Cultist Simulator

After 16 hours of play, I have achieved one of the victory conditions. These are my thoughts having experienced most of the game one time through (I shall be playing again). The main attraction is the worldbuilding and storytelling. If you're not interested in reading every bit of flavour text and trying to interpret the clues hidden in the writing, you will likely neither enjoy the game nor learn how to play it properly. However, if you are interested, this is a game unlike any other I've seen. The writing is fantastic, and I found myself immersed in the game world to the point where I could not sleep in real life for all the half-understood secrets buzzing round my head. Will the Inspector uncover evidence of my latest atrocities? What could be the missing piece that I need to finally summon a Hint, whatever one is? Is summoning one even a good idea? How do I persuade the Peacock Door to open? A lot of these questions stem from figuring out the game mechanics, which are woven tightly with the story/lore. The game has no tutorial, and zero hand-holding. This does mean you occasionally feel like you have no idea how to achieve your goals, or even what they are. I would argue that this is a good thing. It means you are not only playing a character who is trying to uncover secrets and gain understanding, but you actually are uncovering secrets and gaining understanding yourself. Learning to play the game is half the point, and it (mostly) works brilliantly. Sometimes, it is slightly too opaque for its own good, and during the endgame I did resort once to the internet for summoning recipes. My advice is: go into the game as blind as possible, and resist the temptation to look up guides until the very endgame, and even then only if you’re desperate. tl;dr A fantastic atmosphere/story driven game that requires immersing oneself into the lore to get past the sometimes clunky and repetitive game mechanics, and is definitely worth doing so. Embrace your imagination.

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.

It's from Alexis Kennedy. So a masterful world-building and atmosphere and absolutely crap gameplay that just forces you to mindlessly grind for hours to achieve any sort of progress. This eventually undermines the atmosphere, making you bored and makes the game simply tiresome. So like always with Kennedy's games, feel free to cheat and play it for atmosphere alone, where it really shines.

If you like figuring things out and trying things, all the while not knowing what you are doing, you might like this game. Unless you dislike reading, then you most likely won't. My first game was very interesting - and very short. I died of bad health and had no idea why, because I earned money to cover my living expenses, but still got sick. Well, like in reality you just get sick sometimes. The trick is to find a way to counter whatever obstacle pops up throughout the game. When you start the game, you have a few cards, a few "action" slots to put them in and see what happens and an event that gets your story started. Every card/slot has an info box, that pops up, when you click them. And every time you pick up a card, the slots it can be put in get highlighted. It all starts very simple, but gets more complex soon. The fact, that there is no tutorial, no manual and no one telling you what to do, makes it an exciting journey and lets you wonder about what may lay ahead. Unless you hate poking around in the dark. Then you will hate this game. You get new/more cards and slots as you progress. Cards and slots can be permanent or temporary. Temporary cards have timers on them, showing, when they will disintegrate. The slots have timers running, too, but are a litte more unpredictable. They pop up and "search" for specific cards, they automatically draw in. As far as I have seen in my 4 games, most of the time that is a bad thing you have to counter. Read the texts (some change later). When I started my third game, I grabbed pen and paper and started writing down how to get specific cards, because I can never remember, when I end up needing them. So far I have played 4 games, died 3 different deaths and had a lot of fun. -1 star, because a) Slots sometimes pop up and go unnoticed, because they end up outside of my view, even though there is still plenty of room within my view for those slots. b) Moving the Info box to where I want it doesn't stick. c) No music.