If you thought starting your own cult will be easy.. it’s not.

I was keeping my eye on Cultist Simulator for a while - I love occult stuff and making it using card mechanics only made me want to play it more. I had some fun with the game, played it for like 28 hours, but.. it has its flaws.

The game is a time/resource/risk management game - you will most likely juggling with even 6 or more things at once. The big factor here are risks - you need to take care of your health (both physical and mental) and avoid being caught for your notorious actions. There are many actions you can take (verbs), where you can use many different cards for different results. There are also time based actions, happening from time to time, that can have consequences depending of your current cards. The cards can be very different things, with many types and traits, including also temporary cards - having a timer on them, after which they disappear (or transform to something else).

Each card and action in the game has a story attached to it - descriptions of it, giving you the background and the lore for the game. That’s how the story is driven - you control what you do, but explanations and additional stuff is always there. Those description also changes after using a card (properly or not) or even trying to, most often giving you some hints about things missing or a potential result. Results are also always described with something. The problem is, many actions that you will take are just repeated over and over, and those texts are not going to be that important - and the lore in general, pretty much gets lost in the mechanics of managing everything. If you are looking into it for great story and lore - well, people that like digging for it there will get something, but it’s not the main part of the game. Sadly. Even giving some “checkpoints” after achieving some progress in some direction, giving a bit more story to it with some great images, would be great. Without that, it’s just your table getting fuller and fuller with more powerful cards. After losing a game (or achieving a “minor victory”), you just get a paragraph of text, giving some info what happened. And if you think that after winning the game “properly” (going the occult way), well.. it’s the same :(

Main things that drive the game are mystery and obscurity. I will avoid any specific here, as even explaining the mechanics might be a spoiler ;) It’s best to do everything yourself and discover it - because that’s the main thing that the game offers, IMO. Most of the things you can do are not described anywhere. Sure, sometimes there are some straightforward hints, but usually you need to deduce them from descriptions (which are not that straightforward) or just… read and experiment. All the cards have a lot of traits, of different types - and all the slots that you can put cards in, have requirements or just list of types that “can” possibly work there. So discovering how the game works is the main thing. It fits the theme of the game - you’re running things occult, not known to you (yet) and you need to learn them somehow. Alas, it really can be too obtuse for many people, and I can totally understand that.

One of my biggest issues of the game though, are some design decisions and issues with them. Having a card based game on a free-flow table (you’re organizing everything yourself) is a nice idea in theory. You could feel like some mastermind, managing everything on a metaphorical table, plotting and scheming. But in practice, it introduces a lot of issues. The way that new cards are landing on the table (or auto-collecting feature) just doesn’t work - it would need some better, more advanced mechanism there really. The same goes for simple stacking of cards - you can stack the same cards on top of each other (if they are not temporary cards with timers), but I don’t think it’s enough. It’s cool, that everyone can organize their table how they like, but imagine that when finishing the game, I had around 80 (!) stacks of cards on the table. And keeping them even slightly organized, was just a pain. Basically I was managing the game mechanics and the game itself (which is not easy!) while fighting the game UI at the same time. Also, some critical actions are very badly presented - it needs some better indications and/or alerts about crucial things, not only when you basically cannot recover from them. I know the game was quite a long time in alpha/beta testing, and I’m amazed it still was released in this way - it’s not that it’s broken, it’s just not friendly at all. I know that fighting the game itself might be fitting to the theme, that it’s not easy to run a cult, but it’s not just a “hidden difficulty” thing - it’s just a bad experience at times.

Another thing is… grind. There is a lot of mechanics, and experimenting with the game is really interesting and keeps your attention. Although, when you are experimenting, finding new ways, your efficiency is lost. And those experiments might often also make you lose the game too. But you need to progress with your stuff, going to “next stage” of the game, learning new mechanics. Then, you experiment with them too. Probably fail because of that. It’s ok, next time you already know that, you will go further. But you discover new things, and it’s the same - experiment. It’s actually interesting, but it might get a bit tedious, and even frustrating - because the game has a lot of random stuff happening (and quite random results), so if the RNG gods are on your ass - you’re screwed and your run will just fail. Which is not a great thing too. Just imagine, that I played for 28 hours, until I managed to get a proper win - and the last run took like 5 hours. This is how long you need to play to learn and understand the game, and being able to tame it. You can also have a decent run, but while experimenting, achieving a “minor victory” - not related to occult stuff, and not really satisfying, but still ending the game. It fits the theme of you having your life and making decisions in it - but it might frustrate someone really (I think I only saw a warning that my action will result in that once). There will be stages of the game, especially at the end, that you will just grind things. It’s ok, when you’re on the level of still trying and experiment with the game, discovering new mechanics and such, while still keeping yourself alive and well. But when you actually get to the stage that you know (or suspect) what to do next (or especially win the game) it can take a bit of a grind to actually get the stuff needed - and RNG also takes it’s toll here. Close to the end of my winning run, if I would fail and lose, I think I would get jaded and not try it again.. That means something.

What about replayability? Well, you definitely will play it more than once - because you will fail, a lot of times. But it’s actually quite addictive to get another run, fix your mistakes and learn new things, progress further. But after finishing it - where you really need a lot of the game knowledge to do it - I don’t really see big sense to do it, because it will really be similar (even with a different “career” start, different choices, it will just switch some balance a bit) and I don’t think it’s worth the grind. Unless you’re a trophy whore and just want those achievements ;)

I got really into the game, discovering stuff for yourself is a mixture of getting annoyed, often lost what to do next, but then it’s very rewarding at discovery. But this is not enough - mixed with the less-than-ideal UI and design, and quite some grind, it loses its taste. I was also a bit disappointed about the general theme and story - it just didn’t click with me, and was just a background there, lost in the game mechanics and management. Considering my “rating”, it’s only that high for interesting theme and idea of a game, and the fact that I had some fun with it, but the execution left a lot of places to improve and made it a bit annoying.

My rating: 7/10
Playtime: 4-5h (per run)
Tags: management  mystery 
image/svg+xml Cultist Simulator on Steam