Cultist Simulator Anthology Edition

Cultist Simulator is a solitaire card game wrapped around a text-heavy narrative engine, set in a brittle, fog-draped version of the 1920s where Lovecraftian gods are real, hungry, and surprisingly bureaucratic. You begin with a handful of cards representing your character's health, funds, and nascent obsession, and you build outward from there, juggling work, study, ritual, and the slow erosion of your sanity. There are no tutorials worth speaking of. The game teaches you through death, failure, and the creeping realization that you misread a verb card three hours ago and sealed your doom. From an RPG standpoint, the character-system is genuinely unusual. You pick a starting legacy - the Detective, the Ghoul, the Exile, among others - each of which bends the win conditions and available story threads in meaningful ways. These are not cosmetic choices. The Exile plays nothing like the Scholar, and a second run with a new legacy genuinely feels like a different game rather than a palette swap. Build variety here is less about skill trees and more about which Principles you cultivate: Heart, Grail, Forge, Lantern, and so on. Each Hour and Principle opens different ritual paths, contacts, and story fragments, so your doctrinal choices compound in ways that reward re-reading every card text twice. What works: the writing. Alexis Kennedy's prose is dense, poetic, and frequently unsettling in the way good weird fiction should be. Every lore fragment you unlock feels earned rather than dropped in your lap, and the worldbuilding rewards obsessive players who read every single card description. The Anthology Edition bundles in the Dancer, Priest, and Ghoul DLC legacies plus the Exile expansion, which adds meaningful new win conditions and story layers. If you are going to play this at all, this is the version to get. What does not work, or at least what will drive a certain type of player straight to a wiki: the opacity is sometimes a design choice and sometimes just friction. Certain failure states feel punitive rather than instructive, and the real-time card timers create a low-grade anxiety loop that some people find thrilling and others find exhausting. There are no filler quests in the traditional sense, but there is repetitive verb-cycling to grind up resources, which is the closest this game gets to padding. It is not a long game by RPG standards - a focused run clocks around five to eight hours - but the loop has enough variation across legacies to justify multiple playthroughs for anyone who enjoys the flavor. If you want explicit quest markers, dialogue trees, or a main character who speaks, look elsewhere. If you want a game that trusts you to piece together an occult cosmology from fragments and punishes arrogance with quiet, story-appropriate devastation, Cultist Simulator is one of the more distinctive things on PC.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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