Dreaming of Cults - Cultist Simulator
Sometimes the world is not what it seems to be. A little digging shows that there is more to the world then you would ever expect. Cultist Simulator is a resource management, digital card game that was developed by Weather Factory studios. In it, you explore the occult as you juggle making enough money to live and avoiding being noticed by the authorities. It is a deceptively simple game that is enjoyable if you are willing to put in the time and effort.
Cultist Simulator is a resource management game where each resource is a card. The player starts with some of each of the four main resources: health, reason, passion, and funds. Each unit of the resources that the player owns is represented as a card that they can move around the table. From such humble beginnings, the player can use action modules to interact with their cards. Combining cards in different ways and with different actions can produce new cards that the player can use. You continue to advance your resources until you reach the truth of the occult mysteries behind the world.
This system ends up being both enjoyable and quite frustrating. On the one hand, it is fun to explore the different combinations of cards. Each discovery leads to new secrets that the player wants to reveal. The sheer amount of different possibilities is enough to keep the player engaged and guessing for a while. On the other hand, Cultist Simulator has a lot of tedious tasks with no way to automate them. For instance, to not get terribly ill and die the player has to spend funds every day. In order to get those funds, the player has to work. You will find that for the majority of the game you will have to be working constantly to be able to pay for both your survival and the various expenditures that are associated with running a cult. Every couple of minutes you will have to manually restart that work. While this seems like a trifling matter, quite a few of the different works require multiple cards to be put into multiple slots at different times. A lot of the game ends up being chores like that.
The tedium certainly detracts from the overall experience, but I still found myself having fun. Cultist Simulator was, for me, a game that was best played with a video in the background. Anything to distract the player a bit from the repetitive tasks did wonders to make the game more playable. Once you surmounted the tedium there was a lot of interesting elements to the game. Sending cultists out on missions was a puzzle of finding the right agents for the right job. Continually stockpiling occult knowledge slowly gave the player snippets of lore to follow. It became a race against the ever-vigilant police. Either you would find the truth or die trying.
I mentioned the lore of the game and that is worth noting. There is some vestige of a story to the game but it is expressed in excessively vague terms. The text of various cards and events could tell the player what was occurring. Like the occult knowledge that the player’s character is investigating, the in-game texts were quite cryptic. I never really found myself understanding anything about what was going on. Perhaps there is clearer knowledge if the player is able to progress further, but I was annoyed at how little I actually knew. At some point, the game stopped being about exploring occult secrets and became the meta-game of shuffling of cards around a table. It would have done wonders to Cultist Simulator to give the player anything to begin to piece together occult mysteries. Most of the game’s experiences end up being more mechanical than narrative.
Again, despite these issues, I actually ended up liking the game quite a bit. It moves fast enough at the fast forward speed to keep things moving. As you die and have to restart it appears that the game gives you more starting resources, even if those additions are scant at best. I always wanted to solve the next mystery and building up a significant cult was quite satisfying. This game is not for everyone and it is definitely best played with something on the side to help pass the lulls. I found that there was a gem of an experience behind the faults of the game.
Overall, Cultist Simulator is a tedious game, but one that I thought was worth the effort. There are a lot of repetitive tasks that will take up the player’s time throughout the experience without giving the player particularly rewarding gameplay. What lore does exist in the game is sparse and is often so shrouded in vague language that you barely learn anything about the cults that you are a part of. However, the puzzle of figuring out which card to pair with which combined with the satisfaction of seeing your cult grow and flourish made up for the issues with the game. Not everyone will agree with me on this game because it takes a certain type of player to commit to this experience. If you can stay organized and enjoy puzzle games, then I think that you will find this to be a rewarding experience. If you are on the fence about this game then you will probably want to pass it on for something more engaging.
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