The last few years have seen an absolute explosion in the variety and popularity of board games. Settlers of Catan might be where the Euro-style boardgame really took off with American audiences, but the love affair has continued. Gloomhaven, one of the most expensive and complex (and fun!) board games I’ve ever played, raised millions of dollars on Kickstarter for a gargantuan sequel/expansion. And now, folks are creating board game-style video games, letting computer tracking handle increasingly complex mechanics. The latest, and perhaps most ambitious, version of this genre is Cultist Simulator, Weather Factory’s delightfully dense game about penetrating the veil of the supernatural that was recently ported to the Nintendo Switch.
“Something’s come back with us.”
You are a young person in what appears to be the 1920s. Your story differs depending on the background you choose at the start of the game, changing small things like opening professions or starting money. Regardless of your circumstances, you feel… a calling. You begin to have vivid dreams. Perhaps you’ve found a hidden bookstore that doesn’t advertise its more esoteric selection. You begin speaking publicly about what you are reading. People take notice.
Some of those people share a similar interest. Those are people you can recruit into your cult. Others, however, work for ‘the Suppression Bureau’, a semi-official law-enforcement organization that seeks to censor supernatural influences — by force, if necessary. So you must balance your desire to recruit and grow your cult with the need for secrecy against a prying movement dedicated to piercing the shadows you surround yourself with.
And it wouldn’t be a Lovecraft-inspired game if you didn’t have to worry about your own mental state. Occasionally, seemingly at random, you’ll generate a “Dread” card. Let that accumulate, and you’ll die of despair. You can get rid of it using Opium, but that may make you sick. You can get rid of it using Fascination, but accumulate too much of that and you’ll slip into madness, obsessed with the unreal. The game asks you to manage your mental health just as you have to manage your money, time, and physical health. It sounds easy, but the balancing act is mentally engrossing and shockingly tense.
“I glimpse subtle movement in the world -“
Cultist Simulator is a game about mysteries — or maybe more accurately, it is a game about discovery. Consequently: The game doesn’t tell you much. At its best, the game invites you to feel the sense of revelation that your voiceless protagonist does. There is a real sense that you are right there with the character, asking, “Can I get away with this?” More often than not, the game answers: “Yes.”
The game appears simple on its face: You have a series of cards broken up into key categories (locations, people, books, etc…) and a series of actions (explore, study, work, etc…) to which you can attach those cards. So, for instance, you have the location Ecdysis Club, and you can explore it. Each action takes a set amount of time, typically between 30 and 60 seconds. Sounds simple enough.
But what happens if you explore a book? What happens if, instead of working a job, you select a mysterious rite? That’s where the genuine charms of the game open up. Initially, Cultist Simulator feels limited. Go to work. Study books. Explore the city. But as you begin to try to combine the verbs and nouns in different ways, you start opening up weird alternatives. Shapeshift into a cat and lead a heist. Borrow power from gods you hunt in your dreams. Summon ancient monstrosities to bargain for power. The transition is slow, and then all at once, but the game gets beautifully weird as it progresses.
What I find fascinating about that transition is how the game pulls you deep into monstrosity without question. At first, the Suppression Bureau are an annoyance. Not dangerous, typically, but irritating. You’re just reading forbidden books. Who cares? But then something happens. Maybe you’re on a good run and an investigator is getting close. And you talk to a cultist. Maybe you mention how annoying that hunter is. And all the sudden, your cult has moved into the Manson Family phase and you begin to realize, oh wait, maybe the priest-turned-private-eye is actually the good guy here. By not attaching any inherent morality to any action, the game tricks you into escalating your behaviors in the pursuit of power. This lets a game with no dialogue tell complex moral stories better than any of the Mass Effects or Dragon Ages out there.
“- like the floaters which sometimes move through the eye, but slyer.”
Cultist Simulator was built with the assumption of a big, open screen. Adapting it to the Switch and making it playable portably must have been an incredibly difficult task. Developers Weather Factory pulled it off… mostly. Sort of. Mostly.
On the PC, the game is set up like… well, a board game. You have a big open space, and you can arrange it to organize your materials. It looks something like this:
On the Switch, at least playing handheld, the view is quite different:
The PC version is denser and harder to read at a glance. That said, as you play and learn, it gives you more flexibility in how you organize your thoughts and abilities. The Switch version is organized in alphabetical order, and you can’t change that. Instead, you can use the tabs on top to see pre-chosen categories, though why you’d use anything but ‘Eligible’, which only shows you cards that are usable at that time, is beyond me. This is initially easier to read, but as you accrue acolytes and abilities, it can feel unmanageable.
What’s more, the game utilizes a ‘second screen’, allowing you to look at both the main game and a ‘miscellaneous’ screen. Unfortunately, the miscellaneous tab doesn’t do a good job at telling you when something important is happening on it. And incredibly important things happen on that screen. My first two deaths came from accumulated ‘despair’, though I couldn’t tell that it was accumulating, or where. It was on that second page. The game should do a better job at communicating when things are happening on that page; the small cross icon that appears on it for vital and trivial actions alike feels too minor.
There are also lag issues. I didn’t expect lag to matter, but in the late game, timings on your actions can get quite tight. Whenever the game autosaves, my device lagged considerably — and I couldn’t pause the clock once the lag hit. There were definitely times the lag made me miss some of the flash-events that ask you to add resources to an ongoing action for a better reward. That said, I was playing handheld on a base model Switch. It is possible that the issue would be resolved on a newer model.
“Sometimes, too, I hear them.”
Despite — or perhaps because of — its density, Cultist Simulator is a must-have game for any fans of Lovecraft or cosmic horror. The developers, Weather Factory, also designed Sunless Skies, Fallen London, and Sunless Sea, all pulling from a similar aesthetic influence. What I find striking is just how different this is from their past hits. They clearly have a niche storytelling interest, but they’re good at it, and they are still finding new ways to explore those themes and ideas.
Cultist Simulator is at once the most approachable of their games that I’ve played and the most infuriating. As a roguelike, the game is an unambiguous failure to me. Successful runs take many hours, while starting over feels exactly the same each time. When I compare that to something like Hades, which scales its challenges so that the early game can feel fresh again, some of the seams begin to show. Legacies do give you some different experiences — the “Exile” DLC in particular completely remakes the game — but overall, the beginning of the game will always be the same. And the beginning of the game is kind of boring.
And yet, I find myself playing the game obsessively. I’m intrigued by the sheer variety of ways to win, very few of which I’ve ever started to approach. There’s an endless amount of stuff to explore in this game. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the game’s most supernatural elements, which are obscure and tricky in the best way possible. At its heights, Cultist Simulator: Initiate Edition — which includes the Dancer, Priest, and Ghoul DLC — gives you a sense of agency and discovery like nothing else I’ve ever played. It’s a game you can lose yourself in.
Cultist Simulator has deep and profound flaws, but if you are looking for the next great cosmic horror video game, this just might be the one.