Cultist Simulator - Lose your mind! Eat your disciples!
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What is it?
From the Humble Bundle store page:
Cultist Simulator is a game of apocalypse and yearning from Alexis Kennedy, creator of Fallen London and Sunless Sea. Play as a seeker after unholy mysteries, in a 1920s-themed setting of hidden gods and secret histories. Perhaps you're looking for knowledge, or power, or beauty, or revenge. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world.
In this roguelike narrative card game, what you find may transform you forever. Every choice you make, from moment to moment, doesn't just advance the narrative - it also shapes it.
Become a scholar of the unseen arts. Search your dreams for sanity-twisting rituals. Craft tools and summon spirits. Indoctrinate innocents. Seize your place as the herald of a new age.
"Roguelike narrative card game" pretty much makes no sense as a descriptor, but basically it's like a choose your own adventure game with some timing and resource management. If you've played Fallen London or to a lesser extent Sunless Sea you'll get the gist of it pretty quickly.
For an example, on my first run I started a cult with only one other member based on a crazy dream I had, got a job as a law firm worker drone on the side, hired an explosives expert to kill my boss so I could get a promotion, nearly got found out by a detective and then gave up my cultist dreams to settle down and just be a lawyer because my job was so cushy. My next game started by giving me the option of being a detective who turned out to be tasked with hunting down my old cult while trying not to go crazy in the process.
I love Alexis Kennedy's writing and this has a lot of interesting tidbits to sink your teeth into. It's fascinating, macabre, and a little goofy.
Trailer
https://youtu.be/heaH_KvB4eU
More Information
The Humble Store Page
WEATHER FACTORY official website
Also, the game is on sale until June 7th! If you buy it before then you apparently get any DLC for free later on down the line.
I normally dislike these non-roguelike "roguelikes" but I am too big of a lovecraft fan not to try this guys games whenever they come out.
Yeah, this is so far removed from the term I wouldn't even call it a roguelike but damn if it isn't fun to read through all this stuff
Certainly an interesting game to play, though a lot to take in for the first time
Picked this up and had a go, I'm starting to get the hang of things to the point where I can relaibly survive for a while.
I finally beat the game with the sensation ending earlier today. It came off the heels of getting just about every possible death except for despair because I kept mismanaging my cards and eating shit. Apparently there are 6 endings in the game but I'm pretty clueless how to get any of them outside of the regular temptation story paths.
I'll give you a hint, some of them involve not quitting your day job.
Basically anytime you put a card in a verb and one of those big ink-drawing and sound effects come up you are on the path to something.
So much much room for quality of life improvements in this game.
It would be much less frustrating if:
Temporary cards like mystique or dread or glimmering stacked.
Resources coming out of fatigue went back into their appropriate stacks.
Illness event ejected the illness card instead of waiting for you to read through the same text, current run I've gone from 4 health to 1 health just by focusing on other shit when illness popped up.
You could automatically restart events you perform constantly (looking at you PAINTING).
You could make decks of followers and secrets and rites instead of splaying them out across the board.
New cards didn't cover up older cards of a different type.
Ugh yes some organization stuff / cards not being covered up would be so nice. The devs mentioned on reddit that they're implementing auto-organization at some point in the near future so hopefully that'll alleviate things. Losing a lot of health like that sucks, but funnily enough on my current game I let myself get and keep debilitation because it turns out using that is basically one of the easiest ways to generate dread. So pretty much every time I was close to going insane I'd stop going to my physician's job and beg on the streets to make myself sad
also holy HELL how much are you painting to get all of that mystique?? I am amazed
Painting is one of the better jobs in the game atm.
You can paint using passion for a chance at glimmerings and contentment, mystique to get a chance at money and notoriety for garunteed money. Best part is, while painting with notoriety, hunters can't use it during their investigations, you can theoretically tie it up forever. However the mystique it generates will mean that a hunter will be stuck investigating you forever too... but oh well.
Man... I really wanted to like this game... like, a lot. I put in almost forty hours trying to find something redeeming about it.
But it's just not good.
It's just so frustrating that a game with such promise turns into such a boring, random, grindfest. Basically, you have to play through the first three hours something like 3-4 times until you finally get all the little pieces of the game. Learning the mechanics is fun... until you realize that often the games punishes you for experimenting, and you only find out about this punishment hours after the fact.
But worse than that is that nothing ever feels like it matters. In Sunless Sea at least, each island is interesting and actually provides a story. There's nothing like that here. All the lore and story and locations only ever exist to give you extra cards. You keep playing because you think you're gonna maybe get an extra square, or maybe a new facet of the game will open up.
But it never does. I'm just so disappointed.
I know the creators said they intended for players to die in different ways because learning what's going on and what the consequences are is a big part of the experience. It makes it feel pretty good when you have everything figured out and can plan ahead a little bit. That doesn't prevent it from dragging your mood when you screw something up early on and it comes back to bite you later though, for sure.
I can see where you're coming from on the nothing matters part, but this game is definitely a lot more like Fallen London where the minute to minute stuff feels small but the flavor text has a lot of information for you to digest and put together over a long period. Gameplay-wise it just gives you cards but those cards are constantly leading to new bits of worldbuilding. Sunless Sea's approach goes for more self-contained stories with a few major connections, so it's more satisfying in the short term but there's less of a big picture to figure out. I prefer the way this game does it, but I'm also the person who digs through every single item description in Dark Souls so it fits my niche real strongly . Bummed to hear you were disappointed over it though, that really sucks!
The problem is, the game goes from stupid hard and frustrating when you're figuring it out to butt-easy in a second.
For anyone interested, there's a meta puzzle/ARG type thing that's been going on with this game recently. It's a little complicated to explain but you can find the hint to get started by flipping the bird/worm option in the menu and then looking through your save file to see where that's referenced!
Eh, kinda disappointed that this is a card game. I was hoping I would be able to control a character and do fucked up cult stuff.
Picked up this game last night and have already sunk seven hours into it. I can see why others would be disappointed in it, and it would greatly benefit from some QoL improvements. I'm still super into it though; tonally it tickles an area of my brain other pieces of media can't quite reach
i was surprised when the first two endings I got were the ones where you become complacent and accept your day job
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