The Scariest Cults Ever Seen in Video Games

Cults can be a scary thing. The obsession, being cut-off from family and friends as well as a change on your entire life's perspective. Cult members will do anything for their cause and it's not different in the fictional world of video games.

Pick any cult in video games and you'll find a lot of the same things in real ones. Elaborate costumes that could have been designed by Liberace, extorting vast sums of money from followers, glaring holes in logic and dogma, and questionable systems of conduct.

Lucky, video gamers only have to worry about the occasional necromorph attack or blood-magic rite gone wrong. Read on for The Scariest Cults Ever Seen in Video Games: a small list of organizations that we are truly glad don't exist.

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Cult: Unitology

Dead Spaces's Unitology is a perfect example of how human beings ascribe power and meaning to things they don't fully comprehend. Unitology began when an alien artifact was found on Earth by a geological exploration team.

The 'Marker', as it came to be known, was used to prove that humans weren't originally from Earth and that our origins were far more celestial in nature. Using the Marker as the foundation of Unitology, the religion went on to become insanely powerful, like Scientology powerful, and peppered in some mass suicides and ritualistic human sacrifices just to keep things poppy.Good stuff all the way around.

Cult: Tree Minders

So hippies creating an intentional community out in the woods is nothing new. Giving yourself a new name to convey your new-found and deeply held spiritual convictions is nothing new. Worshipping a talking tree that's actually a mutant with branches growing out of his face, well that's not something you run into on the regs.

The Tree Minders in Fallout 3 may be a peaceful lot, but that still doesn't change the fact that they take their orders from a face in a tree who bears more than a passing resemblance to Eddie from Iron Maiden. Couple that with touchy-feely, new-agey names like Bloomseer and Treefather make them a laughably, if not particularly dangerous, sappy lot.

Cult: The Order

Standard boiler plate cult dogma doesn't stop The Order from the Silent Hill series from being any less insane than others on this list. Hoping to bring about the Apocalypse, kidnapping, massive doses of hallucinogens, and ascending to 'oneness' are all found in Th Order's welcome brochures.

Hosting an otherworldly deity within the body of a 14 year old girl is also on the menu for The Order. Crazy and not particularly picky when it comes to insanely violent ritualistic murder is the organizations m.o.

Cult: Mythic Dawn

Aside from sounding like a yoga studio with an attached juice bar, The Mythic Dawn has much greater goals than attracting people looking to start a cleanse. The end game for Mythic Dawn is to open up the realm of Daedric demons and allow the legions of hell to invade this plane of reality.

Seems shortsighted to us, but we aren't necromancers so the misunderstanding must be on our part.

Cult: The Saturnine

To start a cult while you're already in a cult is either a sign of the truly ambitious or the %100 batshit insane.

Rapture and its inhabitants could already be considered a cultish lot to begin with, but to then separate yourself and begin a nature worshipping cult in an underwater city just screams 'we were bored'.

Named after the Roman God Saturn, the group likes to wear masks made out of tree bits and consume plasmids spiked with human blood.

Enlightenment, or the fastest way to get Hep-C? You decide.

Cult: The Covenant

What better way to convince whole worlds to put aside their differences and join together than by starting a cult bent on galactic domination? The Covenant believe that humans are a blight on the galaxy and only through our extermination can divinity be achieved.

Prophecy, religion, and species-ism all combined with a zealous devotion to firepower equals one of the more serious cults we've seen in video games. Considering that it's all a thinly veiled allegory for a few religions already around here on Earth, The Covenant makes the list for being crazy and on message.

Cult: The Children of the Atom

One of the few cults on the list that worships an inanimate object as opposed to demons or talking trees, The Children of The Atom are also products of the Fallout universe.

After nuclear war broke out between the U.S. and China most of America was reduced to an uninhabitable wasteland. Why not begin a new religion that worships the very method of our near extinction? The Children of the Atom gather around an undetonated nuclear device and praise it for its ability to create new life when atoms are split and new universes are created on a sub-atomic level.

Weirdly enough, not a single case of cancer from hanging out around an exposed nuclear core.

Cult: The Vanu Sovereignty

Like all good cults the Vanu have built an entire belief system based on the notion that humanity must transcend its physical limitations in order to become divine.

Unfortunately for the other factions in PlanetSide 2, this transcendence comes at the business end of some very advanced weaponry. Worshiping alien technology and a desire to evolve to the next stage of human existence make the Vanu the Scientologists of the PlanetSide universe.

Cult: Los Illuminados

Cults need to have a certain mass appeal in order to get followers to abandon rational thinking and embrace some batshit dogma. Los Illuminados has managed to both create a false religion and sound like the name of a Brazilian death-metal band at the same time.

A rustic, backwoods cult that infects working class, non-land owning, laborers with alien parasites is really just a metaphor for the immigration debate in Washington. Throw in some black robes and hoods and you've got yourself an entirely new indentured workforce at your disposal. Most people don't know this, but Resident Evil titles are mostly metaphors about failed domestic economic policies.

Cult: Catholicism

We can agree that Dante's Inferno wasn't that great of a game. A God of War clone that swapped out Greek Mythology for Catholic imagery, plus it wasn't all that innovative in terms of gameplay.

What was awesome was how little work was needed to make Catholicism seem totally insane. Demons, The Devil, and Hell were already firmly in place before anyone decided to make a video game about that stuff. The Crusades, the Inquisition, being burned at the stake for witchcraft, and suffering for all eternity in a lake of fire for being an infidel were all notions that just seemed too perfect not to be turned into an action-adventure game.

Good thing it was only a game.