Cultist Simulator

in library

3.7/5

( 125 Reviews )

3.7

125 Reviews

English & 2 more

Posted on: July 13, 2018

apeot2002

Verified owner

Games: 88 Reviews: 7

Unexpectedly absorbing

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.

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Posted on: June 9, 2018

Manaflower

Verified owner

Games: 1507 Reviews: 29

Time management with cards

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.

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Posted on: March 23, 2019

MjrNikolaj

Verified owner

Games: 490 Reviews: 4

A shining gem of game writing

Cultist Simulator is a game about grinding stories. Literally. It takes about 6 hours in a succesfull playthrough to beat the game and you will spend all of this time grinding tabletop cards to tell you story. It may be a story of a failed romance with your follower, a story about madness overtaking you on the edge of victory, a story of cat-and-mouse game with occult investigators and pesky journalists trying to ruin your life. The short snippets of text generated through card interaction will tell you of fighting depression in shady opium dens, sending expeditions to the furthest edges of Earth and dangerous journeys through lovecraftian dreamlands. There is not a single thing occult or eldritch that cannot happen in this game - all you have to do is devote your time to understand it's underlying mechanics. And grind, grind, grind those cards.

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Posted on: March 25, 2019

Feamelwen

Verified owner

Games: 177 Reviews: 14

A very peculiar game

This game is not for everyone. Clearly. You have to be able to enjoy somewhat repetitive, but mesmerizing gameplay, hours of build-up and one slip-up leading to failure, no animations or flashy visuals whatsoever, etc. The main appeal of the game is slowly solving a puzzle (how do I get to that state or place or person or ritual or ending) while dealing with random obstacles thrown your way, all the while reading A LOT and being immersed in incredible lore. If you're remotely interested in occultism, secret societies, mythology or history, have patience and like (increasingly less and less over time) trial and error gameplay, this is probably for you.

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Posted on: March 28, 2020

demonbreather

Verified owner

Games: 46 Reviews: 11

The Dark Souls of Card Games

Not really, but I couldn't resist. It's actually more of a story generator that lets you nudge things along until you actually grok what the hell is going on, and I've never played another game even remotely like it -- to be clear, it's absolutely not a card game along the lines of Magic, Gwent, etc. It is its own thing. And while the board can gat a little cluttered at certain points, it's a pretty cool system. If you enjoy occult horror and or the Lovecraft mythos, this does that. It does that really, really well. But you have to meet it halfway, and in order to tell its dark, morbid stories, they made it incredibly abstract. The cards on the board are just there to lend your imagination some material to work with. The writing is charming and dark, while leaving a lot to the imagination (important in storytelling, but not something you see in many games), the music fits very well, but the characters are pretty flat. It's not exactly a character drama though. My only real complaint with it is related to the Dread/Fascination spirals you can find yourself in way too easily. I tried to avoid reading any guides, but it was quick enough to find info on the mechanics I couldn't deduce. And yeah, it really sucks to have to use outside sources for explanation of game mechanics (with any game) but I don't hold it against Cultist Sim too harshly. Mythos stories never end well. It's the nature of the beast. This is probably not going to appeal to people who want a power fantasy to rip and tear through. I've played a game or two each month for probably a year and I've barely scratched the surface of what you can really dig into. It's really, really cool, and does its thing like no other game out there. However, it's very niche, and I think a lot of spontaneous purchasers who aren't looking for this very specific thing may find it a bit awkward and obtuse, especially due to how some key mechanics are barely hinted at, let alone actually explained.

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