Mysterious but tedious, like the Necronomicon written by an accountant (★★☆☆☆)
I have to admit the game makes a great first impression. Cultist Simulator has cool visuals for its budget level, plus the feeling of things not being quite right is immediately apparent and the quality of the prose is far above what you see in most games. It’s also easy to become engrossed in the tactile feeling of putting cards from your little virtual table into slots and watching the timers go down. What’s going to happen this time? The game has a clear, concise and solid concept. I defy anyone who even has a passing interest in Lovecraft not to be fascinated when starting up this game.
But then what happened with Fallen London and Sunless Sea happens: you hit a wall. From then on, for every hour of reading original text, you have 5 hours of grinding. Maybe more. It’ll be roughly 10 hours before you even get to do anything remotely supernatural (maybe less if you spoil for yourself how things work, but why do that?). It doesn’t help that the prose is less interesting than in either Sunless Sea or Fallen London. It’s certainly to be commended that the author created his own occult lore (no Satan or voodoo or, y’know, actual Lovecraft stuff), but being bombarded with references to the Moth, The Woods and the Mansus doesn’t quite stoke the fires of my imagination.
The game uses the same byzantine system from the two games I quoted above where abstract concepts are used like inventory items and everything is incomprehensible, except through trial and error. I mean, events have flavor text and “qualities”, those qualities have tooltips and even the tooltips have tooltips. Despite all of that, it’s often unclear what does what. What’s the difference between an aspect, a lore, an influence, a veneration and a way? Did you guess that TALK (Headquarters + a Believer) turns the believer into a prisoner? Did you know that TALK (Cult + a Believer) promotes the believer, but that TALK (a Believer + Cult) does something else, depending on that believer’s stats? I don’t really dislike the system, but it kind of drags down the game into even more administrative tedium. It’s “Occult Practice for Public Sector Employees Simulator”, which, when I think about it, feels like a missed opportunity. Who *wouldn’t* want to fill a shoggoth-summoning form?
As of this review, the game is out of Early Access, but seems to have a lot of glaring issues and omissions. Why is there only one “regular” job in the world? Why do so many cards “glitter” as if they have an effect but have none? Why are temporary headquarters the only kind that exists? Why are “legacies”, the roguelite permanent aspect, so completely barebones? In fact, I heartily recommend to backup your save, as nothing different happens on future playthroughs. Heck, the game is pretty coy about it: “here’s a button that shows you exactly where your file is…”
In conclusion, I’d probably like the game quite a bit more if it was more fleshed out, as it actually feels 90% finished, but with lots of trimmings missing. On the other hand, many of the game’s flaws are already baked into the concept and not much can be done about that. I just hope the developers don’t consider the grind to be part of the latter.
Idle Thoughts 