Cultist Simulator

Great Exploration with a mediocre Narrative, Terrible, terrible, gameplay. One can largely expect to spend most their time putting the same cards into the same slots over and over again for little benefit. Or little apparent benefit at least becasue this game doesn't explain anything. Not A Thing. Which on some levels works and on every other level absolutely does not. The reason for this of course is the card mechanic in and of itself. By the mid game most of your retail space is filled with cards that refuse to properly stack, randomly throw themselves on top of other cards obscuring them and regularly spawn new cards with no graphics to tell you they've actually done so. Add the randomly appearing card slots that desperately try to make themselves space only to dissapear again a few moments later and you've got a real sense of interface screw going on. Screw so bad that the lack of explanation is overriden by the inability to reliably locate anything important on the scren. The worst practical application of this is the game over effects. You'll regularly end up in the midst of a multi hour game, notice a despair event has spawned without your noticing and has already grabbed 2/3 of the cards it needs for your game over. Which would be fine if the game hadn't seemingly randomly scattered those cards around the board making it impossible to notice them amidst the constant spawning and despawning of cards going on practically all the time. Even then the number required to lose remains pitifully low when the game is hours and hours long and your amount of cards only increases. Game overs feel woefully undeserved when the game sneaks them up on you and you just can't see them coming if you want to play the game at a rate that isn't tedious. It feels like you're being punished for not stopping every 5 seconds to reorganise your cards the game just scattered everywhere. This is made even worse becasue the game won't let you cancel actions amd you can only have 1 instance going on at any one time. One of the only ways to reliably offset those random gameovers relies on the exploration slot being free, but one of the exploration options is a long, often poorly explained expedition mechanic that you can only stop by running at the problem until your money for it runs out. It's just as bad for the other slots, especially talk which is pretty much the worst method of assigning npcs to quests I've ever seen. The whole thing is clunky and make experimentation feel like a real chore. Worst of all. This game is grindy, beyond all belief. It takes hours to play but isn't fundamentally complicated. The main mechanic of the game comes down to grind certain items until you get matching pairs and a good amount of a resource to use on them. Everything else is just bolted onto the side and often doesn't add a level of complexity to the game just a bit more manual rote labour you have to do to achieve your goals. All (realistically) to pad the game out and hide the fact there's just not a lot of compelling content here. The game design is very similar to Press Button Get Dopamine type mobile games that rely on mechanics that are psychologically addicting instead of actually fun to hook you to the experience. It's pretty clear as to why the devs chose that style. The gameplay doesn't support the positive parts of the game and it really shows.

First off, I played the mobile, rather than the PC version of this game. Reading other reviews leads me to believe the issues I've had are identical. I should say at the outset that the game does an admirable job in piecing the drawing of cards together into something resembling an actual story, which is no small feat. And perhaps, given the tone and subject matter, it should come as no particular surprise that many play-throughs will end in stories with unhappy endings. The writing underlying the game is pretty solidly done. The game itself is, far too often, a needless exercise in frustration. And it's harder to forgive that because one gets the sense that that frustration is, at least in part, a deliberate attempt to prevent players from moving through its limited array of content too quickly. Problems come up, sometimes problems that threaten to end the game in the near- or far-future, and the game is unnecessarily opaque about what one might do or have done to prevent them, cancel them, delay them. Many problems that seem like they ought to have obvious ways to remedy or at least ameliorate them with the resources the player has at hand instead require specific cards obtained in specific circumstances, circumstances which remain unclear to the player as they helplessly watch the procession of timers on "bad event" cards tick away. Other times, a player might well know what they want to accomplish, only to miss an opportunity simply because they're trying to keep track of too many things at the same time- an unusual struggle in a card game, to say the least. (The way screen "real estate" is handled, as others have mentioned, only worsens this problem.) Left with little more than guesswork and trial-and-error to address many challenges, repetition sets in, and quickly begins to frustrate. After playing the game through to a "lesser victory" state, I quickly lost interest in grappling with it. At a significant discount, I can recommend it as a curiosity.

I was really torn on what score to give this game: if you don't want to sink 10+ hours into it just learning the systems and how to use different cards then it's probably only worth 2 stars, but if you stick at it then it's a very rewarding - albeit still flawed - experience worthy of a 4-star rating. Early on the game is incredibly punishing: there are several random events that can kill you if you've not managed certain cards, so you will probably write-off a character or two learning that these events exist and how to handle the cards in question. You also need to learn how to raise your core stats and find a reliable source of funds (used periodically for living costs, and also for one-off purchases). Once you've got over the initial hump, the next challenge is learning how to progress (and what 'progress' actually looks like). For the longest time I couldn't work out how to recruit new members to my cult, for example, and they didn't seem skilled enough to do anything meaningful. After that the game starts to open up more: you work out how to upgrade cultists and what each 'aspect' can do; you work out how to discover locations for your cultists to raid, and start building up a stock of useful items; you learn how rituals work and what they can be used for; you start progressing through the 'Mansus' (a kind of dream world from which you can obtain useful cards); etc. etc. This is where the game shines and you get a real sense of exploration and experimentation. Even once you know what you're doing, there are still frustrations: the game suffers a bit from narrow progression paths at certain points in that you can't advance without obtaining certain cards and some of these come from random results. Whether it's worthwhile to invest the time will depend on how much you enjoy the setting and the concept. Hopefully a community wiki will develop to ease the learning curve and reduce frustrations, because it's very enjoyable and compelling once you get there.

Why, I love to use arrow keys to move around when the game is mouse based. WASD? Why would anyone want to keep their hands in natural positions? Put cards into sensible places on screen? Better throw them at the very bottom, after all, space is there to be wasted. And scroll the screen while we're at it, just because. Want to explore an alternative start you've unlocked? Only allowed directly after unlocking it. It's just not proper to let players start a new game whenever they feel like it. All of this and more adds up to a very frustrating experience.

First, let me say that this game is definately not for everyone. You should watch gameplay online before you make a purchase. This is essentially a card game where your cards represent resources and actions. You can lay out the game board according to your tastes, and 'actions' will populate the board. You have stacks of cards of various types and you try to shove your cards into certian actions to make them do things. The very simple concept gives way to a complex series of interactions as some actions only take certian types of cards. Many cards are temporary, and last only for a set amount of time. Because of that you are encouraged to strategize with how and when you do certian things. The game play is quite simple, but it is repetitive and can become a bit annoying in some regards. For example, "upgrading" your character requires you to use your health cards to create "vitality" and then you combine vitality cards to upgrade your health. To upgrade your health more and more, you need to combine more vitality cards into an upgraded vitality card, then combine the upgraded vitality cards to increase your health. This is my biggest complaint with the game, this repetitiveness. This is not initially apparent when you buy the game either so that is why I mention it here. Expect to lose a bunch. Some of your prior 'character's' may provide bonuses to your next play but this is not a roguelite / roguelike by any definition. Sometimes you will lose to things that are exceptionally frustrating. There is no real, plot. The plot is what you the player, imagine it to be essentially. The game itself serves more as a story generator than a traditional interactive management or card game. There is a lot of reading required to make anything happen mentally. If you are a creative person who likes to visualize thigns that you read, this game will entertain. If you want the game to paint a cool picture for you. Then it will not. Do not buy if you don't want to read.