Cultist Simulator

This is a great game, but as you can see by other reviews, not for everybody. If you are a fan of Lovecraft's work, that's a start. In this game you play as the cultist, but one who's starting to learn, and the mechanics suit this very well. As the intro of the game tells us, there are moments in which you will have no idea what you are suppose to do, as a learning cultist would: you have "X", and you want to reach "Y", and you just don't know how (and sometimes, you have no hint about what's beyond "Y"). So, what can you do? Study something? Talk to someone? Explore some place? Dream? It's a puzzle you need to solve. Many reviewers here talk about the lack ou tutorial/manual, but i don't see how that could be implemented, nor if this would do any good for the game. You have no master here, you are the leader of the cult, so, who's gonna grab you by the hand and show you where to go? Some say it's repetitive, and yes, when you are stuck the only thing you can do is get money to cover for your daily expenses and mutter in your study "where's the key that opens this mystery?" while you look at all the knowledge i've gathered so far. (In the so far 25h i've played i was stuck badly once, and i googled the problem and some person online grabbed my hand (perhaps another cult leader that i met while buying a book, or while i dreamed?) So far i tried to convince you that most of the game's mechanics give flavour to the story we are living, but i'll try to be more objective: The game is a puzzle, do you believe you are interested enough by the setting to deal with potentially frustrating stuck situations? To sit down for minutes of maybe hours exploring other things or simply do some trial-error until you find your way? If so, go for it! I don't remember if a read it here of somewhere else, but i read complains about a lack of story. Well, we really only have cards and small texts here, so if you don't read the texts (small pieces of a larger puzzle), there are only cool looking illustrations here really.

CS strikes me oddly, it's made by the team who made fallen London and Sunless Sea yet what those two games did seamlessly, this game felt like it was the first game from their team. Now if you've played either of those games you'd know that their main strengths are lots of choices and atmosphere, this game however gives you nearly the illusion of choice and an attempt at atmosphere. The game starts you out with you losing your job and forced to find work to make ends meet . Suddenly you get a notice that you're in the will of a guy who you met during your past job. The package contains the necessary needs for your journey. From there on you can decide your faith to create cult of passionately devoted followers who would risk it all for you, to walk in the lands of dreams, or to kill yourself....And much more! The best part about all that is that it's told through gameplay. Like for instance, when you lose your job, you don't get a wall of text explaining to you that you lost your job and now you're cultist-man, no, you get your job card, you place it on the work tile, after a couple of seconds you check the tile to find you lost your job card but you got your severance pay, a health card that showed how your formed job affected you and a paragraph of text that simply says, you lost your job. This is a great way how the game presents itself and it works for a while but as I've mentioned before the game doesn't give you many options and the atmosphere weakens after this carefully crafted opening. Now the main issue I had with this game was the illusion of choice, the games options are it's processes (travel,talk,sleep) and what you can do with those process with cards (place of interest,) this is fine until you realize that if you click ok with a card in a process than you can't stop it this is even worse for sending your cult to do jobs and you can't get them to stop unless either all of them or dead or all of their funds are depleted. Decent game needs options.

I like the music, the mystery, and most of all the lore. If you like reading Lovcraftian staff and diving deep into the ocult, this is a game for you.

Typically, when dealing with games as these, every inch of knowledge is purchased with blood. However, given the choice between playing a game where every defeat is a learning opportunity versus having none, I choose my preferred breed of frustration.

Contemplative, relaxing and still difficult.