The Last of Us offers players a grim, greenish apocalypse where teenagers carry pistols and everything rots, but that apparently isn’t hardcore enough for creator Neil Druckmann. The Naughty Dog director says that the studio’s upcoming sci-fi title Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet won’t be nearly as cuddly as The Last of Us’ knife to throat – it wants you to feel as isolated as possible.
“You’re playing a bounty hunter that’s chasing her bounty, and she crashlands on this planet,” Druckmann says of Intergalactic’s companionless plot in a new episode of Sony’s Creator to Creator series, this one joined by 28 Days Later movie writer Alex Garland. The planet you land on – Sempiria, steeped in mist and shadow – is a shell of its former self, as you yourself are about to be after being forced to brave its strangeness alone.
Intergalactic takes place 2,000 years in an alternate future, Druckmann explains, which deviates from our timeline beginning in the late ’80s after a new religion is born on Sempiria. Things thrive, get bastardized, and change, but, at one point in Sempiria’s history, everything stops. Communication from the planet ceases, and no one knows why.
“I really wanted to make a game about faith and religion,” Druckmann says, “but also about just being lonely. So many of the previous games we’ve done – there’s always, like, an ally, with you. I really want you to be lost in a place where you’re really confused about what happened here.”
As Intergalactic protagonist Jordan, you’ll wonder “Who are the people here? What was their history?” Druckmann continues. “And, in order to get off this planet – no one has been heard from [on] this planet for 600 years – so if you ever hoped to have a chance to get off, you have to figure out what happened here.”
Nothing, not even brain-mush zombies, are as terrifying as being so hopelessly alone.
