Cultist Simulator

TL;DR - An enjoyable narrative puzzle game with RPG aspects and a Lovecraftian atmosphere. Good if you like slow, methodical gameplay with empasis on story. A long while back, I was introduced to the world of Fallen London. Before I knew it, Sunless Seas was in development and was showing promise in Early Access. Throughout my time spent playing Sunless Sea, I love the card system that was used to note objects, places, aspects, and many other pieces of the world that were relevant and useful to the player. From these cards, the player could better understand nature of the world around them as well as being provided a very simple mechanism for aiding in immersion. Cultist Simulator game takes the conceptual framework around this card system and makes it the primary focus of play. Again, you are provided cards to represent the various animate, inanimate, and abstract objects of the world placed before you. There are primary functions you use to "transform" or "operate" on the given cards to produce various different results depending on the function and/or any extra cards to "buff" or "direct" the outcome of the function. Each card contains a descriptor of its contents and its relevance to the games world. Upon passing a card to a function, a piece a the narrative is presented to you while the operation takes place. Longer operations that have multiple passes will usually have more of narrative components to share with you, in depth, if not in length. Ever now and then, procedural or "randomly", other functions will present themselves on the board to represent an event or relevant change in the world. Upon immediate observation, the gameplay is very simple, but that does not mean it is an easy game. There is very little hand holding to guide you to the endgame. This is very much, in a sense, a rouge-lite in the regard that you will mostly likely "die" several times through your journey to one of the many ends.

The writing in both this game and Book of Hours makes the occult genuinely otherworldly; even mundane activities like reading become uncanny. I couldn't try to explain the lore without sounding appropriately insane. If you look up explanations of proper nouns on the game's wiki, you'll learn more and yet know less than if you just meander through the poetry of it all. That's a feat, and it's worth celebrating. This is very likely one of the top three best written games of all time. That being said, and a design philosophy of obfuscation and toil acknowledged, this really is missing some needed QOL features. Skill cards (Health, Passion, Reason) should auto-stack once they're finished recharging if there's a stack on the playing field rather than constantly making a giant messy pile. There's no reason Dread should grab the newest Contentment on the field rather than the one closest to expiring, it does it so consistently that it can't be an accident, and it makes it harder to play around Dread even when you know how it works. More controversially, given the game's intended design, I also think the work queue should be automatable, as in "continue to perform X job for as long as X skill card exists to fuel it". It wouldn't work for painting, but for the simplest jobs it's just unnecessary wrist strain to keep that loop going over and over and over and over, and it doesn't prove anything about what's being learnt about the game. It really is great, though.

In its core, on could describe "Cultist simulator" as a resourcemanagement game, but in truth it is so much more than that. While managing certain resources is an important part of the gameplay, the most interesting part of the game is its presentation. It begins with the cards, that are the main part of the game. The artwork is unique and adds so much atmosphere to the game. Every card, every event has its own art and colourful description. The writing is pretty much perfect, it draws you into the world and gives me a "just more minute..." feeling. The game itself centers around an anonymous maincharacter, and how he delves into a hidden supernatural world, the atmosphere is dark and mysterious. And just like the secrets of the world are revealed to the character, so are the secrets of the gameplay to the player. There is no tutorial, you pretty much have to figure out everything by yourself, which fits the whole theme of delving into a different, strange world, but can make it frustrating sometime, if you die and dont know why. You cant write too much about the game without spoiling something. It has rougelike elements, in that, if you die, you start as a new character and have to begin from the start. In short: It is a perfect game to lose yourself in, particularly if you like deep, convoluted but still very unique and interesting lore. But the exploring part can get boring if you died for the 20th time and have to make a new beginning and basically wait and click through your cards until you can find new stuff again. All in all "Cultist Simulator" provides an unique experiance, and is certainly worth its money if you are interested in reading interesting lore and learning to manipulate a supernatural world with its own rules.

So, to start out with the positiv. This game is a feast of ideas, if you like reading through lore, background info, sprinkled with esoterical mumbo-jumbo, yes you will love a big part of this game, as did i. There are so many cool ideas and things to do in this game, from murdering people, to influecing them, to buying literal libraries full of esoterical texts. You of course get to form your very own Cult, including an alien deity and followers to do your bidding! There are two things where they went really away from a good game. The first big problem is the interface. Basicaly the entire game is literaly played on a table in the voide. On this table are two kinds of things. Tasks, represented by large blocks with an apporpriate picture, and cards, which represent objects, knowldege, people, Emotions, skills etc. You always use these cards on the tasks to do literaly everything in the game. The cards snap to an invisible grid, making them at least somewhat able to organize, however you can't snap cards permanently to a place, so they can get scrambed up, either by you or by game itself, shoving another card into it's place! Not to mention the game glitches very often, as in, normaly two different cards can't occupie the same space, the glitche is that one card get's hidden underneath another one! And in the higher stages of the game you will easily have 200+ cards on the table. Now, all this only becomes a huge problem with the second issue: your "Dangers" TLDR you fall into illesss every 3 minutes, you are nearly going insane every 5 minutes, and all 6 minutes you get another inspector trying to imprison you, now you can either advert these dangers or stopp them dead on, but you need to keep in mind that you don't have infinite time. So the game is just a giant, long lasting attention test, since all of these dangers are so easily averted, the actualy difficulty is only in spotting them, and in this game, it's permadeath! All progress of several hours gone!

Cultist Simulator is unlike anything else I've played, though I've played a few other plate-spinners. The basic idea is very simple, and people saying "it doesn't have a tutorial" are only half right. It teaches you how to use all the tools at your disposal, and the entire rest of the game is you figuring out how to make progress, which is frequently nebulous until you spend enough time with the game to start to figure out the nuances. The writing is fantastic. Lovecraftian, but all the fiction is original, and the narratives created through your actions and through the interesting lore behind everything (which sounds like absolute nonsense at the outset, and begins to make more sense as you go) is very compelling in the early goings. The mechanics begin to get a little repetitive once you start figuring a lot of things out but aren't entirely sure how to make progress, so the game encourages you to take leaps of faith and try things that may or may not work, or may have unexpected consequences. And once you reach that middle stage, the things you DO know all about, despite still requiring your attention, become fairly easy to blow through quickly thanks to speeding up time, and since you can speed up, slow down, or pause at any moment, you're always good to avoid reading stuff you don't need to read, and to stop when you want to puzzle through a tough situation, think about how to proceed, or just read the narrative bits when something new happens. And the more you learn, the faster you go, as you'll begin to realize at any given time what is and isn't necessary for you to be doing. This is an absolutely great game for people who love to experiment, who prefer not to have their hands held through everything, and who enjoy great writing and original world-building. It's got some wonky points, but it's wonderful, and for the right audience it just might be one of the best games in quite a while.