To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 26th

• Game: Sagebrush
• Developer: Redact Games
• Release Year: 2018
• Available: Itch, Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

I think many of us, when approaching a documentary about cults or a piece of fiction inspired by same, afford ourselves an unwarranted mental armor of sorts. A firm belief that we could never find ourselves in a similar situation, beholden to some obviously corrupt and deeply immoral leader figure and willing to sacrifice our own lives for something as nebulous as eternal bliss or spiritual fulfilment. The mass suicide tragedies of Jonestown and Heaven's Gate still weigh heavily on the minds of those who had family members or friends involved, not to mention the state and federal law enforcement who dealt with the aftermath. It's those cults - isolated in self-sufficient agricultural communities, based upon some obscure teachings of Christianity that somehow only their respective leaders were privy to, given rules to abide and punishments doled out to those deemed disruptive - that we have Sagebrush, a first-person narrative exploration game with a low-poly sheen that explores the life and death of a cult.

Like other exemplars of the first-person narrative exploration game, occasionally called "walking simulators," the game takes a deliberately circuitous route through its setting of Black Sage Ranch: the former location of the Perfect Heaven cult, deep within New Mexico. By finding keys and passcodes to the various buildings in a specific, design-led order, the player is drip-fed a story through epistolary means, learning more about the inner workings of the cult from the perspective of a younger worshipper named Lilian. The depths of the depravity of Perfect Heaven and its messianic leader Father James makes itself apparent slowly, as the game first establishes what day-to-day life was like in the cult and the reasons its followers had for joining. An expertly-paced slow-burn view into the life of these devouts, and those like them in Perfect Heaven's real-life equivalents.

The game uses a grainy, low-poly, low-res aesthetic partly, I imagine, because of budgetary and technical limitations, but it's thematically justified by having this cult live and die in the early '90s. The player character is visiting the long-abandoned grounds some undisclosed number of years later, opening a way in through the perimeter fence around late afternoon and eventually spending an entire night exploring the environs. In addition to the low lighting, the game makes excellent - if slightly inexplicable - use of sound design by the way it is continually shutting doors behind you, making you jump at the noise. Distant coyotes and other eerie ambiance creates a sense of danger and foreboding, and even before you reach eye-opening locales like the Cleansing Hall or Father James's Rectory the game has laid the groundwork with notes and audio logs about what horrors you might discover there. Even if there's no traditional scares or monsters (Sagebrush does indeed pull a Gone Home), the atmosphere is palpable and deeply unpleasant.

Sagebrush ultimately isn't a horror game in the conventional sense, but more a fictionalized documentary that explores an unsettling real-life perversion of organized religion (or, perhaps, organized religion simply taken to an exaggerated degree) through a more humane look at the lives of its zealots and how they came to think the way they do, starting with the general alienation they felt towards their Catholic or Protestant upbringing and how recruiters - in Perfect Heaven's case, that was Father James's wife Anne, who apparently had no issue with James's frequent dalliances with other female cultists - are able to identify and prey on these wayward souls. It doesn't spend quite so long on the indoctrination process, though it's evident enough through journals and pamphlets how it happened, and then conveys the increasing paranoia and corruption that brought the whole cult to its final, tragic conclusion. It's sad, it's heavy, it's definitely creepy, and its message is perhaps a little more serious and downbeat than this silly little Halloween-themed blog series can handle. Still, if you ever wanted to explore the abandoned grounds of a cult without the feds breathing down your neck, Sagebrush is as close as you could ever want to comfortably get. Closer, even.

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.
• (Creeposity: 5 S.T.A.R.S.)