Cultist Simulator

I have started more runs of Cultist Simulator than I care to admit, and died to Dread, starvation, and the slow creep of despair more times than feels dignified. That is precisely the point. Weather Factory, founded by Alexis Kennedy of Fallen London and Sunless Sea fame, built something deliberately adversarial here. The writing is extraordinary. The onboarding is essentially nonexistent. Those two facts sit in permanent, intentional tension. Mechanically, the game places you at a table covered in cards. Verbs, rendered as action slots, things like Study, Work, Explore, Dream, and Talk, accept noun cards: emotions, artifacts, followers, occult texts, funds, and human beings whose fates you manage with cold administrative detachment. Actions run on real-time timers, and the table fills up fast. Early on you juggle menial employment and a inherited bequest. Later you are dispatching followers on expeditions into the Mansus, a dream-realm of hidden gods, while simultaneously managing a cult membership, fending off police investigators, and feeding the Dread and Despair counters before they eat you alive. It runs in real time but can be paused, which saves your sanity more than any in-game mechanic will. Multiple starting archetypes, including a Police Inspector who hunts cultists rather than becoming one, give repeat runs meaningfully different shapes, and there are several distinct win conditions tied to different occult paths. The problem every review eventually lands on is the UX, and the community has not been shy about it. There is no tutorial. The card aspects system, where each card carries tags that determine which verb slots accept it, is explained nowhere in-game. Discovery is the gameplay, which fits the Lovecraftian theme beautifully in theory. In practice, your first two or three runs will end in confused failure before you have absorbed enough of the game's own logic to make intentional decisions. Players routinely credit third-party wikis with making the game click. The late-game loop also attracts criticism for repetition: grinding the same study and expedition cycles to unlock the next tier of lore can feel mechanical once the initial wonder of discovery fades. Where it holds up past the rough onboarding is the writing itself. The prose on every card, every lore fragment, every NPC description builds a Secret Histories mythology that is dense, strange, and coherent on its own terms. This is the same fictional universe that Weather Factory later expanded in Book of Hours, and you can feel the weight of it. There are also multiple endings tied to which forbidden path you pursue, giving replay value that goes beyond just learning the mechanics. If you have patience for a game that withholds its own rulebook and calls that a design choice, the payoff is genuine. This one is for players who kept the Sunless Sea wiki open in a second monitor and considered that part of the fun. If you need a tutorial, a waypoint marker, or any acknowledgment that your time is valuable, Cultist Simulator will not meet you halfway. It will, however, show you something you have not seen anywhere else.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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