Cultist Simulator

My previous experience with Fallen London is what sold me on this game as I wanted to see an example of a game where the story is first and gets all the attention as an aspiring writer myself. Admittedly, the author in me was mostly satisfied and even delighted by the storytelling manner and actual content. The narrative is creative, smart, and has hints of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. In fact, if it were merely a book, or even just a visual novel, I would have likely given this a much higher rating. Unfortunately, this game is severely, horribly reduced by the actual play. It isn't that it's just boring to some types of people, as it will inevitably be. The game actively gets in the way of you discovering it, and the story is kept out of reach maddeningly by aggressively obtuse mechanics. For starters, it's true that the game has not even the slightest tutorial. While this isn't really that much of an issue, as discovery can be great fun, once you build up enough runs to know what to do at the beginning, you run into paralyzing fear later as you may not know how to prevent a bad ending from happening unless looking it up, or may find some advanced materials too confusing to use without outside help. This leads into the next point that the beginning of a successful run and the setup required is VERY BORING. You will have to stall to build skills and read the same few books over and over while waiting for a very long time to gather cultists. The high RNG factor can make even a well-developed run end very swiftly and suddenly, sending you back to this grind. Another massive drawback is that the game's UI is also very poor. If you choose to collect all of your cards at once, they will go wherever they wish. You have to keep cleaning and cleaning for the entire game, and increasingly often. Cards can disappear due to bugs or being hidden under other cards, forcing you to search for hours.

The writing for this game is top notch. The Lore is deep, and delving further and further into it is why I keep playing. If you like the writing of "Sunless Sea", "Fallen London", HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, or Robert Chambers, you'll love this. That being said, the gameplay really keeps this game from being an 11/10 experience. The "Roguelike" element to this game DOES NOT WORK. I highly recommend manually savescumming, by manually copying the save to your desktop at critical points. For one thing, there is a TON of grinding, especially early on. For another, luck often plays a major role. Thirdly, certain mechanics and paths are never explained in game; you learn them through trial and error. Which is GREAT, except when you make a critical mistake and lose something important, or get a game over that you couldn't see coming.

So this isn't a game so much as it is a series of timers you periodically click on or move around. There is strategy, because you have to be aware of which timers are counting down and which timers need to be finished before others so that you can initiate further timers. There is lots of lore text as you can imagine since this is another game from Alexis Kennedy- of fallen london and sunless sea- but you are at the mercy of the timers, unless you pause a lot, so you don't really get to appreciate any of it. In this game, he's managed to condense his brand of "storytelling" which is essentially random paragraphs from lovecraft novels pasted onto cards and then randomly dealt to you in the hope that some of it will be in an order that either makes some kind of narrative or is weird enough that you think it might, into its final form. Imagine playing a version of "cookie clicker" where every time you click, the game calls a database of random strings from "The Shadow over Innsmouth" and prints one to the screen for you to read. Now imagine there are 12 simultaneous cookies to click. That's basically this game. 2/5 is generous.

It has been a long time since I played this game, and again and again I find myself coming back to the store page and NOT reinstalling the game. This game is gorgeous, it has an eerie feeling and it trasmits the madness than a character finding about the King in Yellow and Carcosa would. It is filled with lore, hints of weird thing happening on the background and knowledge just out of reach. It is a great setting, but the game is a chore. You just don't know what you are doing, and I think it replicated too well what a person on that world would do and feel, which means that a lot of the time when you start you will spent hours just working not knowing what else to do. The timers get frustrating, and instead of dread and uncertainty it makes you feel stress and frustration. You cannot take it slowly and try to explore small things because you have tons of things happening anyway and a lot of times and a lot of resources that are fading away and sometimes you wish to just let everything fade and lose a lot of progress just so you can try to enjoy whatever you have just find out. And if you aren't that clever, or persistent, you just won't figure out what to do. I am not, and maybe I don't have the patience (but, I mean, I sank 31 hours on this game), but I had to look a wiki to know what could I accomplish and how to, which obviously defeats the whole purpose. I couldn't engage with the game like it wanted me to, it didn't hook me so I would slowly learn more and more about this fantastic world, instead slamming my head against a very clever wall that made me wish this people would just develop another game that plays better.

The writing, the sound design and the visual style of the game are great! They combine to set exactly the right mood as you delve into the world of the occult, even if everything is represented by cards and tiles. Starting the game with little indication of what to do or even how to do what you gradually discover, you are given the sensation of fumbling your way to forbidden knowledge in a very real sense, which makes it that much more satisfying when you reach an epiphany. However, once you do figure out how things work (either by the intended experimentation within the game or by reading a wiki), the work becomes a slog. The abstraction and mystique gives way to a colour-coded solitaire that's more a matter of juggling cards and timers and less about feeling that sensation of tense exploration. The challenge at this point becomes attention span and patience - I did not manage to get one of the 'real' endings in about 30 hours of play because an ill confluence of RNG and impatience or poor planning on my part would always cause my downfall. In the end, I felt compelled to keep playing to achieve ascension, but I was not enjoying it. I can't deny I got my money's worth of entertainment from it, however.