the compound can have consequences: after the player shot an innocent bystander, the group faced police when returning home.
What the early preview suggests
The early gameplay points to a mix of loose narrative events, cult recruitment, base management, and unpredictable encounters. Its blend of strange humor and survival-focused activity has been compared to Goat Simulator and State of Decay, while the developers have indicated that the experience becomes more intense as the world moves through different phases and the cult’s prophecies may prove true.
The preview covered only the opening portion of the game, so it does not show the full range of systems or story developments. Join Us is expected to arrive in March 2027. For now, the most useful takeaway is that players should expect to balance recruitment, supplies, assigned work, and the consequences of their actions. The Join Us game appears designed for players who enjoy management systems wrapped in irreverent humor and unpredictable sandbox situations.
