Naughty Dog’s next game may not be The Last of Us Part III, but they’re venturing into new territory with Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. While we know that it’s going to be a retro-futuristic action game, director Neil Druckmann has confirmed that it’s actually about ‘Faith and Religion’.
Talking to director Alex Garland on Creator to Creator, Druckmann jokes about how the backlash for The Last of Us Part II led to him picking the theme for the next game. Druckmann explains:
“It’s funny, it’s like I joke about this with a team like, ‘Oh, we made a game—with The Last of Us II we made certain creative decisions that got us a lot of hate—a lot of people love it, but a lot of people hate that game.’
“The joke is like, ‘You know what, let’s do something that people won’t care as much about. Let’s make a game about faith and religion.”
In the game, protagonist Jordan (Tati Gabrielle) will find herself stuck on a planet in search of a bounty, but she’s going to discover that there’s this weird religion that was central to the planet and its inhabitants. Druckmann continues:
“This new religion becomes pretty prominent. And then we spend years just building out this religion like from the original Prophet, all the way how it gets like changed and sometimes bastardized and evolves over all these years, and then like all these people… and this whole religion takes place on this one planet and then at one point, all communication stops from this planet. And you’re playing a bounty hunter that’s chasing her bounty and she crash lands on this planet.”
Besides Faith and Religion, Druckmann also says the game is going to focus on Loneliness, which he came up with when he realized that a lot of the ND games are about having allies and companions. Even Jak had a talking Daxter on his shoulder even if he was the only one doing the action.
Druckmann is said to want to make players feel lonely when it comes to Intergalactic, and seeing as how he weaponized empathy in his last game, I’m excited to see just how much he’s going to manipulate everyone again to make them feel more alone.
You think Death Stranding has anything to do with it?
No release date has been set for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, but fans are hoping for a release on the PS5 sometime later this year.
