JOIN US 访谈：一款包含食人与骑熊的狂野沙盒游戏

JOIN US is already shaping up to be one of the most manic games of 2027, and we sat down with Wolf Haus Games CEO and creative director Joe Dietsch to pick his brain about his and the team’s vision for JOIN US, and how it came to be.

If you’ve not checked out JOIN US, you need to, for your sake, so you don’t end up in some cultist’s basement, which is potentially one of the million things you can do in JOIN US. After one interview with Joe Dietsch at Gamescom 2026, it’s clear all bets are off, and your freedom will be near-endless.

“Q. The reveal trailer for JOIN US was, in a good way, genuinely one of the most hilarious trailers I’ve ever seen. Did you know you had a special game on your hands when you came up with the concept?

A. It was this concept that stuck with me for a while when we were first thinking about the game. I kept thinking this is a great idea for a game, but is this too crazy, are people going to connect with this? But I think as we started to ideate with our early builds and kind of figure out, you know, we like the idea of a cult, because I think a cult is such an interesting concept when you break it down into game mechanics.

Then also the question is, what’s the tone, right? The tone we kind of landed on is, we know cults are bad. We, as the player, presumably know cults are bad, but what if they weren’t? What if they were a great time? What does that world kind of look like? So, that was a tone we found early on pitching the game. We pitched the game for a while and talked to a lot of people about it, and there were concerns at times that it was too crazy.

At that point there were six guys in the company, but we have 13 people now, but it was still like this, you know, this little group of guys making a crazy game. I think when that first trailer launched, I would say we were validated as we knew people at least found it funny. It was sort of like, are people going to understand what the joke is? It seems like it lands. It’s pretty universal.

Q. At what point did cannibalism become a gameplay mechanic?

It was the first teaching we ever made. There’s about 75 to 100 teachings at launch. The first one we made number one was cannibalism. I think it was cannibalism followed by animal riding. You can ride deer in the forest, I think was the second teaching we made. But yeah, there’s deer riding in there and bear riding.

Q. Are there any limits on who you can and can’t convert? Can you technically just rule the world in JOIN US?

We always want there to be a challenge. I think part of the design challenge to JOIN US is if you make a really good cult and you take over the whole map, what happens, right? Essentially you’re making a game that gets easier as you go. So the idea is there always has to be, it’s not the police, it’s the military, right? How do you step up the challenges?

But you can recruit every civilian in the game. Some are much harder than others. If you’re in the upper class area of town, it’s going to be harder to get people. You can get any enemy in the game as well. Those are your teachings where you have to beat people up with a bat, and if you beat them up, they might join you. So it’s a sort of a combat-based mechanic.

Q. So, up to four players can play simultaneously, and me and my friends are going to absolutely love playing this together. How does the world and experience change going from, say, single player to a multiplayer experience?

When four players are in, it’s not like one player really has control of the game and other people are there just to scavenge and do combat. Everyone has the same menus, everyone can build, everyone has the same tools. We’re counting on friends liking each other enough to agree on the teachings that they’re creating for their co-op.

But everyone has full control, and I think what we’ve found between playing co-op and a single player is that the game is weird and it gets weirder a lot faster with four people. Because you get someone go, ‘I’m going to go fight this civilian for no reason. I’m going to go over here.’ People start to sort of go on their own journeys a little bit and that creates a lot of emergent chaos in a fun way.

Q. On a slightly more serious note, I saw a news post on Steam. I think it was on the JOIN US Steam page, actually, about the voice actors. The exact line said, ‘every line of dialogue in JOIN US was written and voice acted by actual human beings instead of robots.’ Do you feel strongly about this? And how much more satisfying is it knowing that there’s no AI voices in the game?

A. It’s something we feel really strongly about as a studio. I know we feel like part of the reason we like being a 13-person team is that we’re making a game that I think, hopefully, feels like it was made by a specific group of humans who made a choice to make something. I think with that comes the need to say, hey, if we have actors who are hearing voices in this world, it should all be other human beings making creative choices. I think that’s sort of how you maybe stand out in a saturated environment. You want someone to feel like you’ve created something for them.

You had intention behind it. I think that should trickle down into voices and the voice acting. I think it also has humor, and it has a very specific tone. It’s something we feel strongly about. I’d say even in the game, the UI is drawn by one of our team, and she has drawn, at this point, hundreds of hand-drawn pictures. So everything in the UI is completely hand-drawn. Input symbols or something like that.

Q. I know it’s hard to put a number on something like this, considering you can just go off the beaten path and go and do whatever, but how long would you say an average playthrough is?

We’ve always targeted around 15 hours for the story campaign. There are also side missions that get unlocked as you conquer regions and various completionist tasks. I think with that, you’re looking at 30 [hours] plus. That’s been the goal. Then there is the sandbox mode and the idea of exploration. Once you get into the teachings, the teachings are kind of almost a deck-building system.

So we’d hope people would probably, with friends, explore what if we make some more in-game choices and try to have this teaching connect with that. We love this game, and we don’t have any interest in letting it go after March [2027]. So I’m sure we’re going to have other ideas and probably continue providing support and updates for it.

Q. Any idea what extra content we could see post-launch?

Probably some patches. I think, we’re immediately going to be looking into a dis-expanded wardrobe and sort of fun, creative expression for the player. After that, I think we’ll want to grow the community as well. This is something where we don’t want to guess at what people want, we’d rather hear from people if someone wants something.”