Following the backlash against The Last of Us Part 2, Naughty Dog’s head reveals the next project will delve into the seemingly neutral themes of "faith and religion."

Naughty Dog head Neil Druckmann has shared more details of the studio’s all-new next game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet was announced at the end of last year, with a trailer which featured a retro futuristic energy and introduced us to Tati Gabrielle’s bounty hunter, Jordan A Mun. Other than that, details remained relatively slim on what this game would really be about.

Now, however, Druckmann has shed more light on the studio’s sci-fi title, and joked it was a game about religion that will surely get less hate than the divisive The Last of Us Part 2 did on its debut.

“With The Last of Us 2, we made certain creative decisions that got us a lot of hate. A lot of people love it, but a lot of people hate that game,” Druckman said during a chat with 28 Days Later writer Alex Garland, to which Garland replied: “Who gives a shit.”

“Exactly. But the joke is like, you know what, let’s do something that people won’t care as much about. Let’s make a game about faith and religion,” Druckmann quipped.

The Naughty Dog head revealed he has been working on Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet for four years now, and confirmed the upcoming release won’t be set on Earth. “It takes place 2000 years in an alternate future that deviates in the late 80s,” he shared.

“So there is not only in this alternate history timeline, we’ve made this – where the where the timeline deviates – this new religion becomes pretty prominent and then we spend years just building out this religion like from the original prophet all the way [to] how it gets like changed and sometimes bastardised and evolves over all these years.”

Druckmann stated “this whole religion takes place on this one planet”, which in December was revealed to be called Sempiria. “And then at one point all communication stops from this planet and you’re playing a bounty hunter that’s chasing her bounty and she crash lands on this planet,” he continued, noting that while he “wanted to make a game about faith and religion” he also wanted to tackle themes of isolation and loneliness.

“So many of the previous games we’ve done there’s always like an ally with you,” he said. “I really want you to be lost in a place that you’re really confused about what happened here, [about] who are the people here, what was their history and in order to get off this planet like – again no one has been heard from this planet for 600 years – so if you ever have hoped to have a chance to get off you have to figure out what happened here.”

Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is in development for PS5. Last year, Druckmann confirmed Naughty Dog had a number of games in the works, including “multiple single-player projects”, this being one of them.

Elsewhere in Naughty Dog news, don’t hold your breath for The Last of Us Part 3, as last week Druckman told fans: “Don’t bet on there being more”.