Cultist Simulator

"Through merciless illumination I've risen higher beyond the shell, and forged what no man could dream" Cultist Simulator is a phenomenal experience of excellent writing, and clever keywords. All the solutions are there beyond the cryptic aspects and beautiful prose.

i spent like three days just playing this game. i did not play anything else, i was soooo invested and determined to reach my goal (dont wanna say anything spoilery)
it was to the point that my friend was worried about me since on the second day i stayed up all night.
needless to say its a good game, highly recommend; just if youre anything like me be prepared to lose a night/day chasing your cultist dreams

Offering a unique blend of narrative and strategy, it immerses players in a mysterious world of occult rituals and dark lore. The card-based mechanics provide a compelling and complex experience, though the steep learning curve may be challenging. It’s perfect for fans of deep, story-driven games with a focus on strategy and intrigue.

This game is so addicting. 19 hours in and I only have 6 out of 84 achievements. LOL. I've only just scratched the surface. The lore is just insanely deep and there is always something new to discover! Highly recommend if you want something entertaining and intense but not requiring a ton of control/hand skill (like action games)

crusty ahh game

If you like games that throws you in deep water and you have to find a way to swim back into shore while it looks on and doesn't help you out and don't mind the grind of getting back to where you were during your previous run, then this game is for you!
The lore is also pretty cool and it has awesome art and really satisfying sound effects that I can hear in my sleep.
May have also developed a Pavlovian response to the sfx but hey, I had fun.
Overall a cool RTS card game for those who want to waste away hours trying to find out what really is going on.

I wish I'd like this game. I just love the setting. I don't mind the cryptic nature and absence of hand holding. I actually enjoy it.

But in the end, it's a micromanaging grind fest that can end abruptly to bad RNG.
Everything is decaying on a timer, your are constantly trying to keep up with them.
It's just unsatisfying how much attention is needed to achieve so little.

Genuinely the best written game I have ever played. This is one of the few games I would call a work of art.

Overall its a good game, but is definitely not for everyone. I have put in a good amount of time and it can be pretty addictive once you start figuring out that path you want to take, but it does take a bit to figure out what you are supposed to be doing and why/how. Once you find your rhythm though, this game has wonderful charm and mystery.
I know they have the warning that there is no tutorial, but I do think the game would benefit from having some kind of direction to help new players. Trial and error that causes multiple restarts of a whole run is not my personal favorite way of learning.
But I have enjoyed the game for the most part and will be checking out other titles from this developer.

*sigh* I wish i could give the game a Mixed rating of my own... I both love it and hate it.

I've never one a single game to date. I love the challenge but think it may be sometimes a little... too challenging? No, oblique is probably the better word. It's hard to connect logic to a lot of the cards and puzzles and the game is punishing enough that you can't get to experiment as much as you'd like. I haven't uninstalled it yet, but I don't know how much longer that will be for.

It's worth about ten bucks.
I like this game, even though it's not all that fun to play and the lack of direction can be annoying. I can't resist it's atmosphere though, I really do feel like I'm obsessively pursuing dangerous truths even though i'm playing a stupid card game.

I hate this game so much. I hate it with my whole self. But I can't stop playing. Save yourself, don't come this way, turn your back and walk away.

Light LEAKS through the CRACKS. My mind is BRIGHTER than it EVER was. THE HIGHER I RISE THE MORE I SEE.

This is definitely one of the stranger game. It is facsinating! ;)
Its gameplay was for me completely original, but I got used to it. It enables different wayof thinking and taking actions than i was used to.

I reccommend to watch first 5-10 mins of some lets play to see the weirdnes :) But do not watch anything else. No lore no middle game etc. lot if beauty is in discovering stuff by yourself.

I made a mistake and i read wiki when I was stuck and it was so interesting that I read all of it and spoiled it for myself. Dont be like me!

I currently play book of hours and I enjoy it too.

Needs a quick save or something.

Games a time sink, timers take way too long, you can spends hours, days even setting up one path, an suddenly "fascination" kills you with no reliable way to counter it, "reminiscing" is random and "dread" you've been saving to use for it get sucked up in another time that will also kill you, its a death spiral.

I wouldn't mind the failing an starting again, but this game eats real world hours, everything take waaaay too long.

Besides that its a interesting game. Wished steam had a meh option.

After 35 hours. I love the game. I'll go long binges playing it. I may not be the best at it but I enjoy stumbling my way around until i find a new card that might give me a little more progress and the constant pressure from the cards that are meant to harm you.

Shout out to MandaloreGaming for his video introducing me to this game.

At first, this game was confusing. I had no idea that leading a mundane life was a bad thing and kept getting that ending. None-the-less, I was given some guidance on how to build my own cult and then things got interesting. Interesting and very weird. It amazed me.

For a "simple" game, this is so complex. The artwork is brilliant (though eerie).

I give this game a 10/10

Incredibly good game. Despite some of the complaints for the DLC, I would personally recommend playing through all of them once for a complete narrative.

First it was the dreams. Then it was the visions. Now it's everything. I no longer have any idea what is real, and what is not...

Light LEAKS through the CRACKS. My mind is BRIGHTER than it EVER was. THE HIGHER I RISE THE MORE I SEE.

Awesome game, it make take time to get the hang of it but try not to look things up. Read everything, take notes, and take your time.

A genuinely unique kind of card game. Requires a lot of trial and error and a bit of headbashing to figure out how it works. If you pay careful attention to your dread, and work a decently paying job you should be ok. Requires a bit of grinding to get a basic good end.
Not everyone's cup of tea I realy enjoyed this one.

Kept pulling me in even though it's extremely hard. Had to look up some walkthroughs to get past certain points. Loses marks for indiscoverability of paths forward, and what I think is having to have DLC to complete it properly. All that said, it is the best of this type of card combination game I've played, perhaps just a little better than Stacklands and suffering many of the same issues. Be warned.

Short version:

The early game was confusing. The mid game was grindy. And I could tell the late-game would be more of the same.

Long version:

Cultist Simulator is a very unique game - even though I'm about to compare it to other titles.

Everything in the game is an action card that you put in timers. That's it. That's the whole game.

Perhaps that sounds boring. But it doesn't have to be. Games like Stacklands and Beecarbonize are structurally similar in gameplay. And I enjoyed one of those quite thoroughly (Stacklands).

Still, it's a rather unique way to construct a game, and a demo would do the customer well to identify if this tiny genre is one you'd actually enjoy. On that note: Beecarbonize is completely free, so give that a try if you're curious how the gameplay of Cultist Simulator works.

With all of that out of the way... Cultist Simulator does some things right. It's got a very polished visual sheen. And it has a fun story concept: you get to start a cult!

Unfortunately, the writing is very lacking (which you won't have time to read without pausing). So the story pull is more just a way to explain the mechanical boxes of the game. You "dream" about cards with the word "passion" on them to learn more about your cult you founded but don't know anything about (there isn't much to know). You "study" two cards of "vitality" to gain "health". You use "health" to... not die.

This isn't an RPG where you level up your stats to defeat a boss. Or maybe it is. I never got to the end. Stats are cards, and cards are just objects for your timers. And now we circle back to the beginning of this review:

The whole game is action cards you put in timers. That's it.

I beat this game, then bought it, then REALLY beat just so that I could write this review.
As of right now, I have 13.2 hours in. And thats me having the wiki opened AND knowing what I'm doing all for a single Major Victory
But WHY does it take so long? Timers. Timers + slow game + random chance = a lot of wasted time. I wasted so much time, that by the end of the 13 hours, I legit had a super headache, and basically collapsed on my bed the moment I got the Victory.
As I am writing this, I just googled and found out that "cultist-timejump" mod exists, and i'm kinda ticked off that it wasnt in the base game

Story:

So, there was once a Forge girl, and she liked, really love the Sun, so she naturally killed it and it exploded into a bunch of "children" and they all waged war on gods made of stone, and won. And now they all live inside your dreams, in the light ofc. You play as a rando who works at a clinic where a dude dies as hes handing you a scrap of lore. You get fired, and then become an office wagie who begins a major quest to devote his life to a devotion of Power, Enlightenment, or Sensation through the lore you pick. Then you take lots of opioids to fend off your depression and sleep a lot to harvest your dreams for the whereabouts of esoteric knowledge.

Gameplay:

Everything i'm describing is done with cards that are placed into action boxes to do something.
Your mission is to get a powerful Follower, Lore, and Instrument/Reagent to perform a rite powerful enough to allow you to ascend. Which means you have to grind. To get the follower, you must run around town, speaking of esoteric lore like a mad-man until someone pulls you aside to offer you help. This can either be a patron, like Meme Bucket, or a follower like Eldritch. You have to spam this, go to work, harvest your dreams, and study your Reason, Health, and Passion in the beginning to start your cult.
When you harvest your dreams, youll get lore for Histories, and if you Explore it, it'll give you a location you must raid. Raiding locations will give you books and Reagent/Tools. Books, if studied, will give you lore or language. And now you basically begin your quest of
A. Getting all the lores from the books (specifically, you're hunting your Cult's lore)
B. Harvesting Dreams for more Histories that give you more Locations for more Books/Lores
C. Taking opium to fend off your depression.
Once you get a higher level lore, you typically require a higher level Dreamscape. Instead of busting down Stag doors with Reason, you might need to cuddle with a prisoner so that the spider in your dreams can eat him in the physical world to get better Histories.

Beginning of the Game:

This is the beginning of the game, and believe it or not, its actually really engaging. Then, the unfun begins.
The highest level Mansus/Dreamscapes requires either Prisoners or Silver Spintrea to access. making Prisoners creates Notority which can instantly lose you the game if it isnt handled properly. Ntm, the Prisoner will only get you the second highest spot in the Mansus, so its not even that good compared to Silver Spintrae. The Silver Spin method requires a Mirror or a broken-af key. Every time you cuddle the mirror to sleep, you'll break it for a chance to get the best History. To repair it, you gotta have a Forge homie use Silver Spin to fix it up. To get Silver Spin, you must RNG your Patron, like Meme Bucket, to give you a commission that is Very Substantial. The commission itself isnt hard to do at all, just time consuming. the REAL problem is that there is a 1/3 chance of her giving you what you want, and a 2/3rds chance she'll give you a baby commission. I have spent HOURS on this game just fulfilling commissions trying to farm the Silver so that I could repair the stupid mirror so that I could sleep with the stupid mirror to get a good History.

How to win:

The standard or minor victory isnt that hard to complete, just time consuming. You basically just need an exalted follower (which requires high lore and tool), a high lore, a high tool, and a Rite. And you'll win. You might accidentally get the items you need just doing basic raids. But were you doing occult-like stuff?

Occult-like Stuff you do:

You'll utilize your minions to conduct raids on locations, and their aspects overcome challenges. These challenges are usually won if you can manage to bring in a squad that adds up to 10 of any aspect. Unless its a curse. Curses, can go to hell. I curse the developer for making curses the way they are. If your people look at a curse, there is ALWAYS a chance for them to mess up, and its ALWAYS right when youre about to do something risky. Can you dispell a curse? Basically no. You have ONE chance to dispel a curse, and its a 1/3 odds, and it WILL produce Notoriety anyways.
You can imprison people and use them for sacrifices. Surprisingly, these sacrifices arent Rites, usually. Because Rites are COMPLETELY pointless. The only time you'll do a Rite is when
1. You have so much lore and junky resources, that you're just messing around
2. You're trying to get a specific ingredient for the Major Victory
3. You're down to your last Health after you failed to pay attention to the Sickness and you'd like to gamble some Decrepitude.
Imagine that. You're in an occult, and the only time you do a Rite is when you're ready to beat the game.

The game tries its hardest to prevent you from having fun. Did you want to Dream and experiment with Dreams? You can produce Dread which can lose you the game if youre not careful. Did you want to explore a place? You'll get Notoriety which can lose you the game. Kill your detective? He'll literally comeback a super villain and curbstomp you. Try to utilize your followers in occult activities? Good luck with that. Some occult actions can KILL your followers, create Notoriety, AND DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!! Yipeee!!.

But what about the Rites? Its a Cultist game, surely the cool rituals are at least fun, right?
No. They're incredibly pointless AND cost resources that you typically cannot afford. Either you need an emotion (hard to come by), a follower, high level lore, or a high level ingredient to SACRIFICE. And for what? you get to talk to a demon for a little bit? Maybe he can teach you a language? pointless because your followers can fight just as well as he can AND YOU CAN GET EVERY LANGUAGE IN THE GAME UNLOCKED BY JUST READING BOOKS AND DREAMING.


This game is not for everything. There are a LOT of development oversights that went into this game. It runs EXTREMELY well and never gotten a bug in this game. It WILL require you to have the wiki open at all times AND to waste about 6 hours per run. And thats IF you know what youre doing.

this is a game for people who deeply enjoy complicated card sims. if you don't like reading a lot, or having to maintain several elements of the game at once, skip over this title.

This is a rogue like game where you can easily die due to misunderstanding or inattentiveness. Each ascent or game can take 50 hours to complete especially when you're new. There are numerous timing interactions where correct juggling of all the steps is essential to managing all the traps and processes. Time can be paused on demand. The game explains very few interactions. I recommend playing this game with a wiki unless you have a photographic memory. There are too many patterns that are left hidden to understand exactly what you're supposed to do. While I recommend this game and enjoyed my time with it, I've stopped playing because I had a bad, unexpected interaction where I lost a follower after 5 hours in. Why this was extremely frustrating is because after 5 hours I felt like I had just about setup the board only to lose an extremely limited resource permanently for the rest of the play. Bottom line, if you're playing this game, realize it'll take days and you can get screwed over at any time.

This game is MESMERIZING. Frustrating at first, because without a guide, you'll need to try things, fail, and try some more. And yet I couldn't just quit. I'm still figuring things out, but I'm on a roll here and things are starting to hit a stride.

Idk this game was too cryptic, slow paced and unintuitive for me to enjoy. A lot of people love this style of game where you have to figure out how the game works on your own but I was just too confused and it never really cliked.

Cool art style and aesthetic though.

I wanted to give this a thumbs up, but after all these hours, I have more complaints than not...

The lore is fantastic, the mechanics aren't too bad, and the music is very fitting.

That said, working with lore pieces is tedious (I have a 14, and it's not strong enough for anything), I somehow ran out of people (I ate at least a dozen or so), and I managed to grind the game to a stalemate state, in that I'll never go broke, become ill, or advance a story beat. It's just too much of a time sink versus the accomplishment of figuring out the next puzzle.

There was a couple of fun runs though, I managed to be killed off by an ancient curse, had a follower frame me for murder of a detective, and live a happy life working at the office in a senior position.

An extremely uniqe game with phenomenal writing. Getting into it's flow might be challenging in the beginning so I reccomend taking it slow, reading out the various flavour texts and getting into the atmosphere. It's not for everyone but people that enjoy lovecraftian stuff can get a lot of enjoyment out of this game.

Cool atmosphere and in concept perfectly simulates losing yourself in occult lore and ideas of reference. In execution it's a single player card game based on timers instead of turns, which just devolves into a whackamole of constant, unautomated busywork demanding your attention. I never felt like managing a cult and it's believe system, as the gameplay itself was too stressful and demanding to develop any kind of immersion. Genuinly the first game in my life to make my wrist hurt from all the tensed up repetetive clicking.

Great atmosphere and lore with an addicting gameplay that that after the first few hours becomes grindy and requires obscure combinations to progress through an RNG infested system.

I get that the main attraction of the game is figuring out things by yourself, but there are times where your progress comes to a slump when you don't get the locations and items required for your objective, it ends up with you staring at the board for hours waiting for timers to end just to see you have to do it again. All this while you juggle your money, sanity and a detective that can make you lose your whole legacy.

It seems that you should approach it by trial and error, but with permadeath, some cards having too little information to make the right choice and an inability to undo a lot of decisions it can feel frustrating.

To my knowledge, the only things you can get for further legacies are three new starts (that each require its own run, which may take hours), that can you get some new endings (that have even more advanced card requirements), but you can’t unlock a way to skip the early game that usually just amounts to you grinding for funds and abilities.

With such grindy and esoteric gameplay that wears down after a couple of your runs it feels like this doesn’t respect your time, it just makes me wish it was another kind of game altogether because the world seems so interesting.

I really wanted to like this game, it seems like it could be interesting further down,
the problem is im already 6 hours deep. the problem isnt that there isnt a tutorial, its an overall lack of direction youre given, trying a bunch of different routes just to end up at the same place

I actually find this game VERY enjoyable, but I also find it hard to recommend to everyone. This is definitely a game that is going to vibe with specific people: people who enjoy card-based tabletop mechanics (think Stacklands), people who will read flavor text and story with all scenarios, and people who enjoy puzzles but don't mind when they don't have all the answers at first. This game does not have a tutorial and it does expect you to read everything during your interactions. The descriptions of events usually have the answers for what you need to complete objectives, but it also requires some deduction (and preparation) to have a successful run.

Successful runs will also run you quite a long span of time. Thankfully, the wonderful music and storytelling does make the journey worth attending. I find this game quite charming and - at times - challenging in how it asks you to solve different events. I also think there are some parts of the game where a guide is absolutely needed and that it could explain mechanics a bit better for beginners. Overall though, I think this game is worth a fair shot. Get it on sale along with the DLCs if you can.

5/10, don't buy this if you want to feel good about yourself later

Pros:
-I adore the concept of a game where you have to figure everything out on your own using only the scraps of information you've been given and your own wits, like you're an actual cultist or paranormal detective trying to figure out how these gosh-dang unknowable beings and their powers work
-Good soundtrack
-Wonderful atmosphere, engaging lore

Cons:
-You won't figure most things out if you're dumb like me
-Basic gameplay mechanics are hidden behind in-game lore, and it's up to you to figure out via trial and error (and an unhelpful cryptic hint if you're lucky) how to not die of Dread or Fascination
-Sometimes the RNG really screws you over; cards (beneficial or detremental) decay over time, and every Action you take ALSO takes time, and you can't abort an Action once you start it. You're bound to require an Action that is being used and won't be available until after the card has decayed.
-Gameplay aspect becomes predictable once you figure out what actions give you which cards; got Dread? Dream with a Contentment to fix. No Contentment? Paint, or sleep with a money card. Eventually, every event becomes "Got A; do B to get rid of it" for a few hours while you try to subvert your lore cards.

I struggled for 15 hours and felt like a clueless idiot the entire time.

without the sale I wouldn't have looked twice at this game. I usually just add anything mildly interesting to my wishlist (which is now sitting at around 1200 games as of writing) to give you an idea of what that's like. then I wait and see if it pops up in the sale tab.

that was a mistake. now that I have actually played this game, I genuinely think I would pay full price for it. it's grabbed me like no other game has in so damn long. I've played 12 hours in 2 days and am loving every second of it.

the joy of being able to work out how the game works and what does what has been satisfying. there have been a couple bugs, but nothing serious.

I'm not very good at describing what the game is actually like, so check other reviews for that, but it's been a great time so far.

my only suggestion, and I wish it was base game, was to use the shelves mod, and then the hawkthorn mod which gives you some more organised shelves. if you're someone that gets overwhelmed by lots of things happening and you need designated places for things to go, that will help.

The greatest strength oft his game is ludonarrative synergy. By which I mean - the game's mechanics work together with its writing and presentation to reinforce themes and create atmosphere. Your lucid dreams and occult tomes are fascinating and you want to devote yourself to them, but you still have to show up at your day job so you don't lose it. Longing for something that a mortal life can't provide can lead you to sucidal depression, yet delving too deep can turn you into a babbling lunatic. It's a great game that pushes the boundaries of what you can achieve with the medium.

I gave it an honest try but in the end it felt very grindy and became a puzzle of trial and error. The writing is great and I wish I could have unraveled more but it's stuck behind repetitive loops of "keep it up". I'd hope with the DLC it becomes a more fleshed out game...