Naughty Dog studio head and creative director for upcoming game Intergalactic Neil Druckmann has said that the studio wants to make the player feel lonely and lost in the game. Speaking to 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland on a recent episode of Sony’s Creator to Creator series, Druckmann spoke about the themes of Intergalactic, and its primary setting of the planet Sempiria.
According to Druckmann, Intergalactic will make use of themes like religion and faith, as well as the idea of loneliness. To that end, players won’t have an ally like they traditionally have had in previous Naughty Dog games.
“I really wanted to make a game about faith and religion, but also about just being lonely,” said Druckmann. “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.”
Druckmann wants players to share the same feelings as protagonist Jordan A. Mun, wondering about the mysterious people they meet on Sempiria and about their histories.
“Who are the people here? What was their history?” Druckmann said, describing questions he wants players to wonder about. “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.”
In the same conversation, Druckmann also revealed that, while he has an ultimate vision for Intergalactic, it’s more of a theory. Rather, during its development, the game is still seeing changes and is evolving.
“Again, these things are so complex and big and there’s so many people involved,” said Druckmann. “It’s like, I still don’t know exactly what this thing is going to look like at the end. I have a theory, I have an idea, but it’s still evolving and changing as we’re making it.”
Intergalactic is currently under development for the PS5. The game was announced with a trailer back in December 2024 during The Game Awards. There is no current word on a release date for the game.
Intergalactic revolves around the attempts of protagonist Jordan A. Mun, who ends up trapped on remote planet Sempiria, and must try and get out of the place alive. In doing so, Mun would be the first person in more than 600 years to have escaped from the planet, which had “gone dark” hundreds of years ago.
Druckmann has previously described the game as being the most ambitious title Naughty Dog has worked on so far.
“What we can tell you is that this game lives up to the Naughty Dog tradition of creating an emotional, character-driven epic journey,” wrote Druckmann about Intergalactic. “Our narrative goals are rivaled only by our gameplay ambitions. This will be the deepest gameplay in Naughty Dog’s history, taking our learnings from our previous franchises and pushing them beyond anything we’ve ever done before.”
For more details about Intergalactic, here are 10 details we have learned about it.
