Cultist Simulator

Cultist Simulator is a narrative-driven simulation game that has the player take on the role of a citizen in one of several 1920s European capitals, chiefly one resembling London. The player's actions may lead to their creating an illegal cult in pursuit of semi-divinity for themselves or others. The game's mechanics are presented as a combination of playing cards and timed "verb" boxes/action buttons in which the cards are placed. Cards can represent human and nonhuman NPCs, player character attributes such as health, passion or reason, language proficiencies, occult books and scraps of lore, rituals, day jobs, occult influences obtained from dream, obsessions, cities, excavation sites, magical tools and ingredients, currencies, etc.

Player choices involve combining these cards within different "verb" boxes with varying, complex outputs. The player drops cards into verbs which may respond by demanding more cards if not directly pulling them from the table, both before and after the player commits the inserted cards starting a timer for when output cards can be collected. The initial, default "Aspirant" character begins with only a "Work" verb and two cards: a menial job and the health needed to work one shift of it. After the timer the player collects a temporarily exhausted Health card, the job, and cards representing some funds.

The game lacks a central plot structure that the player follows. Instead, the lore of the game is revealed through a variety of explorations to different ruins, reading of found books, and other methods. In order to accomplish this, the player can learn to speak a variety of languages such as Latin or Sanskrit to help decode knowledge found.

During the course, the player is confronted by two factions, the "Hunters" of the Suppression Bureau, which hunt the player, and "Rivals", which are other cults hunting for the same secrets and power. The player will have to deal with both groups throughout the game. If the player character dies in a run, the game restarts and the new player character is likely to be investigating the conditions for the death of the previous player character.

Weather Factory is an independent game studio created by Alexis Kennedy, who previously had founded Failbetter Games. Failbetter had developed several gothic and Lovecraftian horror story-driven games, including Fallen London. Kennedy split from Failbetter and founded Weather Factory in 2016, looking for a more hands-on role in designing and writing than his management-focused role at Failbetter. Cultist Simulator represented the studio's first game and an experimental title that they could produce quickly with minimal costs. Humble Bundle published the game.

The use of card-driven narrative systems was already something Kennedy was familiar with through Fallen London. Kennedy said that a card-based approach helped to make concepts tangible and allowed players to organize the cards as they saw best fit. Cultist Simulator represented the most minimalist take Kennedy could take with the card-based concept, since cards represented a vast vocabulary of terms within the game. While Kennedy provided user interface elements to help the player understand where to place cards, much of the strategy and reasoning was something he wanted players to discover for themselves.

Cultist Simulator received "mixed or average" reviews from critics, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. Fellow review aggregator OpenCritic assessed that the game received strong approval, being recommended by 50% of critics.

TouchArcade enjoyed the visual style of the game, saying it beautifully evoked "the early 20th century aesthetic of the game’s narrative". Nintendo World Report felt it could take too long to make meaningful progress, and it was easy to make a mistake that would reset it. PC Gamer liked how the trial and error gameplay could lead to experimentation, "each failure comes with a bit more knowledge of how the game works and how to avoid whichever disaster befell you the last time". Eurogamer praised the writing, saying it evoked a feeling of "a protean clutch of riddles, scholarly marginalia, back-alley rumours and pointed epithets".