Cultist Simulator

Drugs are bad kids. Do this one though

Played the game for a few hours and I really enjoyed it. However, the game really needs a tutorial as I personally was stuck in limbo for the majority of the time I played.

Day 1: I have purposed to play this game entitled "Cultist Simulator" though I imagine it shall be full of nonsense. Most such pretenses are mere noise. Day 2: I seem to have died of overmuch dread. An annoyance, but I shall overcome. I begin my descent anew. Day 3: The Light from beyond the Walls of my DREAMS begins to Fill My Mind THERE IS NOT ENOUGH ROOM AND I EXPAND!! Day 4: I appear to have gone insane from overexposure to the bright lore. Hmph. There is more to this game than I previously believed, but no matter. Day 5: I am apprehended by the Bureau of Suppression. I require more associates, to prevent such injustices. Er, well. Justices. My deeds were dark as the Ragged Lore, but I have only done as I must! Day 6: I have summoned a thing from beyond this world, and it has slain the investigator meddling in my research. I know I can use this body, but for what? And will the rite be ready before the body decays? Day 7: It was far too costly to destroy that Damning Evidence, but it was necessary. I shall miss Ysabet. Day 8: The incantations are almost ready. My englightenment is at hand, and I shall not be denied! Breaking character for a bit, if you read all that and are interested in more, then just buy the game. You're exactly the kind of person who will enjoy it immensely. It's a fun game with loads of potential, and it fails at a tutorial on purpose so that you're just blindly fumbling about on your first few playthroughs, just like your character. I rather wish there was more diverse late game content, but it's probably the best cultist simulator for Cthulian horror ever to exist.

This game absolutely does what it says on the tin: It simulates the life of a cultist. What's surprising is the amount of daily grind an aspiring cultist has to do in 19th century Notlondon to achieve immortality through bargains with the unspeakable gods from beyond reality, both the mundane and the eerie kind. What's even more surprising is how little this seriously painful grind hurt my engagement. Whenever I got frustrated by the grind, some enticing piece of prose pulled me back in. It took me 6 times to get my first successful run, and whenever I died or went insane or got locked up in the tower, I hit the restart button right away. The card abstraction works surprisingly well, the writing is top notch (Alexis Kennedy being the writer got me interested in this game) and the well of discoveries goes very far, but never as far as you want it to. That's the good stuff. The bad stuff? This is a bit of a rogue-like, which means permadeath, which means you might loose a lot of progress. And as an exception to the genre, the next run doesn't profit at all from the run before it. Also, the different routes to victory are not different enough to make me want to replay the game, now that I've beaten it once. Still, ca. 40 hours of gaming makes this one an excellent value proposition.

An intriguing game, really. But... The lack of tutorial makes it a necessity for me to lose several first games before I grasp the basics like maintaining and not totally annihilating passion, reason, health, and money. Some of the UI elements are a bit clunky and difficult to read and organize and works much like a Virtual Tabletop dedicated for this single game but for some reason doesn't have much helpers to make life easier with the game. The worst times are when the new elements popping up on the table just spill out all over the place, sometimes over and around your nicely arranged core gameplay area, sometimes so far away from it you won't even notice them unless you frequently zoom out to just check for such instances. The sound effects and/or music are a bit strange. I keep constantly hearing a repeating sound effect that on occasion wouldn't be bad, but as it's playing like a grandfather clock, it gets irritating. I think it was some weird and exactly same creaking noise that occurred every 3 seconds or so without failing. Auto-pause would be really nice on finishing of the timers, especially if you could individually set them for each one, currently I need to watch for them finishing like a hawk to hit the pause so I don't waste resources. Besides all that, the writing is interesting and really the only interesting part of the game. The transition from the start to the cult management seemed quite out of nowhere. I was working the days and trying to find meaning for my life and suddenly my character is managing a cult with no hint in between that I was aiming for such. Did I miss something? As final words, there's a lot of random elements in the game, some of which seems there just for the sake of randomness. Some actions are not very obvious on what they do unless you read everything very carefully, as I noticed one of my actions that I had thought was simple investigation actually involved downgrading my card. I feel like I need a wiki for this.