Here’s yet another small game by some of the same people behind Failbetter Games and naturally since it’s a narrative-based game with cards, how could I resist? Unfortunately this is one game I did not like at all, mainly due to how tediously grindy it is. You’re supposed to have fun by exploring the gameplay mechanics by yourself and learning what cards interactions are possible but I find that as achieving victory takes quite some time and a little bit of luck even when you fully understand how everything works. As such, you’re just prolonging the pain unnecessarily by repeating the same actions over and over again if you refrain from looking things up.

The basic story, conveyed entirely through the system of cards, starts you off as a lowly nobody stuck in a menial job and living an unfulfilling life. But one day you receive a bequest from someone who has died and the papers include clues that opens the door into the secret world of the occult. Through reading books, you learn secret lore and rites and the existence of vaults containing more books and artefacts. Through contacts, you get in touch with those of a similar interest and slowly you build a cult that can help you grow in power, with the eventual objective of achieving some sort of mystical ascension. A branch of the government however is aware of the existence of the occult and works to suppress such activity so you’ll have to evade their attention. You’ll also have to earn enough money to fund your cult and stave off madness and despair as you delve ever more deeply into the higher mysteries.

Almost everything in the game is represented by cards, with the exception of the square verbs in which the cards are slotted into. As you can see from the screenshots, this eventually results in a very abstract-looking and bewildering board. Things do start out modestly. In lieu of a tutorial, you’re simply presented with a very small set of options so what you have to do at every step is obvious. Click on the button for Work and add in a Health card to represent doing menial labor. This starts a countdown that lasts, say, 60 seconds. At the end, you get back a Health card that is temporarily exhausted and a Funds card representing the money that you earn. Every action in the game works like this, so you put a book card into the Study button and when the timer runs down, you might learn a new bit of occult lore. In addition to funds and Health, you also have Reason and Passion as basic resources. Reason is for working a desk job and solving logical challenges. Passion is used when you need to be creative as in when you try to make paintings.

But things spiral out from there. Everything, literally everything is a card. It makes sense that books, pieces of lore, minions, rites you know, spirits you summon, artefacts you know and so on are cards. But there are also cards that represent more abstract things, such as Dread and Fascination. Let either of these build up to three and you lose the game, because you either commit suicide due to expression or go insane. Worse is that many cards have timers too, so they only last for a limited amount of time before decaying to another card or disappearing either. The Contentment card which staves off Dread lasts only 60 seconds for example. If you become well known that is represented by Mystique cards. If you actually do nefarious deeds, you generate Notoriety cards. Hunters that manage to snag a Notoriety card might use it to create Evidence again. If they manage to build up enough evidence against you, you lose the game too.

Eventually Cultist Simulator becomes a game of managing all these resources and watching the timers. The game is pausable so there’s no real time pressure as you can think and plan at will. But you always need to be thinking about timing and what is going to happen next as every action takes time. Then after you grasp the gameplay loop and understand how to survive, you start grinding to get the things that you actually need to win the game. You need to get the main lore of your chosen cult up to max level, and that means getting and reading all the books and raiding plenty of vaults. You also need to dream your way into the deepest part of the Mansus, likely obtain a powerful matching your cult’s lore and luck your way into getting a matching influence that only lasts 60 seconds. Plus of course you do this while surviving the usual dangers and this is just the standard victory condition.

There’s plenty of flavor text on the cards of course as you might expect so it’s great fun at least for a while to read everything and soak in the atmosphere. The graphics are limited to the cart art but they are well done with some properly eerie touches like how they occasionally twitch seemingly out of the corner of your eye. But the insane grind and repetitive gameplay loop kills any sense of magic the game might have. Assembling a team to explore a vault for the first time and get out with books and new tools feels great so you take the time to read all of the flavor text. But after half a dozen or so vaults by which point you have so much lore that you don’t really care about books any more but still need to go into vaults to get that last tool that you need to win the game, it’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm to read more flavor text. The way the Mansus works is similar. It’s amazing when you realize that you can dream your way into it with the right cards and can ascend to higher doors. But eventually you just come to see it as a slot machine to get the card you want, typically the right influence card or a Secret Histories card.

The infuriating thing is that I don’t understand why the developers feel such a need to gate content and lengthen gameplay time in this way. I would estimate that a standard victory takes about 20 hours of playing, and likely a lot more if you don’t look things up and fail a lot. There’s just no good reason for it and the gameplay loop isn’t that complex. Just extremely repetitive and often subject to the whims of luck. It is quite possible to lose due to Fascination by having one pop up from painting just as you draw another from the Mansus. This is especially frustrating as there is no reloading saves in this game and it takes such a long time to build up your cult so that you can actually start accomplishing things. I can’t imagine replaying this many times to achieve different endings because almost everything you can do is still the same. I think I would love this game a lot more if it aimed for something around 10 hours. As it is, I found this to be rather neat as a concept, but just terrible as a game.