[Mini] Cultist Simulator
Cultist Simulator is absolutely a genius game. And it is absolutely not for everyone, it appeals to a very specific audience. And no, it's not one of those ironic simulator games about building Kool-Aid tanks.
If I had to quickly summarize:
It's a game about maintaining a balancing act, spinning a dozen plates while taking risks and experimenting to further your goal of supernatural ascension, with the ever-looming presence of catastrophic failure in the back of your mind.
I can easily identify all the aspects that would make someone hate this game with a passion. Obscured mechanics, ticking timers, and especially the lack of clarity. Most first-time runs of Cultist Simulator will be confusing and end abruptly by dying of overwhelming dread or by going mad within 30 minutes. And that's by design.
It hands the player a few cards, some action tiles, and says:
Do you want to run a cult? Want to know how? Well, combine some cards and figure it out yourself. Good luck.
Of course, the game teaches you the basics, but it doesn't explain anything in detail, if at all. And when it does, it is in cryptic sentences and keywords, with mechanics obscured behind the combination of cards and verb tiles. On the surface, it all seems overwhelming, or even unfair, but it's really not. The game does give you (veiled) information, not enough to hold your hand, but enough to figure things out if you are paying attention.
However, If you have no patience to read and put some thought into what you are doing, it will be a very frustrating game. Mindlessly clicking through things will lead to dumb mistakes that will send your run head first down the eldritch toilet.
Which was exactly what happened to me when I first played.
But Cultist Simulator snared me, even with the initial frustrations the game tapped into some kind of obsessive behavior I didn't even know I had. The allure of possibility and the desire to learn more was strong enough to push me forward, to the point I took pen and paper and started writing things down. Combinations of cards, aspects, negative effects, and the ways I found to combat them. In time my desk slowly started to get messy, creating an oddly immersive connection to the game board and the overall vibe of uncovering the occult.
And that's when everything clicked.
If I wanted to progress I would at least need to understand the game's lore, or at least what each symbol represented and was capable of. It wasn't gonna be like other games were to succeed I just needed an abstract intelligence stat level up. Understanding, planning, and then finding ways to manipulate that knowledge to my advantage was the key to progress.
If the game did explain each and every mechanic in detail like so many people criticize it, Cultist Simulator wouldn't be nearly as engaging. Taking risks, making mistakes, and having breakthrough "AHA!" moments are the core experience of this game.
What at first looked like nonsensical flavor texts started to make sense, I figured out what the symbols and keywords meant, how I could use them, and how aspects feed into each other. Mechanics like the aforementioned Dread that felt like it relied solely on RNG to decide whether or not it would kill my run turned out to not be the case at all. I just couldn't see past frustrations before.
And just like that when I least expected it, I was easily destroying police evidence, summoning demons to teach me foreign languages, murdering my day job supervisor, reanimating his corpse with necromancy, funding expedition parties across the world to steal artifacts, biding at the auction house on cursed texts, and painting masterpieces with arcane pigments. All while maintaining health, funds, fascination, notoriety, and dread in check.
In no time I had all the tools I needed. I sewed their severed bodies onto mine. The feast of the True-Birth had started. Swollen with the lives of others, I returned from the Tricuspid Gate. My flesh reborn. I have become a Long, favored by the Grail. I shaw not grow old.
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