Pretty deep, as you probably already know from the trailers. But how does it play and how do you survive navigating yourself through it? Lets start the review with a quick summary. What this game is: - Literature - Resources managment - Roguelike - Demanding What this game isn’t: - For everybody - A card game Wait, it must be a card game if you use cards to play it, right? Right, only the cards… aren’t really cards. They are more like representations of various people, creatures, knowlege or information and there is no "hand" you can play it from at your leisure. In fact you only have partial control over them. However, you indeed do use them to play the game, mostly by moving them to "verbs", which are a sort of action slots (the Study verb, for example) and combining them together. This may sound simple and boring, but it is actually quite complex and surprisingly fun. It delivers the feel simililar to 4X games, when things click together and the structure you’ve built finally start working. I also said the game is demanding. And while there certainly is a steep learning curve, the true challenge comes in a form of the need to use your imagination and intelect. You have to piece the big picture together from hints. The terrible truth behind them is shrouded by obscurity. It goes without saying that the whole game is briliantly written and to me personally, it delivers an amazing sense of truly discovering something huge. All and all the game totally meets the goals it has set for itself. What can put someone off is the price tag, which may seem a bit high at first. But even though Cultist Simulator looks like a small game, it actually isn’t and if the premise renonates well with you, I can provide countles hours of gameplay… Because the rabbit hole goes very, very deep.
Pretty deep, as you probably already know from the trailers. But how does it play and how do you survive navigating yourself through it? Lets start the review with a quick summary. What this game is: - Literature - Resources managment - Roguelike - Demanding What this game isn’t: - For everybody - A card game Wait, it must be a card game if you use cards to play it, right? Right, only the cards… aren’t really cards. They are more like representations of various people, creatures, knowlege or information and there is no "hand" you can play it from at your leisure. In fact you only have partial control over them. However, you indeed do use them to play the game, mostly by moving them to "verbs", which are a sort of action slots (the Study verb, for example) and combining them together. This may sound simple and boring, but it is actually quite complex and surprisingly fun. It delivers the feel simililar to 4X games, when things click together and the structure you’ve built finally start working. I also said the game is demanding. And while there certainly is a steep learning curve, the true challenge comes in a form of the need to use your imagination and intelect. You have to piece the big picture together from hints. The terrible truth behind them is shrouded by obscurity. It goes without saying that the whole game is briliantly written and to me personally, it delivers an amazing sense of truly discovering something huge. All and all the game totally meets the goals it has set for itself. What can put someone off is the price tag, which may seem a bit high at first. But even though Cultist Simulator looks like a small game, it actually isn’t and if the premise renonates well with you, I can provide countles hours of gameplay… Because the rabbit hole goes very, very deep.
