The Church in the Darkness Critic Reviews

Discovering the secrets of the Freedom Town cult, who has power and influence where, as well as the inner workings of the leadership are the best parts of The Church In The Darkness. That combines with excellent stealth gameplay, a dynamic and engaging scenario-based narrative, and some excellent characters with great voice acting to create a memorable and unique experience. An experience that is only held back by a few technical issues and some missing quality of life features.

The Church in the Darkness is a smart stealth game that impressively warps to reflect your actions. It lets you get in and break out as you see fit. While failure still feels like failure, success is sweet and varied. Once it gets a hold of you, you may not want to break out, at all.

The randomized nature of the game does allow for new-ish experiences each time you play, though I wish the game took it further, such as making Freedom Town modular so that its camps, playground, open-air theater, and places of worship could be moved around and really shake things up. As it stands, The Church in the Darkness is a decent exploration of cults from the perspective of those participating in it.

The main objective of the work has been achieved, albeit with some hesitancy, and we therefore consider it necessary to reward the will of a new but extremely courageous study.

Ultimately, The Church in the Darkness rewards players with a fascinating and original cult setting, but the provided method for navigating and interacting with that setting is entirely uninteresting. For some, it may be worth trudging through an uninviting cult compound to understand their experiences and culture; for me, I wish I’d stayed far away.

The Church in the Darkness is a game with a great concept, but its execution isn’t flawless and ends up feeling repetitive. It isn’t a bad game, although we’re a little bit disappointed because it feels like it could’ve been much more.

While interesting on paper, The Church in the Darkness is mostly just a collection of anti-capitalist audio logs blaring over harder-than-it-needs-to-be stealth gameplay. There's no love lost in this place.

The Church in the Darkness has some good ideas, but they’re not properly realised. Gameplay never ventures out of its basic boundaries, while the narrative doesn’t offer up enough variety or compelling subplots to engage with. The Church in the Darkness is competent for a couple of playthroughs, but it’s an experience that you’ll quickly forget about.

At its soul, The Church in the Darkness begins with a fascinating concept: infiltrating a cult. The idea of the cult having a different personality through each playthrough is also a unique one. However, the big ideas don't live up to the hype with a game that's so small and gives the player very little to do.

The Church in the Darkness wants to be a stealth game that puts you in the midst of a doomsday cult. Consequently, rather than giving you insight into the world of a cult (a la Sagebrush, which I’ll once again point you to as a better game about the same topic), you get a dull game that’ll just make you appreciate how to avoid someone’s field of view. There are better options out there (*ahem* Sagebrush), and you’re better off getting that than wasting your time here.

There are some intriguing ideas at play here. Decent stealth mechanics and a captivating cultist backdrop will reel you in though there just isn’t enough substance to make The Church in the Darkness a lasting, worthwhile experience.

The Church in the Darkness does a great job of delivering a sticky stealth and exploration experience that also gets your brain moving. It's not quite as replayable as it first seems, however. The seemingly large pool of possible endings isn't as diverse an assortment as it seems, and there's not a ton of variation in the evidence you gather.