Are you a good person? Are you cunning, passionate and wise? Are you the one to change the world to your whim and lead them into a new era of prosperity? Or, do you wrap yourself in delusions of grandeur and are destined for no more than death? Test your courage and find your path in Cultist Simulator!
Cultist Simulator: Initiate Edition is a narrative-driven card game which follows different characters as they attempt to build their cult. You use cards to manage various resource points, which in turn produce other cards to be used in their place. As the cards are consumed, the story will progress, giving you more options and more obstacles to deal with.
At its core, Cultist Simulator is a rogue-like, menu-based, resource management sim. The story gives you clues as to which cards will work in certain instances but you’re largely left to experiment and find out for yourself. There’s little to no handholding in this regard and you are more than likely to make many wrong plays before finding the combos required to keep your character alive.
You have several stats to manage, including your reason, health, passion and money. These are bolstered by the cards you draw by placing others into your different “actions“, which consist of things like dreaming, talking, investigating and working. If your stats decline for any reason, your character will start producing cards with negative connotations, such as dread, and will succumb to these afflictions if you can not find a way to cure them.
Your resource actions work on degrading timers. You place a card into the appropriate action slot and it begins counting down. Some cards will then require you to add additional cards to further the story. Meanwhile, your expenses will naturally tick down and pull from your purse when your next bills are due.
I played Cultist Simulator for maybe ten or twelve runs to varying success and I can still only recall a handful of successful action paths, but I’ll try and explain. There are cards which offer lore for you to build upon. You can dream about them or research them with “passion” to put your heart and soul behind them, or you can talk about that lore with others to spread your narrative or glean more information. This will then provide you with a random chance at more cards, be they new people to talk to or some kind of magical inspiration such as “glimmering“. You can combine these specialist occult cards in the “investigation” tab to get lessons in them, and hopefully get better cards to investigate further.
There are also negative paths to contend with. If you produce too much dread or become afflicted with some malady, your character’s health will decline and consume them. You can fight this by dreaming about the things that trouble you and combine them with “reason” or find some other way to conquer your demons in another tab.
There’s a decent selection of character archetypes to choose from when beginning a new run. Your starting position greatly affects what work you can do and how fast you can expand your influence. The priest, for example, has a role in the church and has access to more work options early on. The dancer begins with more passion and the police officer has more connections, but even this isn’t enough to save you from random number generator (RNG) drops.
Despite being a menu manager, Cultist Simulator has a wonderful atmosphere that combines storytelling, music and the lingering threat of death to create something rather unique. The UI is sleek and fluid and works to build upon the macabre universe told in the stories, provided you can live long enough to read them, of course.
Cultist Simulator is rather unforgiving. Runs can turn sour without warning and it can be difficult to produce the exact cards you require when you’re at the mercy of the RNG. There were several instances where I was doing really well, then out of nowhere my supporters wound up in jail and I had a dead body card I couldn’t dispose of. Another time, I focused on working and managed to send my character into an unbearable depression.
I found myself pausing the game for short periods while I read the stories and puzzled over which cards to place where. In this regard, I found myself engaged with the gameplay and enjoying my time playing, even if fatigue set in pretty hard after an hour or so. This, combined with the steep learning curve and the heavy reading requirement, makes Cultist Simulator difficult to recommend to a wider audience. I can think of only a handful of TYG staffers who would be able to read so many cards of text and absorb the information held within them when I found myself missing things. Equally, I could see it becoming a major hyper-focus game for others.
The management sim formula and gameplay are incredibly well polished and do exactly what they set out to do, but Cultist Simulator simply won’t be for everyone. It actually came out on Steam and mobile back in 2018 but has recently found its way to PlayStation with the Initiate Edition, so I was able to look at a bunch of reviews which seem to mirror this sentiment. You’re either going to love it or hate it.
Additionally, this lead me to finding the older version to see what changes have been made to the layout. It only takes a quick look to see this was more than a simple port to console. The changes are pretty huge, but they seem to be for the better while managing to maintain the general vibes and style of the original.
The Initiate edition also has three of the DLCs included which gives you access to The Priest, The Dancer and The Ghoul, with another available on the store. There have also been significant changes to the design since the original release which I see as a nice improvement.
I went into Cultist Simulator completely blind and was pleasantly surprised with how many different routes and storylines on offer from a seemingly simple game. I’m still not confident I know how half the mechanics work, and I won’t be claiming world domination in Cultist Simulator any time soon, but I’m determined to keep trying.
Platforms: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One
Developers: Weather Factory, Playdigious
Publishers: Klabater, Playdigious, QubicGames
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