There is so much noise surrounding this game, and there's good reason. CDPR had to, I think, put flagging finances ahead on the priority list, and the game had simply taken ages in development. Maybe they bit off a bit more than they could chew, maybe there were production issues or management problems. Who knows. Game dev is complex and can fail or falter in a multitude of ways, and that's how we find ourselves in the position we're in, with a hyped game that's had a pretty mixed launch. I'm nearing I think 30 hours in, and I've played through the first act and a little of the second, and am enjoying exploring the city and doing side content. I can say a few things with relative certainty, though of course your mileage will vary depending on your play style and your PC. To begin with, the game isn't as buggy as I was expecting. I've experienced about 8 or 9 documented bugs, almost all just small cosmetic things. I've not had any crashes, nor quest bugs. Nothing that's impacted my enjoyment of the game at all. Performance isn't phenomenal, but my rig is about 5 years old at this point, and the game runs well on a mix of ultra, high, and medium settings. Secondly, this is a game that should be played on a higher difficulty. Some have complained about a lack of depth, but I'm playing on the hardest difficulty, and that's necessitated interfacing with all the game's systems, from crafting to character-building. It's all been quite satisfying. Finally, this is a game that would have fared better had it come out even a few years ago. It doesn't do anything especially new. You've played all this stuff in some form or other before, most likely, but it does give you a big open world with incredible atmosphere, a giant toybox of stuff to play around with, and lots of ways to occupy your time. This isn't a perfect game, but it's held my attention and given me a great deal of joy, to the point where I'm looking forward to DLC expansions even more than future patches.
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.
Don't go in expecting much of a game. This is an experience—something to sit with, languish in, and ponder. The game itself is very simple, but what's there is a beautiful and emotive thing. Great visuals, and beautiful world to explore, and one of the best soundtracks in the last several decades.
This is not at all the game it was at launch. Whatever your feelings about how all that went down, it's clear this is a game the developers have put a lot of love into. Since the last patch, things have really turned around. The addition of a proper story, vehicles, new space combat mechanics, a graphical overhaul, some new systems, new ships, new NPC interactions, a full overhaul to system and planet generation, a rudimentary multiplayer system (a framework for future updates), and the usual smattering of bugfixes and the like. Oh, and a couple new biomes (deserts!). This is the 3rd patch, so you've now cumulatively got a lot of new stuff if you've either never played or not played since launch. Base-building and farming were added, a creative mode, a survival mode, and a 1-life permadeath mode. Freighters were added, which you can also design inside using a building system, and you can hire NPCs, etc. Low-flying with a spaceship is now possible, so you can zoom above planet surfaces, but you can also use 3 new exocrafts to actually zoom around on the surface too, which makes planet exploration a lot more fun. It's still a little rough around some of its edges. The PC version is not a technical masterpiece, though it's certainly better than it was. A lot has been done to make the game look better (high-res textures and new lighting in particular), which makes the new photo mode a real joy to play around with, but performance still isn't perfect. I don't have any framerate issues, but I do still get screen tearing even after messing with vsync. That said, it's not bad. For a huge game with so much procedural stuff, on top of being from a really tiny developer, nothing here is to be unexpected, and the improvements are welcome. If you've been on the fence, give this a try. If you were put off at launch, now's a great time to give it another go. The updates got me back on board, and now I'm hooked. NMS is officially a great game if the chill vibe is to your liking.
This game is utterly fantastic. It's not without some minor flaws, and it is very much a game that will either appeal to you or not, so do be careful before purchasing. That said, it does everything it sets out to do with aplomb. It is easy to pick up, very difficult to master, and has deep and challenging tactical fantasty combat with a simple but solid strategy/upgrade layer to keep you busy between dungeon runs. And lots and lots of Lovecraftian horror. Not for the faint of heart. Your heroes will die, and with reasonable frequency depending on your skill level, and the game demands that you learn its systems in order to succeed. If you're into stuff like XCOM, this is a reasonable analogue overall, though the individual systems are very different. Also worth noting that there's no save-scumming. This is all ironman mode, all the time. When things go south, you don't have the ability to go back and load your game. In addition, it's worth noting that the game looks and sounds stellar. Wayne June's narration is inspired, the writing is excellent (and there is some decent story exposition, here, though it's not a story-driven game in the strictest sense), and Chris Bourassa's Mignola-inspired artwork is absolutely top-notch. Pick this up at the $20 release price point and you won't be disappointed. This is easily a $35 game in terms of value. I logged 48 hours into it even before it left early access, and there are others out there with hundreds of hours. Final release gave everything a nice polish, balance changes, the final area of the game, and lots of new horrifying things to kill you, and Red Hook Studios is already working on their first free post-release expansion (did I mention free?). Grab it!
