Darksiders begins as a straightforward story with heavy mythological overtones. Heaven and Hell go to war during the Apocalypse. War, one of the four horsemen, is summoned to oversee this Endwar. He soon realizes that something is wrong. The other three horsemen are not here. The final seal whose destruction marks the beginning of the Apocalypse has not been broken. He should not have been summoned. There was a mistake. Defeated and blamed by those who rule over him for starting the Endwar early, War swears to bring justice upon whoever framed him, and upon returning to an Earth now 100 years dead, he discovers that a great demon named the Destroyer has led Hell’s forces to victory. Here is the most obvious suspect, the demon who quite likely faked the Apocalypse and set War up to take the fall.

But in the universe of Darksiders, things are often not as they seem. Throughout the first game, War uncovers a surprising amount of intrigue, with double- and triple-crosses on every side of this grand conflict. “We didn’t want it to seem like a one-dimensional universe,” explains Vigil general manager David Adams. You may not entirely realize it from the first game, but the world of Darksiders has many more forces at play than just Heaven and Hell. The angels aren’t necessarily good guys, and the demons aren’t necessarily bad guys. The regular rules do not apply, and in Darksiders II, things are only going to get messier.

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for the first Darksiders. If you have not yet played this game and don’t want the plot spoiled, I suggest playing it immediately, then coming back to read this article. All good? Awesome!

One of the most important things to note about Darksiders’ fiction is that although Vigil used Christian mythology as a jumping-off point for the game, its adherence to Biblical source material basically stops at the idea of the four horsemen being tied to the Apocalypse. “We’ve always joked that it’s as Christian as Diablo,” Adams says. “Yeah, there are angels and demons and the four horsemen, but it’s really just mostly fantasy. We very purposefully avoided a lot of the religion references. There’s no God in our fiction.” In his place is a mysterious figure referred to only a few times in the first game as the Creator.

Throughout the history of the cosmos, the Creator has tried time and time again to bring balance to the universe. Unfortunately, all of these attempts have failed, leaving behind “countless worlds that have been fed to what we call the Abyss. These are just the war-torn battlefields of the angels and demons of the past.”

The angels and demons of Heaven and Hell that exist in Darksiders are “the latest iteration” of this eternal conflict, but this time a third party known as the Charred Council comes up with a new plan to help avoid the needless destruction of yet another series of worlds. They mediate a truce between the frustratingly evenly matched angels and demons. Adams eagerly lays out the situation: “It’s like a giant stalemate. It’s too balanced, so no side can win. So they make a truce and create a third faction, the kingdom of man.”