Honey, I Joined a Cult

My first thought after two hours with Honey, I Joined a Cult was that someone had crossed Prison Architect with a late-night satirical sketch and let it run unsupervised. The bones are immediately familiar to management-sim veterans: you start with an empty field, drag out walls, assign room functions, and slowly build a compound that can sustain and exploit an ever-growing population. The 1970s aesthetic and funky soundtrack give it a distinct personality that most tycoon games would not bother attempting, and the writing leans into its premise with enough genuine wit that you will catch yourself reading the tooltip flavour text instead of watching your faith meter crater. The systems stack up faster than a first glance suggests. Five core resources demand constant attention: Money, Faith, Influence, PR, and Heat. Faith keeps your nightly sermons functional and your cultists from revolting. Influence funds the research tree that unlocks new rooms. Heat is the punishing counter-metric, climbing every time followers leave bored or missions go sideways, eventually triggering protests and SOB raids. Each cultist carries individual skill ratings covering Bluffing, Espionage, and Retail, plus a set of Traits and Quirks that affect which rooms they should and absolutely should not be assigned to. Scheduling shifts to keep the compound running round the clock while leaving everyone six hours of sleep is the kind of problem I genuinely enjoy. Newcomers to the genre should not be intimidated: the tutorial is thorough enough to get you past the first week, and the adjustable difficulty sliders let you dial the money pressure all the way down to near-sandbox if the early-game crunch feels overwhelming. The room roster is where the game earns its dark-comedy tone. Early facilities cover basics like the Canteen, Bathroom, and Meditation Studio. Unlock the research tree and the options escalate: Maggot Rejuvenation Therapy, Discombobulation machines, a Seance Center, and eventually late-game rooms that let you sign away follower souls or convert them into robots for mountains of cash. Sending cultists on Covert Ops missions in town generates PR, attracts higher-quality recruits, and unlocks new items, though those same missions crank up Heat and can trigger cascading morale problems back at base. The three cult paths unlocked through the Leader's Sanctum, roughly evil, peace-and-love, and futurist, give subsequent playthroughs a meaningfully different flavour and lead to distinct endings. The weaknesses are real, and worth naming before you commit. The late game loses its grip. Once propaganda routinely nullifies protests and police raids, the threat layer evaporates and the final stretch becomes a grind to accumulate the funds needed to trigger the ending. Min-maxers who optimise their compound efficiently will hit this wall sooner and feel the repetition harder. The tutorial also has gaps: it does not explain hospitalization well, so your first overworked cultist collapse will catch you off guard. And the visual presentation is functional at best, deliberately reminiscent of a flash-game aesthetic that some reviewers found charming and others found underwhelming. The music is a single funky loop that will either fade pleasantly into the background or drive you to mute. For management-sim fans who have already put time into Prison Architect or RimWorld and want something lighter in tone but still mechanically dense, this sits comfortably in that bracket. For genre newcomers, the adjustable difficulty and solid tutorial make it a genuinely reasonable entry point, one that does not ask you to memorise a hundred keybindings before the first in-game day ends. The early-to-mid-game loop of researching new rooms, watching your compound grow weirder and more profitable, and firefighting Heat spikes is satisfying enough that the late-game fade is forgivable rather than fatal.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Honey, I Joined a Cult.