You know when a game isn’t trying to be funny or even SUPPOSED to be funny, but the basic concept of its existence is so funny in itself that you can’t help but laugh anyway? That was my experience playing the I Am Jesus Christ prologue.
When I Am Jesus Christ was first revealed to me, I was gobsmacked. I thought, “The JC lovers in the chat are going to be big mad at this one!” But, as it turns out, this was not a joke game. I Am Jesus Christ‘s purpose is to educate the gamers of the world of the life of Jesus himself, gamifying acts that one would think are ungamify-able (that’s not a word, but you get what I’m saying here).
Upon opening the game, you are greeted with this message from the developers, SimulaM and PlayWay:
If that’s not a sign that you’re going to have a great time, I don’t know what is.
So I’ll be lenient here. It’s a game in development, it’s not finished. There are still some bugs to be ironed out, but they seem to be interested in pulling out the ironing board to do so. Good on them.
Visually, the game actually looks alright. Sure, it’s not AAA-level production, but we really shouldn’t expect that from a small studio making a Jesus Christ simulator. Think of this game as somebody’s attempt at making an older Elder Scrolls game, but the only source material they had ever read in their life was The Bible.
The I Am Jesus Christ prologue has… a LOT of cutscenes. A lot. You don’t need to read about Jesus Christ’s life, you simply just have to watch and listen. Prior to booting the game up, the classic Steam installation pop-up came up and told me that the game files consisted of 28GB of game data, and I’m pretty sure that’s mainly from cutscenes and audio files. The prologue is an hour long. I was losing my mind.
The opening cutscenes of each chapter of I Am Jesus Christ prologue (I’m not sure how many chapters there are as I only got up to Chapter 6 before the game decided it didn’t want me to play it anymore and consistently crashed at that point) are completely unskippable. You MUST hear the word of the Lord, and you’re going to like it.
One of the first issues that I ran into actually had something to do with these cutscenes, as upon entering the interactive world, I decided to pause the game to check on something on my computer. Let me tell you, the I Am Jesus Christ Prologue did NOT like that. Every single time I paused the game, the opening monologue audio of the chapter would start to play again. Again, completely unskippable. It felt like I was being punished by God for daring to look at another tab.
how i look when i listen to the story of jesus christ’s birth with inspirational music in the background over the games already-existing inspirational music for the sixth time in a row pic.twitter.com/FEkfcIjLeO
— ruby innes (@rubyinnes) December 2, 2022
Going past this, the I Am Jesus Christ prologue breaks up Jesus’ life into chapters, as stated before. Within the 6 chapters I could play, Jesus is born, he walks around, baptises a guy, he gets people to believe that he is Tha One, turns water into wine, heals people who were all yucked up, and… fights Satan.
Fighting Satan was really hard. Satan exists in the form of a spectral orb with an evil voice (oh yeah, it’s all voice acted) that flies around flinging shit at you. You have to amass holy power, dodge his attacks and also reflect his attacks back to him until he eventually runs away. I died so many times but I also came back to life, which felt canon.
Throughout the game, you find yourself in a Holy Zone that essentially tells you how to perform miracles. In this zone, you make cubes appear and through them at the sun or put them on a button. Pretty simple stuff.
Funnily enough, you don’t actually do any of this stuff back in the ‘real world’. You can’t make cubes appear in the ‘real world’ just yet, or ever. I’m not sure, I couldn’t get any further than Chapter 6. Maybe, later on, Jesus becomes The Cube Maker. Who am I to say?
Instead, you are introduced to two miracles by the end of Chapter 6: Interaction and Heal. Interaction was used by Jesus (me) to turn water into wine, which everybody was super stoked about and probably got messy on. Heal was, if the name didn’t give it away, used to heal people. My only instance with this in my gameplay also happened to be one of the accidentally funniest parts of the game.
In Chapter 6, you are approached by a Royal Official who tells you that his poor sweet boy is sick. You, as the miracle fella, tell him, “Hey, don’t even worry about it.” You then proceed to go into God Mode and fly over to where his son is, spiritually enter his sickly body, and walk around and click on viruses inside to heal them. It was insane. It was incredible.
There’s a lot more I could go into but I won’t. I still am in awe that a game where you fight Satan and spiritually heal a little boy from the inside as Jesus Christ is not only real but 100% serious, but here we are.
If you’ve played Skyrim for the 12th time on your 12th console and are looking for something more biblically accurate and unintentionally ridiculous, why not consider the I Am Jesus Christ prologue? Who knows, you might get further than I did.
Or you could just watch some Veggie Tales. Or wait for the full game, where I’m hoping they’ll introduce the 12 Disciples DLC.
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