Top 10 Christian Video Games That Will Strengthen Your Faith

If you've ever searched "best Christian video games" and felt suspicious that half the titles you found don't seem to exist anywhere on Steam — your instincts are good. The Christian-game industry is small. Always has been. What's worth knowing is that the games which do exist tell a more interesting story than most listicles let on: a story that starts on a grey NES cartridge sold in Christian bookstores and ends, decades later, with a couple of believing parents making a game about their dying son that left a generation of secular gamers in tears.

What follows is ten real games, in roughly chronological order, with what they actually are and who they're for. Some are dated to the point of being museum pieces. A few still hold up. One will wreck you. None of them are made up.

1. Bible Adventures (Wisdom Tree, 1991)

The grey, unlicensed NES cartridge that launched a small industry. Three side-scrolling platformer mini-games — Noah's Ark, David and Goliath, and Baby Moses — each loosely retelling the Old Testament story they're named for. The Noah level has you picking up animals two at a time and depositing them on the ark, which is exactly as charmingly weird as it sounds. Mechanically it's a Super Mario Bros. 2 clone. Spiritually it's a starting point: a generation of kids born around 1985 first heard these stories on a CRT.

2. Spiritual Warfare (Wisdom Tree, 1992)

Wisdom Tree's most ambitious release: a top-down adventure heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda. You play an unnamed Christian wandering a modern city, throwing fruit of the Spirit at demons to convert them. You collect pieces of the armor of God from Ephesians 6 — the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, the sword of the Spirit — which unlock new abilities. It is unsubtle. It is also the first time a video game tried to put an Ephesians 6 passage on the screen as a mechanic, and it stuck around long enough to get re-released on the Genesis and Game Boy.

3. Joshua & the Battle of Jericho (Wisdom Tree, 1992)

Another Zelda-shaped retelling, this time of the conquest narrative in the book of Joshua. You wander overworld maps, blow your trumpet to bring down walls, and work through the actual sequence of events from chapters 1–6. Pair it with reading the source text and you have an unintentionally decent middle-school Bible study aid.

4. King of Kings: The Early Years (Wisdom Tree, 1991)

Three more mini-games, this time from the Gospels: the wise men's journey, Jesus' boyhood in Egypt, and the temple cleansing. The gameplay is rough, but the choice of stories is interesting — most Bible games stay safely in the Old Testament, and this one was willing to dramatize Christ himself, which has always been a theologically loaded thing to do well.

5. Exodus (Wisdom Tree, 1991)

Released on the same engine as Joshua, with Moses doing the wandering. Less remembered than its siblings, but worth a footnote because it's the only Christian game to seriously try to dramatize the wilderness years between the parting of the Red Sea and the entry into Canaan — the messy middle that scripture itself spends most of Numbers on.

6. Captain Bible in the Dome of Darkness (Bridgestone Multimedia, 1994)

A first-person DOS adventure game, the kind with painted pre-rendered rooms. You play Captain Bible, sent into a domed city deceived by lies, armed only with a verse lookup tool that lets you cite scripture to defeat each falsehood. It's clunky, it's earnest, and it's the only game that genuinely treats Bible-reading itself as the verb of the gameplay. Hard to find now, but ROM-preservation sites have kept it alive.

7. Catechumen (N'Lightning Software, 2000)

Built on the Genesis3D engine, Catechumen is a first-person shooter set during the Roman persecution of the early church under Nero. The twist: your weapon is the Holy Spirit, and the goal is not to kill enemy soldiers but to "convert" them — they fall to their knees in repentance rather than die. Christian-developer attempts to make a non-violent FPS were rare in 2000 and still are. It's worth a play just to see the design problem being seriously attempted.

8. The Bible Game (Crave Entertainment, 2005)

Released on PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Game Boy Advance — a real disc you could buy at GameStop. Underneath is a straightforward party trivia game in the mould of You Don't Know Jack: multiple-choice Bible questions wrapped in mini-games. It's the most "normal" Christian video game ever shipped, in the sense that it had a real publisher, a real budget, and shelves at Best Buy. Good for family game night if you can find a working PS2.

9. That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016)

The reason this article exists. Ryan and Amy Green, both Christians, spent four years building a game about their son Joel's terminal cancer diagnosis at age one and the four years that followed. It is barely a "game" in the mechanical sense — you walk, you click, you listen to voicemails and prayers and a father's voice cracking. It is the only entry on this list that received wide secular coverage (a feature documentary, Thank You for Playing, was made about its creation) and the only one that has reduced non-Christian players to tears at the way the Greens process grief through their faith. If you only play one game on this list, play this one.

10. I Am Jesus Christ (SimulaM)

The most theologically ambitious recent entry — a first-person life-of-Christ simulator from a Polish indie studio that gives the player control of Jesus himself: baptism, temptation, miracles, the road to Golgotha. Reception has been split, including among Christians, because portraying the incarnate Son of God as a playable character raises real questions about reverence and limits. Worth knowing about precisely because the conversation around it — what should and shouldn't be turned into interactive media — is one the church needs to keep having. For deeper reading on how faith and gameplay intersect, see our piece on how Christian gaming communities form online.

A Note on Where the Genre Goes Next

Read that list carefully and you'll notice the dates: 1991, 1992, 1994, 2000, 2005, 2016. Long gaps. Christian gaming has never been an industry; it's been a handful of small teams trying things at irregular intervals. The reason is partly market — the audience that wants explicitly Christian games is small — but it's also that the most spiritually formative games made by Christians aren't usually about being Christian. They're about a dying son. They're about wrestling with doubt. They're games where faith is the soil, not the slogan.

"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men." — Colossians 3:23

If you want to support the genre, the best thing you can do is buy That Dragon, Cancer at full price, pay attention to indie devs on itch.io who are quietly doing faith-shaped work, and stop sharing listicles that make up game titles. The real history is more interesting than the fake one anyway.