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Cultist Simulator Review & Starter’s Guide  ◥▶◀◤

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꧁ TL;DR: ꧂

Saturated with intrigue, this is an innovative & unique singleplayer roguelike card game w/ a steep learning curve. Highly replayable due to branching events & randomness. Non-existent tutorial, but community is helpful.

* Designed by the dev that created Fallen London & worked as creative director on Sunless Sea.

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Recommendation:

☑  Content quality is a value at full price. ☑  Content quantity is a value at full price. ☐  Positive experience, but wait to buy when it's  on sale. ☐  Negative experience. Wait for improvements before buying. ☐  Very negative experience. Save your money.

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What I like about Cultist Simulator:

+ Active pause. + Achievements. + 1920's setting. + Legacy system. + Alluring premise. + Very well-written. + High replayability. + Apocalyptic humor. + Fast forward option. + Simple & effective art. + Mouse zoom for tiny text. + 20-40 hours of gameplay. + Eye-pleasing color palette. + Very helpful & friendly community. + Music invokes a feeling of mystique. + Plays smoothly. No bugs that I ran into. + Study lore & discover forbidden secrets. + Authorities can be alerted to your "activities." + Subtle & blatant hints when clicking on icons & empty slots.

Indifferent:

~/= Waiting for a critical card to turn up can be like waiting for the stars to align, but that's the nature of the game: to play the hand you've been given wisely. ~/= Default sound settings are way too low at 10%. Press ESC to adjust. ~/= Static screen hints default is too small. Go to Settings & switch to 100%+

Room for improvements:

- No tutorial. - Some grindiness. - Late game can be convoluted. - Timers try my patience ...at times. :P - Individual card expiration timers need an adjustment. - Automatically PAUSE gameplay upon returning to game. - Grammar could use a minor touch-up in places. (mine probably could too!) - Legacy selection window needs mouseover tooltips for what their corresponding cards do. - There are times that no matter how well you play, the randomness will just totally screw you. - I would prefer mouseover tooltips to having to click each icon or slot that I want to view the tooltip for.

Other thoughts:

Cultist Simulator is not a quick, pick-up-and-play card game, but it sure is devilishly entertaining once you understand how to play it. Be prepared to devote some time to learning its particulars and nuances, mainly because it is so different from most other card games that you may have played. Part of the challenge getting started is wrapping your head around all the combinations of how the cards interact with one another. Will adding a card to that Verb yield a favorable or unfavorable result? Will it be consumed? Would it just be a waste of time? What cards will it produce? Now apply that thought process to multiple Verbs and multiple cards that are running down their own individual timers. It can be daunting at first, but once you've dedicated some time to learning the game's functions and have a bit of a handle on it, it's smooth(er) sailing.

The Beginner's Guide by Tssha is a really good place to start, taking the author's advice step-by-step through the beginning of the game, while utilizing active pause. This is one of the best and quickest ways to get some of the basics down, while getting a visual flow of the game. I had first tried to figure it out on my own, and while I did Ok for a little bit, it became a convoluted process when a lot of Verbs and cards were in play with all those timers ticking. I appreciated the "training wheels" immensely.

I've added an additional starting tutorial below this section ("How to Begin Playing") with more detail and descriptions, as some portions of the Beginner's Guide were somewhat vague to a new player, but Tssha's guide is very important as it also digs into additional ways to make money, get established, and specifics for founding your cult, etc.

Further, once you begin needing a better understanding of some of the cards that appear later in the game, the Comprehensive Reference Guide (spoilers!) by Escapade84 is a handy compendium of cards, traits, assets, ephemera, grimoires, lore, rituals, locations, status, followers, societies, actions, time, random events, legacy, miscellaneous stuff, etc. Due to it being loaded with spoilers, you may want to hold off until you've soldiered through more of the content and made some discoveries for yourself.

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How to begin playing:

➥ My Cultist Simulator Starter Guide on Steam

(For best results, follow along w/ this starter's guide while playing & using active pause)

Cultist Simulator starts you off with a single Work Verb. This is a square-shaped icon on the game board which you will click on to reveal its empty card slots. Clicking on an empty slot will reveal what types of cards you can place there. You will see a description on the tooltip, with some Aspect icons at the base of it. Clicking on those icons will give you a description of the type of Aspect that can fill that card slot. In this case, your starting card, Menial Employment, fulfills the requirement as an "Aspect: Job" and may be added to the empty slot. This enables you to begin work as a miserable hospital porter.

Clicking and beginning to drag a card will highlight the Verbs in purple that the card can be used with.

To begin your job, now that you have added the Menial Employment card to the Work Verb,  you can click START, and the Work Verb timer will begin. Once the timer has elapsed, open the Work Verb, and you will see two new cards: Funds and Health. Collect them all, and they will now appear down on the game board area. You will notice a new Sleep Verb has appeared on the game board with its own timer. Once that initial Sleep Verb timer elapses, you will see that another new Verb has appeared: Time Passes. Before adding any cards to the Sleep Verb, let the Time Passes Verb timer run down to initiate the next Verb: A Bequest Arrives.

For the purposes of getting started, I'm leaving the Dream Verb (& Contentment card) be, but it's helpful in discovering lore & recovering from negative statuses. Dreaming can also eventually cause you to go insane.

The mini magnet icon on a Verb means that it will automatically grab a card (like how the Time Passes Verb will grab the Funds card each cycle of its timer for example, whether you add it manually or not).

The Bequest Verb description delivers good news that the old man you dreamt of at the hospital named you in his will. Allowing the new Bequest Verb's counter to run down will award you with eight new Funds cards plus three others. Collect them, and at this point you will also see on the game board, a Bequest card, a Reason card, and a Passion card. This is a very good time to use active pause to stop the timers while you consider your next actions, because the Time Passes Verb has just grabbed one of your Funds cards (due to its mini magnet icon). This is your recurring expenses upkeep (every one minute on the Time Passes Verb timer). Keeping yourself stacked with Funds cards is extremely important as running out of them will eventually affect your hunger and ultimately your Health, setting you up to lose the game. Negative effects like hunger, illnesses, and injury cost Funds cards to remove. The late game will also introduce additional money sinks.

Be careful how you use your Health card(s) as they are critical to keeping yourself away from a losing scenario. In the early game, they can be added to the Work Verb with a chance to be turned into an Injury Card which costs Funds to turn back into a Health card.

You will notice, at this point, that the Bequest Verb has now changed into the Study Verb despite having the same light bulb icon. You also now have a Bequest card that you will add to the Study Verb. Notice also that while having the Study Verb open with the new Bequest card slotted in it, that it opens a new "Approach" card slot. Make a decision to add either your Reason or Passion card into this slot and click START. Remember, you can click on empty slots and on tooltip icons for additional hints and descriptions.

Now that your Study Verb has been slotted with the Bequest card and either the Reason or Passion card, it's time to unpause the game. Allow the Study Verb timer to run down to receive additional Text cards that you can add to the Study Verb when you wish. Most likely the Time Passes Verb timer also ran down by this point and grabbed another Funds card from your stash.

One of the best ways to keep money flowing is by climbing the corporate ladder of Glover & Glover. You can open this option up by adding the Reason Card to the Work Verb. Be aware, that your boss is a hardass and demands a perfectionistic work ethic...

You should now have a very basic understanding of how the game flows and can begin to experiment with how using different cards and combinations on various Verbs branch out the story and gameplay. As storylines unfold, your play area will fill up with cards and Verbs that will allow you to do a great many things like founding a cult, sending disciples out to on missions, reacting to encounters, summoning "things," etc. 😈

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Legacy Options (Pick one after defeat):

Physician Cards: Reason, Position at the Institute "As the patient descended into the final delirium, I made copious notes. In the buzzing heat of the night, I re-read those notes, and they began, at last, to make a kind of sense."

Bright Young Thing Cards: Health, This & That "Endowed from birth with wealth and talent. A life of ease, comfort and delight stretches ahead like an amber carpet."

Detective Cards: Reason, Health, Inspector's Position "I am an inspector in the capital's police, charged with the investigation of the most vile and wretched things that one human does to another."

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Helpful Links for Getting Started:

Community Discord: https://discord.gg/ub2tE6Y ➥ Beginner's Guide - by Tssha ➥ Reference Guide (w/ spoilers!) - by Escapade84 ➥ Cultist Simulator Wiki - by Curse Gamepedia

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I hope you enjoyed this and found it helpful!       ◥▶◀◤

Check out my other reviews!  ⤵ https://steamcommunity.com/id/sklurb/recommended/

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