The Churches The Apostles Left Behind

The Churches The Apostles Left Behind: What It Actually Is and How to Get Started

The Churches The Apostles Left Behind is a first-person survival crafting game that puts you in the shoes of a lone traveler navigating a desolate, apocalyptic world where ancient churches and overgrown ruins hold the remnants of a forgotten civilization. The game doesn't hand you much in the way of tutorialization. You learn by doing, by dying, and by figuring out systems that the developers assumed you'd pick up intuitively. The game is available through Steam and is currently in early access, which means you're getting a product that is still actively being built and patched. As of my last check, the base game runs around $15 USD on Steam. If you want the direct download link, it's straightforward: go to the official store page on Valve's platform, click purchase or add to library, and it installs like any other Steam title. There is no standalone launcher or third-party client required. The game runs on the Unity engine, so if your system can handle a game like Valheim or 7 Days to Die, you should be fine. Minimum specs sit at something like a dual-core processor, 4GB RAM, and a basic GPU from the last decade. Recommended specs bump you to 8GB RAM and a dedicated graphics card from the GTX 10-series or equivalent. One thing I ran into when I first started was that the game doesn't always play nicely with ultrawide monitors on launch. I have a 3440x1440 panel and the UI elements were stretched awkwardly across the entire screen. The workaround was simple enough: set the resolution to 1920x1080 first, launch the game, then switch back to ultrawide once you're in the main menu. The UI recalibrates after that and stays correct. Not ideal for a pre-launch game but worth knowing if you're running a widescreen setup.

Core Mechanics and How They Work in Practice

Survival crafting games follow a pretty standard template, but this one adds some specific flavor through its environmental storytelling and church-themed exploration. Here's how the basic loop works without overcomplicating it. You spawn in a world with minimal equipment. Your starting inventory typically includes nothing more than your hands and whatever random tools might be lying near your spawn point. You need to gather resources by interacting with the environment. Trees give wood. Rocks give stone and flint. There are herb nodes you can harvest for medicinal and crafting materials. The collection system uses a radial menu that feels a bit sluggish at first but becomes second nature after a few hours of play. Building is where the game earns its keep. You place foundation pieces, walls, doors, and roofing in a grid-based system. The building costs scale logically. A basic wooden wall might cost three sticks and two stones. Upgrading to reinforced stone variants costs more but provides better defense against the creatures that roam the world. I found that the most common mistake new players make is building too aggressively too early. There's no reason to construct a massive fortress on day one. The creatures scale with your progress, and a half-built base with no resources to defend it is a liability. I spent about four hours in my first playthrough trying to build an elaborate shelter before I'd gathered enough stone to properly fortify anything. I got raided and lost almost everything because I hadn't stockpiled materials. The lesson is simple: gather first, build when you have a surplus, and expand gradually.

Crafting System Explained

The crafting bench in this game is accessed through a portable workstation that you can place anywhere. Unlike some crafting systems that force you to return to a central hub, this one gives you flexibility. You craft weapons, tools, armor, and building components through a tiered progression. Early game is all about wooden and stone tools. Mid game introduces metal working, which requires smelting ore at a furnace. Late game involves more advanced alloys and enchanted components that come from processing materials found in the larger church structures scattered throughout the world. One counter-intuitive thing about the crafting system: you do not need to unlock recipes through experience points or skill trees. Recipes unlock organically through exploration and item discovery. When you find a recipe note in a dungeon or church, it immediately becomes available in your crafting menu. This means the game rewards thorough exploration over grinding. Some players skip the exploration in favor of staying in one area and farming resources, which works for survival but leaves you missing key recipes that make mid-game significantly easier. I discovered a full smithing recipe tree by accidentally entering a ruined chapel I hadn't noticed on my initial mapping pass. That single discovery cut my weapon crafting time dramatically because I went from wooden swords to steel-tier weapons almost overnight.

Exploration and the Churches

The churches are the central feature that separates this game from generic survival titles. Each church is a large, multi-room instanced area filled with puzzles, enemies, loot, and environmental narrative. They range from small chapels with one or two rooms to massive cathedral complexes that take an hour or more to fully clear. The interior design is detailed, and the lore fragments scattered throughout them paint a picture of a world that collapsed under some kind of religious or cosmic catastrophe. The puzzles are not particularly difficult. They involve finding keys, aligning statues, pressing pressure plates, and solving basic light-and-reflection mechanics. What makes them memorable is the atmosphere. The sound design, the lighting, and the occasional ambient music track create a genuine sense of dread and wonder. I've seen plenty of players report feeling genuinely unsettled in certain sections, particularly the deeper cathedral areas where the geometry of the building seems to shift slightly as you progress deeper inside. Whether that's intentional design or a rendering quirk, I don't know, but it adds to the tension. Enemies inside the churches are tougher and more varied than the surface creatures. You'll face humanoid figures in tattered robes, corrupted animal variants, and occasionally boss-level entities that guard the most valuable loot. Combat is real-time with a light attack, heavy attack, block, and dodge roll. The combat system is serviceable but not deep. It does exactly what you'd expect from a survival game and nothing more. Positioning matters more than reflexes in most encounters. Kiting enemies through church corridors and using doorways to funnel them is an effective tactic I relied on heavily during my early deaths and eventual successes.

Common Pitfalls and Limitations

There are several limitations worth being honest about before you invest time in this game. The save system is manual only. There is no auto-save, and checkpoint saving is inconsistent. I once spent about forty-five minutes exploring a large cathedral, collected several high-tier materials, and then the game crashed to desktop. When I reloaded my last manual save, everything I'd gathered in that session was gone. I had saved earlier in the day rather than mid-session. This is a real problem for a game of this length. My workaround was to save after every significant loot find or milestone event, even if it felt excessive. It became tedious but saved me from losing progress on multiple occasions. Another issue is the early access state of the game. Content is incomplete. There are no endgame bosses yet, the world generation has quirks that can spawn you in unwinnable locations, and multiplayer is either absent or in a very raw state depending on the patch version. If you're looking for a polished, complete experience, this is not it. But if you're fine with supporting a work in progress and don't mind reporting bugs or dealing with the occasional game-breaking glitch, there is a solid foundation here that improves with each update. The difficulty curve is also uneven. Early game is punishing because you have no context for the enemy behaviors. Mid game opens up significantly once you have proper gear and a established base. Late game, from what I've seen in the current build, plateaus because the content simply isn't there yet to challenge well-geared players. The developers have mentioned that post-launch content will address this, but that's not a guarantee for everyone playing now.

Performance and Optimization Notes

The game runs decently on mid-range hardware but struggles on lower-end systems, particularly during indoor church sequences. The lighting effects in those enclosed spaces cause frame rate drops that can be noticeable. If you're playing on integrated graphics or an older GPU, reducing shadow quality and draw distance in the settings menu will help stabilize performance. I ran the game on a GTX 1660 Super and got acceptable framerates at medium settings in open areas, but the frame drops inside churches were still present at around 30-40 fps during intense moments. Dropping shadows to low brought that to a stable 50-55 fps, which is playable. Memory usage is another factor. The game tends to leak memory over long sessions. After about six hours of continuous play, I noticed the game consuming significantly more RAM than it did at the start. A full restart of the application resolves the issue, but it's something to be aware of if you're planning marathon sessions. Save frequently before those sessions and keep a habit of restarting if you notice performance degradation.

Is It Worth Your Time?

If you enjoy survival crafting games with a strong atmospheric focus and don't mind early access imperfections, this is a reasonable purchase. The church exploration adds a unique twist to a genre that otherwise follows predictable patterns. The resource management, base building, and combat loops are functional and satisfying once you get past the initial learning curve. Just be prepared for the rough edges, the manual save requirement, and the incomplete endgame content. It's a game that benefits from patience and a willingness to engage with its systems rather than rushing through them. The payoff comes in those quiet moments of discovery when you find a beautifully designed church interior with enough loot to meaningfully advance your progress, and that sense of accomplishment is real even if the road to get there has some potholes along the way.