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Cultist Simulator: Let's Boogie

Cataphract

Cataphract

Denizen of Qliphoth
Location
UTC +8:00
Pronouns
He/Him



Also on Kickstarter.


From the creator of Fallen London and the creative director of Sunless Sea comes this new solo project. As the name implies, the game's about setting up a cult seeking the knowledge and power of the Hours, a pantheon of 'secret gods' with appetizing names like the Thunderskin, or The Door in the Eye. All the while, the player will need to avoid the Authorities, rival cults and of course the hellish beyond-beings that get in your way. The Kickstarter page outlines a couple of win conditions, even some that lie outside the realm of the supernatural (these usually leave legacies for new games in a manner similar to Sunless Sea), so I think that's pretty cool too.

I think this is really exciting, I like Fallen London and Sunless Sea quite a bit but the setting never got its hooks in me the way these little blurbs on Kickstarter have. The gameplay might seem a little abstract, but the creator's had enough experience with a similar format that I don't feel too put out by the concept.

I'm going to back this as soon as I can gather up the dough to do so, though it seems that the project's gathered more than enough support. I feel the tiniest bit put out there's no stretch goals, but I think the guy's reasoning behind it is sound.
 
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Oh, hey, the game's out! It's priced at $19.99 USD on Steam. Should've been keeping tabs on it, but I was too broke to buy into the beta and... I kinda forgot.

I've played a few hours of it and I find it really fun, though the lack of a proper tutorial is a little frustrating at times. Then there's the UI: if you don't organize things yourself things will get messy, and even then things can get a little annoying.

However, the writing is on point, the lore fascinates me, and you can play as an aggressively muscular Pablo Picasso whose cult is basically a bunch of people from the 1920s wanting to become supernaturally swole.

Anyone else playing this?
 
I'm playing! I'm only on my second run, and I'm still pretty much blundering about blind, but i have figured out some tricks to proceed through Ways now, which is cool. All the interactions feel esoteric and make sense after you know them.

Seconding the desire for an auto sort or at least a snap to grid or something, I'm so messy at organizing things here.
 
This is the dark souls of clicker games.

I'm not sure I've had fun, but I have spent 40+ hours in less than a week. Anyway, I've gotten exceedingly efficient at this game and so here's a lot of basic gameplay things. If you want to fumble blindly for a while, don't open the spoilers.

Before you even touch the mystic stuff, you have to get the basic stats and cards you'll run into in the mundane parts of the game.

You have one resource. Funds. You need at least one Fund every 60s or you fall to Sickness, covered in the third tab. You get Funds by working at a job. Most starting jobs don't pay very well, and barely keep you afloat. Jobs will be covered in the sixth tab.

You have three stats. Reason, Passion and Health. You generally start with one of each. These stats are needed to power a lot of the things you do. Generally, they are persistent - using them puts them into cooldown, but doesn't destroy them. The exception is Health, which we'll get to in the third tab.

You have four 'moods'. Contentment, Restlessness, Dread and Fascination. If you accumulate too many of the latter two at the wrong time, you risk going mad of either Despair (Dread) or Visions (Fascination). We'll get to this in the fourth tab.

Finally you have two reputations. Mystique and Notoriety. These will be covered in the fifth tab.
When you study a base stat, or work with Passion or Health, or from a random event[1]​, you get what I'll call a humour. A humour lasts 180s, and there are three of them.

Erudition, associated with Reason.
Glimmering, associated with Passion.
Vitality, associated with Health.

The primary use for these is to upgrade your skills. You can Study two matching humours to get the first extra stat, four to get the second, six for the third, and eight for any further. Given they expire, getting eight extant at one time is difficult and involves either abuse of game mechanics or luck.

My advice to you, is collect Vitality (from Working with or Studying Health) as soon as possible. You really want a buffer of Health. This will be elaborated on in the next tab.

[1] You can see a preview of what the next random event will be in the corner of the Season button pop-up.
The most dangerous thing to you in early game Cultist Simulator is Sickness. You don't have so much occult stuff going on that you're risking madness, but you are poor, and generally have low Health.

Sickness can appear on the board one of two ways - as a random event (which happen every 60s), or due to not having Funds available during the 60s 'season' window mentioned in the first tab.

Either way, what happens is that the Sickness item appears on the board, and tries to eat one of your Health. If it can't find Health to eat in 60s, you lose.

If it does find Health to eat, at the end of the 60s you get an Affliction back, replacing the Health that was eaten. This Affliction has a 180s timer. If that runs out, it turns into Decrepitude, and you've lost that Health until late game magic comes in. This is bad, because it means you've got one fewer to offer the next Sickness.

You deal with Afflictions by putting the card into the Dream button, along with either one Fund, or one Vitality. In the late game, you will probably have Funds to burn, so it is up to you. Early game, however, every fund is precious - you'd much rather spend Vitality - and if you're getting Sickness from running out on Funds, your best hope is that.

However, aside from occasional lucky drops, the only way to get Vitality is to Study or Work Health. So when an Affliction eats your Health, you really want a back-up to throw into Study and get the Vitality to fix it. So generally your first priority is getting at least one extra Health card, preferably two, by Studying Vitality.
The four moods you encounter in early game have an order to how lethal they potentially are.

Contentment is never bad, though it often useless. You can leave it be. It only lasts 60s.

Restlessness also only lasts 60s, but it turns into Dread when that time runs out. Deal with it by Working Passion and putting the Restlessness in as the 'Yearning' or 'Inspiration'.

Fascination is generally rare in the early game. It has a timer of 180s. If the Visions random event comes up, it will grab a Fascination card every 60s. If it reaches three Fascination, you lose. You can reduce the Fascination in the Vision button by having Dread, which it can also grab - but not necessarily preferentially, so having Fascination on the board with Visions is still a risk. You deal with it by Dreaming of it with Dread or Fleeting Memories (which are otherwise useless).

Dread is the real early game killer. It too, has a 180s timer, but it is more prevalent than Fascination. Beyond that, it has the Despair event, which functions like the Visions event, except that it grabs Dread and requires Contentment to counteract. You can deal with Dread by Dreaming of it with Contentment.

Given you often needing Contentment to save yourself from Despair, there are two ways of generating it through your own agency. The most reliable and, for the moment, best, it to Dream of one Fund, which buys you one Contentment by the power of opiates. In the future this probably risks addiction, but for now, as far as I know, go wild.

The other way is to work Passion with Restlessness or some other Inspiration. Often this will give you a Contentment.
At present, neither of the two reputations, Mystique or Notoriety, is really a good thing to have. Mystique, while technically harmless and useful for Working with Passion, makes Hunters show up and investigate longer.

Notoriety is much the same, except it, unlike Mystique, can damage you. When a Hunter investigates (by grabbing) a Notoriety card, they can generate Evidence. If they generate enough Evidence, you are jailed and lose. In the early game, it's generally best to avoid getting it altogether. Investigations are triggered by random events, which, again, proc every 60s.

You gain Mystique and Notoriety from painting arcane subjects, Notoriety by commissioning criminal acts or expeditions, and when first establishing your cult. In the early game, there is little reason to most of these enough to get you jailed.

Reputations last for 300s. Evidence lasts for 600s. You have to lay low for a while.
If you started with the Doctor, congratulations. You can skip this part and use it as your sole revenue source for the majority of the game, at no risk of losing your job or suffering some sort of injury for it. The Doctor gets 2 Funds every 60s.

Manual Labour, or Working Heart, isn't a particularly efficient way to generate funds past the early game. If you're untrained, you risk injuring yourself (which functions in a similar way as to an Affliction), which can put you into a tailspin. You are trained when you've upgraded your Health twice. Manual Labour only pays 1 Fund and 1 Vitality (or Injury), but it goes faster the more skilled you are. 60s with raw Health, 55s with the first level of training, 50s for the second, and 45s for the third and beyond. If you're trained, you can slowly go positive using simply manual labour.

Painting, or, Working Passion, is much more variable. Untrained, you can but will not often make 2 Funds. It will, on average, just barely lag behind the Seasons eating at your Funds, and so isn't sustainable.

Trained Painting, using Repuation, is more more likely to get you a significant influx of money (precisely how much I do not know), but it comes at the cost of having and generating Reputation, which could lead to a Hunter getting you.

Reason gets you clerical work. It's good money, but it's demanding - you have to commit Reason, and you often simply don't have time to do anything besides work that job in the Work slot, without risking a demotion that takes Passion to fix. You can, however, work your way up the Corporate ladder, by hiring a Swindler or Muscle to... deal with it.[1]​ This risks Notoriety, but if you do it twice and get yourself promoted to Board Member, you have the best Fund generator in the game.

Be careful though - when you're working as a Board Member, it collects Notoriety as Hunters do for investigations. If it collects enough, you're fired forever due to scandal.

[1] You hire people by exploring with Heart, and then paying them with Funds if someone with a skillset you want shows up. Then you set them on the problem by talking to them, and then dragging your job over the active Talk button.
 
Personally, I find that getting a 'Wild' or better imagination can turn Notoriety into a useful asset. What I did was generate two stacks of Notoriety by painting two pictures with an occult focus (putting a piece of low-level lore in, not sure if higher level stuff will make more Notoriety) and then always using those two to paint, but taking care not to use any more occult focuses for your paintings. Draw a cultist or something, or use Dread/Fascination/Restlessness/etc to make a 'mood piece'.

As long as you invest one stack of Funds into the painting, you'll generate profit. On top of that you'll be generating tons of Mystique, Contentment and Glimmering. Though, yeah it becomes really tiresome to manage (I have to keep tossing Mystique cards into a large part of the board that I designate my 'Rep Board' and you gotta manually stick in Notoriety into the 'Art or Bread' slots when doing a painting) after a while. And then my adversary's stuck in an endless Mystique consumption loop, at least they're not generating evidence, simply prolonging an investigation!

It's nice to imagine your cult leader is some hedonistic party person banging groupies and causing scandals while painting, which makes people more interested in the paintings with less regard for their actual quality (even if the PC calls it 'worthless' I find I'm always generating profit for my work.)
NonSequtur said:
[1] You hire people by exploring with Heart, and then paying them with Funds if someone with a skillset you want shows up. Then you set them on the problem by talking to them, and then dragging your job over the active Talk button.
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You can also explore with a follower to save on time and Health, it's faster too I think at ten seconds initially.
 
Xalgeon said:
I am determined to get a Forge Victory on my First Life!
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Yeah that's a valid way to play but if you keep restarting you'll miss out on the cool Legacies. They're pretty damn neat in their own way, and seeing throwbacks to your previous characters is always super nice.

This is a case of a pot calling the kettle black cuz I do keep on purging my save as soon as something goes wrong. Most of the time it's because I make a stupid mistake with the interface. That I think is the biggest problem I have with the game, above the fact that you'll be fumbling around in the dark a lot at the start.
 
Cataphract said:
Yeah that's a valid way to play but if you keep restarting you'll miss out on the cool Legacies. They're pretty damn neat in their own way, and seeing throwbacks to your previous characters is always super nice.

This is a case of a pot calling the kettle black cuz I do keep on purging my save as soon as something goes wrong. Most of the time it's because I make a stupid mistake with the interface. That I think is the biggest problem I have with the game, above the fact that you'll be fumbling around in the dark a lot at the start.
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I don't care about legacies untill I get my three "Victory Lives."
 
I've got 33 hours in the game and am enjoying it immensely. Painting with all the available skill slots filled with Notoriety can make you immense amounts of money. The interface can be frustrating, but the game's so compelling that I find it easy to overlook.

Things that would be nice to have in Cultist Simulator:
  • the ability to designate areas of the playing field for particular types of cards (Reputations, Humors, etc.)
  • A way to quickly tell when one card's been hidden under another by auto-collect
  • the ability to have the cards snap to a grid (I believe the developer is planning on this)
  • One more potential recruit for the Winter, Grail, and Knock Aspects.
 
NonSequtur said:
I think those gaps might be for the mortal patrons, whose recruitment hasnt been implemented.
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So, of the four patrons--Poppy Lascelles, Count Jannings, Mme. Bechet, Dr. Ibn al-Adm--which do you reckon would be recruitable in that case? Poppy seems an obvious Winter, and Mme. Bechet makes sense as Grail, but neither the Count nor the Doctor seems an obvious choice for Knock. Though if you turn your head and squint the Doctor's name could be interpreted as "Father of Adam"...
 
mr_stibbons said:
The doctor probably can't be recruited, on account of being immortal.
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Hadn't noticed that before.

In my current playthrough, I'm desperately trying to find something or someone that can teach me Vak and Mandaic. I know you can learn Phrygian and Fucine from summoned beings; is that the case for the other very dead languages?
 
I've been playing and enjoying the game a lot. I accidently ended up ending my first playthrough by dropping a passion into my clerical job, which ended up ending the game. On my current game I've had some bad luck with my followers and have ended up losing a lot of them to exploration or trying to deal with Hunters, so I'm feeling like my options are limited as I try and break through into the late game stuff.
 
Didn't figure out how to recruit followers until third game. First game was fumbling around and ended up insane from desperation clock. Then second run got jailed for kidnapping and tempted murder on the hunter. :rofl: Fifth game now and read all the book from the book shop and still trying to figure out how to work the dreams and cult. Maybe I'm not cut out for life of a cult leader. :V
 
It feels really obtuse and I wish I could automate some stuff like my job once I am well past needing to juggle the stuff for that.

Oh and by god I wish I could just figure out how to get my cult up and running and hopefully finding how I can go for specific Hours while I'm at it.

Going mad trying to find relevant things to investigate because I don't have anything to do(?).
 
I was doing quite well on my bright young thing game, until I realized I'd screwed myself over accidentally. You see, inducting new members into your cult permanently removes the humor you use to do it. I only noticed this after I realized I'd somehow gone down from five to one Health, and put two and two together.
 
Hakazin said:
I was doing quite well on my bright young thing game, until I realized I'd screwed myself over accidentally. You see, inducting new members into your cult permanently removes the humor you use to do it. I only noticed this after I realized I'd somehow gone down from five to one Health, and put two and two together.
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Which is why you don't use humors to bring people into your cult. Just the appropriate level 1 lore fragment in the ceremony will work for initiation of hangers-on and acquaintances into pawns and believers, hell, an appropriately aspected tool in the Trappings slot will also work. But if you use anything with the Ingredient aspect in Trappings (which includes Humors), it gets consumed.

Keep an eye out on your Expeditions for items that have the pigment aspect. If you've found a pigment that also has the aspect you used to found your cult and managed to level your painting skill to A Fevered Imagination (and it's probably the easiest of the skills to level), fill all four Art or Bread? slots with passion, pick a lore fragment of at least level 4 from your founding aspect to use as Inspiration, and when the Colors of Night prompt comes up, drop in the aspected pigment instead of funds. You'll end up with a boatload of Notoriety and Mystique, no Funds, and a painting that has the Tool aspect along with level 8 in the lore which you used for the Inspiration and Pigment. Just the painting by itself in the Trappings slot will suffice to level your Believers to Disciples, and since it's a Tool rather than an Ingredient, it's reusable.
I've found the Spoiler to be a slightly easier way to raise up Disciples than trying to Study or find level 8 lore fragments, but it does depend on what you find on Expeditions.
 
This is one of the games where learning how to play IS the game isn't it? Which is appropriate given the thematics.

Overall I read the negative steam reviews (as I usually do) and the complaints were about a monotonous gameplay loop and a tedious disorganized UI. The latter might get fixed, but the former troubles me. They also complained about the game being confusing, but as noted before, its a puzzle game where 'figuring out the mechanics' is very much part of the puzzle so that's more ok.
 
firefossil said:
This is one of the games where learning how to play IS the game isn't it? Which is appropriate given the thematics.

Overall I read the negative steam reviews (as I usually do) and the complaints were about a monotonous gameplay loop and a tedious disorganized UI. The latter might get fixed, but the former troubles me. They also complained about the game being confusing, but as noted before, its a puzzle game where 'figuring out the mechanics' is very much part of the puzzle so that's more ok.
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It's a polarizing game, and no mistake; you either love it or hate it. I can see where the criticism is coming from, and completely agree about the UI needing work, but I don't personally find the gameplay loop monotonous, though I can see how people who haven't been willing to experiment and take risks would find it so.
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
My experience with the game play loop is that it was murdering my time with "Just one more cycle".

I haven't quite figured out so far how to level painting, though?
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OK, levelling Painting is going to require Glimmerings. Two Glimmerings to get the skill, four to get the second level, and six to get the third and max level.

Studying Passion will always get you Glimmering, but due to the expiration timers, you can have at most 2 Glimmering at a time from Study. Working Passion by itself has a chance to earn Glimmering, but it's not guaranteed.

Once you've got the basic Painting skill, though, using Passion in the Art or Bread? slot will increase the chance of earning Glimmerings; I think two is the maximum at the basic level.

When you turn in a commission to a patron, you have a 50/50 chance of getting a Glimmering (if you don't, you'll get Erudition instead.

Finally, I believe Dreaming certain Ways in the Mansus can get you Glimmerings, but it's at most 1 chance in 3 for any attempt, with a risk of pulling Dread or Fascination.
 
Death_Sheep said:
OK, levelling Painting is going to require Glimmerings. Two Glimmerings to get the skill, four to get the second level, and six to get the third and max level.

Studying Passion will always get you Glimmering, but due to the expiration timers, you can have at most 2 Glimmering at a time from Study. Working Passion by itself has a chance to earn Glimmering, but it's not guaranteed.

Once you've got the basic Painting skill, though, using Passion in the Art or Bread? slot will increase the chance of earning Glimmerings; I think two is the maximum at the basic level.

When you turn in a commission to a patron, you have a 50/50 chance of getting a Glimmering (if you don't, you'll get Erudition instead.

Finally, I believe Dreaming certain Ways in the Mansus can get you Glimmerings, but it's at most 1 chance in 3 for any attempt, with a risk of pulling Dread or Fascination.
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Exploring the Street in Moonlight can get you Glimmering too.

Death_Sheep said:
Hadn't noticed that before.

In my current playthrough, I'm desperately trying to find something or someone that can teach me Vak and Mandaic. I know you can learn Phrygian and Fucine from summoned beings; is that the case for the other very dead languages?
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Nothing Summoned teaches you Vak. You can learn it from a bowl you find on an expedition or in one of the dreams beyond the Pheasant Door
 
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Death_Sheep said:
I've found the Spoiler to be a slightly easier way to raise up Disciples than trying to Study or find level 8 lore fragments, but it does depend on what you find on Expeditions.
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You can also use a summon in the trappings slot, won't consume the summon, it's a bit more reliable that getting the right pigments or tool, but much faster than finding lv 8 lore
 
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