Cultist Simulator: The Exile (DLC)

Cultist Simulator is a narrative-driven card game set in a 1920s world of eldritch gods, secret societies, and slow-burning obsession. You start with almost nothing: a job, a health meter, and a handful of cards representing your waking hours. From there, you slot cards into action verbs like "Study", "Dream", and "Work", watching chains of consequence unspool across a cluttered table. There are no quest markers, no NPCs with exclamation points over their heads, and the game will let you starve, go mad, or get arrested without blinking. It is deliberately, cheerfully hostile to the impatient. The writing is where this thing earns its reputation. Alexis Kennedy's prose runs through every card description, every cult doctrine, every whispered revelation, and it rewards close reading in a way almost nothing else in the genre does. Discovering a new Lore card and reading its flavour text feels like finding a marginalia scrawl in a library book that was not supposed to exist. The world is built entirely through fragments, and the fragments cohere into something genuinely strange and affecting if you give them time. For players who care about worldbuilding depth, this is the real payoff: a cosmology that borrows from Lovecraft and Borges without becoming a pastiche of either. Combat and progression work through the same card-slotting logic. You recruit followers, send them on expeditions, manage their loyalty and their fraying minds, and eventually attempt rituals that can bring you closer to one of several wildly different endings. Each legacy (the game's term for character class) unlocks a different angle on the same world: the Physician starts with healing resources and a fragile body, the Detective has access to investigations that other runs cannot open. Build variety holds up across multiple runs, though the middle-game plateau where you are grinding Reason and Passion into Lore can feel repetitive by hour fifteen regardless of your chosen path. That is a real design friction, not a small one. The mixed Steam score reflects a genuine divide. Players who want systems explained to them, or who expect RPG scaffolding like skill trees and dialogue wheels, will find Cultist Simulator opaque to the point of cruelty. Players who grew up on Fallen London, who enjoy piecing together rules from trial and catastrophic failure, who read item descriptions twice, will find it quietly extraordinary. The Metacritic score of 71 undersells the ceiling and oversells the floor: at its best this is a singular piece of interactive fiction, at its worst it is an inscrutable card shuffle that sends you back to the wiki for the third time in an hour. If you want a game that respects you enough to never explain its own mythology, that hides its best writing inside obscure ritual outcomes, and that has an ending which will sit with you for days after you reach it, Cultist Simulator earns serious consideration. Just go in knowing the learning curve is not a curve, it is a cliff.

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