I’ve never summoned a demon before. This should be alright. Oh… It’s… escaping. So where is it gonna run off to? Oh no! It’s eating one of my followers! Oh, God! “Cultist Simulator” is a first for me, as I’ve never really been into card games. My experience is as follows: I had some “Pokémon” cards in the 90s, but no one really knew how to play “Pokémon”. The rules of the card game seemed a lot more complicated than the video games, so everyone I knew just traded and collected them. So, not really playing a card game. Later on, there was “Yu-Gi-Oh!”, which I DID understand. I knew a lot of kids who played that. We even had this one kid who never wanted to play, but just made the life point sounds. I don’t even think he went to our school… Many years later, I found out about “Magic: The Gathering”. I don’t know much about that one either. The guy who told me about it, showed me his thousands and thousands of cards in bins, and then he said “Ah, I can’t use these anymore – they’re out of season”. That seemed too pricey for me. Then cut to Spring, when I made the “Sunless Sea” video. A developer reached out and said “Hey, the lead writer for “Sunless Sea” is working on our new game. You want a review copy?” I get these offers from time to time, so I said “Yeah, sure, I’ll take a look at it. I’m not sure I’ll make a video, but what’s this game all about?” “Oh, it’s a… card game.” I don’t know much about these. But then, the months that followed, more and more people started recommending it to me, and I realized: this wouldn’t be a typical card game. So, full disclosure: this is the first video I’ve ever done with a review copy. Even if it is half a year later. So, let’s get right into it. The game starts off with a nearly identical warning to “Sunless Sea”: “Explore. Take risks”. But now there’s no captain warning. Instead: “You won’t always know what to do next. Keep experimenting, and you’ll master it.” I didn’t understand what I was in for. There is a “Bird/Worm” option in the menu. It lets you choose between “Bird” and “Worm”. Self-explanatory. Okay, let’s go… Alright, here it is. Alright, there’s an empty space, and it’s for…? Right, I’m gonna drag the card into it. This game doesn’t have much of a tutorial to speak of. Like the intro said: you need to experiment. The tiles are verbs, the cards are nouns. So, the early game is about figuring out what actions you can take with which cards. It’s also the mid-game. And the late-game. Can I do it? No, I’m dead… Let’s talk about some other aspects, before getting into the gameplay mechanics. I really enjoy the look of the game. It’s a minimalist art style that’s easy to read, which is good for a card game with this many moving parts. Trust me, the board can get VERY busy. The minimalism helps out here, since, if the cards were all very detailed and intricate, then you’d look at the board and probably go crazy from all the visual noise. Plus, since cards can be used for multiple uses, it makes them easier to categorize. That isn’t to say “it’s so minimalistic it lacks a style”, because I like the art style a lot. This is a game about forming a cult and trying to know the unknowable, and the board reflects that. Sometimes, your actions will cause strange, esoteric images to burn onto the map, before vanishing. It also helps to establish its setting is vaguely early 1900s. In particular, the characters remind me of coffee shop wall favorite – Henri Matisse. It could be a coincidence, but it fits the setting. Eh? EH? There is a weird visual mysticism to everything. It’s like having a fuzzy view of a dream, which is appropriate, since dreaming is a big part of the game. The only thing off-putting to me is that the table sits inside of an abyss. Thematically, it makes sense, and you’ll be staring at the board 99% of the time anyhow… But, Idunno, some candles would be nice, scientology pamphlets, some Multi-level Marketing oils – just something. It’s more of a nitpick. The sound design is also great, with strange chanting, rotating gears and ticking clocks. [interaction with cards produces clockwork-like sounds] [eerie whispers are heard in the background] Then there’s the music. [otherworldly tune builds up and then quiets down, culminating in a strange whirring melody that sounds, both, bird-like and mechanical] [calm and wistful melody] It’s excellent. And you start to learn to fear certain songs. [a certain song] Oh no… So the result is that the game is very atmospheric. I never thought I’d say that talking about a card game. As for the story, you mainly create it yourself, since there are multiple ways to win. Maybe, you seek ultimate knowledge, maybe, you wanna learn how to change your form. Hell, maybe you wanna forget the cult stuff entirely and just get a nice desk job. There are several different ways to progress, rather than just one way forward. The world and its lore are established, but it’s very fragmented. A lot of it is very abstract, but rich. It’s possible that there is a grand timeline and shaping of the world and all that, but I just haven’t found it yet. Or there could be none at all. The game is described as “lovecraftian”, and I agree. A lot of people like the phrase “show, don’t tell”, but Lovecraft was more “tell, don’t show”. But he was really damn good at telling. Just don’t read that one book… The writing in the game is awesome, as expected. Creepy, with light touches of humor. I’ve played a few other games Alexis Kennedy wrote for, and this is by far his best work. He’s really good at generating intrigue and creating a tone. His writing about despair and depression is so accurate, that I think it can only come from a place of experience. I mean, Jesus… So, the writing is also great and I’ve got no issues with it. I don’t really consider this limiting for a video game, since creepy writing can stick with you. Even the “Call of Cthulhu” game would utilize that from time to time. So, onto the big question: which Lovecraft story does this remind me of? I got them all right here. Oh, shit, surprise! It’s the “King in yellow”. "SON, THAT'S POWER" Like I said before, the nature of the game is very open-ended. It’s not pulling inspiration from one material in particular, and it’s coming up with a lot of stuff on its own as well. I’m not gonna get into the nitty-gritty technicalities of the writing, since I don’t think that’s what you came here for, or rather I wanna talk about the narrative. So, some spoilers for the short story “The Repairer of Reputations”. It’s about someone involved in a strange occult conspiracy. The character, named Hildred, believes he’s the last heir to a supernatural race that lived beyond our stars, and also was on Earth long ago. So he’s beginning his moves to gain ultimate power and making his brother abdicate the throne. Or… maybe not. Hildred fell off a horse, breaking a leg and getting a side of brain damage, and he might not be thinking clearly. He’s searching and taking actions to achieve ultimate power, but he might be in the wrong direction. Or just wrong entirely. You’re along for the ride when he’s looking at old maps, old books, and trying to find out the secrets of his ancestry. But at the same time, you wonder if he’s completely delusional, and doesn’t know what he’s doing. “Cultist Simulator” gave me that feeling. A lot. It took over a dozen hours of playing until I won my first game as a cultist. This is what makes talking about the mechanics difficult. Figuring out the mechanics, and even how to progress at all, IS the game. A guide to how all the mechanics work is, essentially, spoilers. At the same time, I can’t say nothing. So I’m gonna be saying a lot of WHAT you can do in the game, but not a lot of HOW. I’ll go a bit more into detail on early game stuff, but that’s it. I’m not gonna go through the symbols step-by-step, or tell you secrets from beyond the colors of time. Alright, let’s start with the basics. This might be too far… I think I went too far… Your priority above everything is survival. So you start off working, to make money. You can use different cards to work different jobs, and these relate to a kind of stat system. You have your health, your passion and your reason. Sometimes, these cards need to cool down, and could be unavailable for a while. Sometimes, challenges pop up. If you don’t have money or something else to buy medicine if you get sick, you can lose health. In this case, it’s permanent. If something bad happens, and you have no health cards – you die. So having a health card temporarily unavailable for work could be risky. You could also get a regular job and find ways to advance it, and make even more money. If you don’t do your job long enough, the card can expire, and you risk unemployment. You might also get an awful boss, who makes you work unpaid overtime. He burns through your stat cards, talks down to you. Then you start talking about things you shouldn’t to that guy by the bridge. Just like real life. The stats can also enhance or are required for certain actions. So it’s safe to say that these stats are very important for just about everything you do. There are a few ways to increase your stats. It’s only a few minutes at first, but the time investment gets longer the higher you want your skills to go. We’ll come back to this in a little bit. There are a lot of ways to lose: suicide by depression, getting arrested, going crazy… And you will die a lot early on, because you won’t know how to prepare for it. However, when you play a new game, you play as a different character. So you can die as a student of the occult, but decide to play as a detective this time around. You have a special job for it and everything. You start with the case file on your last character. It’s almost like you were playing the prologue to the story and didn’t know it. Yeah, let’s reopen the Frederick case. What was that guy all about? That was a mistake… Well, now I’m the doctor who had to deal with him. Maybe I can find out why his case drove him crazy. All the legacies have different starting stats and their own positives and drawbacks. One character can start out rich, but utterly stupid. An aspirant has a goal of founding a cult, but very little power starting off. A detective has a demanding job and needs to find all the knowledge on their own. Plus, you’re sending your potential future followers to prison. But if you balance it, you could start a cult, and then send you rivals into prison. There are also other detective characters, launching their own investigations, so, hopefully, they won’t focus on you. If it’s not already clear: this game has a lot going on simultaneously. It’s not turn-based or point-based – it’s just the clock. So you’re having to manage your income and stay alive and figure out what you’re doing, all at the same time. This is very tricky. Especially early on, when you don’t even know if you’re putting yourself in a dangerous situation. This is where the first problem comes in. The game is going to become more risky and dangerous as time goes on, so it makes sense to start raising your stats at the very start of the game. Once you know how to do it, the first few advancements aren’t tricky to pull off or anything – it’s just a waiting game. There is a fast-forward function, which helps, but this is still gonna take a while. It’s not something intricate, it doesn’t trigger any events that I know of – it’s just busywork. You can put it off for later, but it becomes much harder when you have so much more to be managing. This is the game where a 2-3 minute lapse of judgement can mean a “game over”. Not even getting a few more stats early on is a bad strategy. What about the rich character who only has a single point in health? You’d be crazy NOT to focus on stats early on. The work stat grind can also get you into a bad mindset of just clicking through everything. Sometimes, the writing is changing, but you don’t bother to look as much. Some of these verb tiles would really benefit from an auto-pause, but I get that that’s kind of against the spirit of the game, where everything’s ticking down and happening at once. But, I mean, there’s already a pause function… I think, it could work well as a difficulty option. Have an option for pause and auto-pause for some tiles, then you could have the “Jim Jones Deluxe” difficulty, or “Give Me Cultist Simulator” – something like that. That could have no real time pause function at all, but maybe have some more tidbits of lore, advanced victory conditions – something like that, to make it rewarding. Because this is interesting, I wanna read this. Oh, a condition changed at work! I’m glad I caught that! I don’t want to mindlessly close out of something important, but I don’t want to read the same thing over and over again. A catholic with an untrimmed beard. He’s capable of anything. Welcome to the flock. So if you’re wondering why I, or anyone else would sit through these grindy elements – it’s because the game is really, really interesting. There are so many great things about running a cult. Let’s see some examples. There are so many kinds of lore to study, and they all have their special powers and abilities. Let’s learn some rituals for the guys to try out. Oh, Viktor won’t like that one… Maybe we can turn his corpse into some kind of monster. The pigs at the Bureau keep trying to incarcerate my people. I think they’d like to meet coked up Lazarus. Aw, dammit he’s seen this before… Our family needs more children. There was that one guy my follower met flicking cigarettes at people by the post office. Yeah, that went well. An entry consultant. Well, a brick is a guest key anywhere… Let’s learn the secret places of the Earth. And then let’s break into them. Seduce that detective, build a meth lab, kidnap children. I’m gonna go to bed early… Take this rock! Tell me the future! We’ll try again later… You’re promoted! Fix the rock! This is all going really well. Yeah, I’ll just sell this. I don’t think it’s important. Wait… Wait, did I use that for someth…? Do you really need the exact ingredients for these rituals? Candles of flesh are expensive, so I got these seasonal ones from Target instead. Now I need to draw a pentagram. Nailed it! Where’s the cursed object? Yeah, this will probably work. I think I’m good to go. What was this for? [Scooby Doo Movie - Creatures Chant] I guess I’m just really impressed by the sheer amount of stuff you can do. A lot of issues I had were features I just haven’t found yet. This lore is useless this playthrough. I guess not – I can make some money off of it! These expeditions seem like a lot of RNG. No, I wasn’t reading it carefully, and didn’t make some connections. All my followers had stats I needed to understand. The rewards only scale by difficulty, and they ARE random. Named followers have set personalities and affinities. So their stats aren’t randomized, so then I can figure out which ones would help with which playthroughs. Can I attract certain ones? No, that’s RNG. There’s a lot you can do to influence the game, but some aspects are completely RNG. Due to the nature of the game, I don’t think that should go away entirely. I do wish you could make sacrifices to influence the numbers. Maybe, you could sacrifice a high level of lore to attract a follower of it. Or you could go about it the normal way and just cross your fingers. This is something that becomes more annoying once you have more of the game figured out. You know exactly what you need to progress, but now you hope that RNG gods are in your favor. Thankfully, this IS something that’s being fixed. At least when it comes to expeditions. So consider this a temporary issue. As intricate as it all is, it’s clear there’s areas like this that still require some more work to be done. After I won a few games, I decided to pick up the DLC, since it was only $3. Sure, I wanna see more! You play as a dancer, and your work is related directly to the cult. The main game separates them, so this is new. There are new paths to take and areas to explore, which are challenging, but not RNG frustration. Like I said before: I like that you can make money while also advancing in the cult. Once I saw the “HQ” card, I thought that maybe the cultists could work for me. Unfortunately – not, since the HQ is another one of those things that need to be developed out more. It doesn’t do much. Every time I lost a game, it did feel frustrating, but I kept going back to play it again. The more I got the grip on the mechanics and how the game played – the more prepared I was for the next one. The endings revealed more about the world and the lore, which was satisfying. I still haven’t beaten about half of them, so I could be missing out. [weapon charging up] [eldritch Marv scream] Despite its more frustrating and grindy elements, I would really recommend “Cultist Simulator”. This is a game that’s truly original in what it’s doing. I can very safely say I’ve played nothing like this before. If you are on the fence about some of the issues, it might be worth checking back on it in January, when they’ve done some updates to it. Or just freeze the timer sometimes. Whatever works. Step back in a few weeks for the next video. Hmm… Thanks for watching, and thanks to all the people keeping me alive! I know it was never an official thing, but I’ll bring the credit questions back in the next video. I just had a lot of construction going on around here, and it happened right when I would be recording for it, so I didn’t know what to do about it. And, of course, I didn’t post any this week, since I was thinking about the giveaway thing, so that’s my bad. Let’s see… Announcements! There’s not gonna be a big “end of the year” update video thingy like last year. I’m trying to phase out update videos entirely. If it’s anything long, I could just type something up on Patreon, set it to “public” and then tweet it out, so everyone would know about it, who cares… Ehm… “Elite” video early next year. Something-“Rangers 2” early next year. Figuring out some other games early next year. The next video is still gonna be in December. I just… I get very busy in December, like I said last year. That hasn’t really changed much. Oh, right, the instructional guide video I have not forgotten about! That is also early next year. Probably, I’m gonna guess… February? Since I’m gonna be aggressively going through feedback and all that in the next month or two. Alright, have a good weekend! [Scooby Doo Movie - Creatures Chant] BRIGGS: “Do you know what? Every gift tells a story…” VOICES: “Join us now!” (coh-coh-coh)
MandaloreGaming is easily one of my favorite channels on YouTube. Always happy to have a video of his waiting for me when I get home from work, especially when it comes to games like Cultist Simulator that I really haven't heard much about
I should try this again
This game is so... Strange. Which is great, considering the topic.
Someone once described it as a chemistry set, you really just kind of have to play around with it and eventually you almost get to learn the formulas, the ingredients, you start to be able to read what is meant both mechanically and narratively by what in all reality is often inane, purple prose... But its setting makes it far less arrogant and obtuse and just simply intriguing. The obtuseness of it all if anything aids in the feeling of discovery, and a discovery that's so unlike what most discovery in games is like. You're not discovering lands, you're discovering the inner workings of the mind... Or, a mind maybe, what are you discovering exactly? It's so alien and foreign.
I did give up on my run though last time I played because I ran out of reason, which isn't as easily recovered as health or passion. That sucked, a lot, since I didn't realize using it as a trapping would consume it... That is one of those weird gamey moments which took me out of it though.
But anyway yeah, love to see these kinds of experiments in gaming. Totally different, totally interesting, can way too easily lose the night to it.
This definitely sells me on the game. Love the concept of it and it looks like the best aspects of sunless sea made it into this title
Love this game. Feels like an open-world rpg with how much freedom it gives the player. Some people have even beaten the game without even starting a cult.
Cross post from another sub, but I feel compelled to talk about how much I loved this game.
It's not going to be for everyone since the interface gets messy very fast and the core gameplay loop doesn't hold your hand at all, meaning you routinely die to things you didn't see coming and don't understand. But in terms of writing and tone and raw sense of discovery, very few games are on par with Cultist Simulator. It legitimately feels like you start out as a total layman and are sucked into this massive, infinite Cthulhuesque world of rituals and monsters that is bubbling below the surface.
Maybe I should try again, I remember this game as being really slow, and I never got any sense making brilliant or discoveries, I just was grinding for those resources and then dying after a while.
This is one of the few games in the last 4 years or so to capture my imagination and leave me hungry for more. I absolutely adore the lore and how the game-mechanics really do mirror the actions of your character, in a sense.
The cycle of desire, research, exploration, recruiting, and machination feels so fresh compared to every other Lovecraftian game just putting you in the sorry shoes of some poor schmuck that happens to stumble into something horrible and powerful.
The only downside is the pure-RNG grind at points but the dev just sent out their monthly email stating that they're completely reworking expeditions so you'll know what you'll get. So that will be a bit change!
I didn't knew the game was made by the same creater of sunless sea, but I sure thought those two are very similar when I picked it up.
I have a problem with the game though and its that I have almost no idea whats going on, even more so then in sunless sea.