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dkirschner's Cultist Simulator (PC)

[April 17, 2021 05:34:14 PM]

This is a weird one! I was intrigued by the theme of building a cult and the way you do it through a sort of card game. You will have no clue what you are doing until you try and fail a few times. Then, I suppose like cult knowledge, it becomes clearer with study.

You start off with a menial job (in subsequent playthroughs you can choose a couple other, better jobs). You have to go to work to earn money because time passes in real time (there is a handy pause button), and I suppose you have rent and need to eat. Soon, you can perform more regular actions, such as studying, dreaming, and exploring the city. You also get other stats to manage: health, reason, and passion.

You can boost stats by studying them to get more cards, which allow you to use the stat to perform more actions or to make actions stronger. For instance, using your passion for work will let you paint. If you only have one passion, your paintings will suck and you won't earn anything, but if you have four, you can turn profit and use money for other things, such as exploring the city to buy books from the bookstore or to pay entry into a secret club or to hire a goon (who could become a follower or, better yet, a sacrifice).

Basically this is a game of managing expanding resources and countdown timers, as it takes time to study or do anything else. Eventually, you will learn more about the occult, including getting all sorts of recipes for rites, magic items, incantations, and etc., etc. I never really got past acquiring a bunch of things (I actually exhausted the library and studied every book, haha), improving my arcane knowledge, and getting stuck in a loop of going to work. I had maxed out all my stats, didn't have anything useful to dream about, and just...didn't know what else to do that wasn't going to take forever.

That was my fourth playthrough and I decided to quit because I get the gist of it. Also, I was out of health. Sometimes you will get sick, which will require health to stave off. I suppose this is like a win timer because I never figured out how to get health back. If you don't stop an illness, it turns into decrepitude, which persists the rest of the game. I had like 5 decrepitude (I must have been really sickly!). Anyway, assuming I didn't die from wasting away, I guess I would have slowly gotten the various pieces of recipes for learning about and enacting cultist things, grown the membership of my cult, moved into a headquarters (I had an empty one but couldn't figure out how to move in), hired a goon to sacrifice in the end, and raised the dead or whatever you do in the end to win. Oh, I did win a "minor victory" one time by becoming chief of police or something. I have no idea. But I sat here for three hours today clicking on things and feel like nothing happened.

My girlfriend has been listening to a podcast about Heaven's Gate and telling me about it. So, with that plus Cult Simulator, I feel like we're ready to start our own.