CULTIC

I've spent more time than I'd like to admit listening to CULTIC's piano-and-synth score loop in my head at 2am, which tells you most of what you need to know about how well this thing gets under your skin. Solo developer Jason Smith built something here that the boomer-shooter revival keeps promising but rarely delivers: a game where the atmosphere does as much work as the gunplay, and where every design decision feels chosen rather than inherited. The mechanical pitch is straightforward. You are a disgraced detective crawling out of a mass grave somewhere in a fog-drenched 1960s American countryside, and the cult that buried you is going to regret it. Your toolkit runs from a throwable axe and a lever-action rifle through to a flamethrower, bundles of TNT you can cook before throwing, and Molotov cocktails useful for turning robed fanatics into running torches. None of the weapons use hitscan, so headshots feel physical and deliberate rather than instant. There is also a dual-armor system, with ballistic armor eating bullets and blast armor absorbing fire and explosions, which quietly rewards players who pay attention to what's coming. A portable field kit lets you bank excess healing for later, and secret areas hide Imbued Remains that permanently expand your health pool. The game is generous to thorough players and quietly punishing to those who sprint through. What separates CULTIC from the growing pile of Blood-adjacent releases is its willingness to use silence. The maps, built in Unity but visually convincing as a Build Engine game, cycle between combat arenas and stretches where nothing moves and the soundtrack drops out entirely. You are left with footsteps, distant wind, and the creeping suspicion that something is about to go very wrong. Chapter One guides you through shipyards, mining towns, crypts, and a chapel where a T26E4 tank shows up as a mid-point boss. The pacing within that chapter is tight; rarely a wasted room, rarely a fight that doesn't teach you something. The level design holds a middle ground between the key-hunting sprawl of Doom and the more directed corridors that came later, and it earns that position honestly. Combat allows for genuine playstyle variation: rush in sliding and dodging, set up oil-lamp traps and let enemies find them, or use friendly-fire geometry to let cultists thin their own numbers. The criticisms worth naming are real but minor. Enemy AI is not sophisticated, which some reviewers flagged as a dull spot. The color palette, heavy on browns, greys, and burnt oranges, is intentionally grimy and will genuinely put off players who want visual clarity over atmosphere. Chapter One, taken alone, runs roughly three to four hours on a first pass, which is short enough that completionists might feel the sting. Chapter Two expanded the scope significantly when it released in 2025, adding new weapons including a revolver and semi-automatic shotgun, a shopping mall sequence with mannequins that shift position when you aren't looking, and a train level, though some reviewers noted the back half of Chapter Two stretches slightly past its ideal length. The full two-chapter game is a different proposition from the original release, and the better one for it. For anyone who grew up loving Blood, or who has been quietly hoping someone would make a boomer shooter that treats horror as more than wallpaper, this is the one. It is rare to see a solo project with this much craft in every layer, from the per-level soundtrack arrangements to the reactive environmental details like coffee pots you can heat and throw. CULTIC knows exactly what it wants to be and executes it with the kind of quiet confidence that is genuinely hard to manufacture. Kai, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Verified. Runs flawlessly on Linux out of the box. Based on 43 ProtonDB community reports.

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