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. Kennedy said that a card-based approach helped to make concepts tangible and allowed players to organize the cards as they saw best fit. The use of card-driven narrative systems was already something Kennedy was familiar with through Fallen London. Cultist Simulator represented the studio's first game and an experimental title that they could produce quickly with minimal costs. 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. Failbetter had developed several gothic and Lovecraftian horror story-driven games, including Fallen London. Weather Factory is an independent game studio created by Alexis Kennedy, who previously had founded Failbetter Games. The game ultimately has many different parallel victory and failure conditions, both based on "sane" and "insane" routes that the player's character may uncover. The game takes place in real-time, but the player has the option of pausing the game to review cards and actions, and to place or collect cards from the board. Some cards, often generated by action buttons, also have timers attached, either which they will burn out, or may revert to a different card type. For example, players will eventually get an action button that reflects the passage of their character's time in the game, which will automatically consume wealth cards should the player have no wealth cards when this action's timer completes, they will gain Hunger cards, which leads to a chain of cards and action buttons that can lead to the death of the character. Other action buttons are a detriment to the player's progress. Some of these are beneficial, adding more options that players can do, such as Study, Talk, Explore, or Dream. After the timer the player collects a temporarily exhausted Health card, the job, and cards representing some funds.Īs the game progresses, new action buttons can appear. 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. 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. Player choices involve combining these cards within different "verb" boxes with varying, complex outputs. Cards can represent human and nonhuman NPCs, attributes such as health, passion or reason, language proficiencies, occult books and scraps of lore, rituals, day jobs, influences obtained from dream, obsessions, cities, excavation sites, magical tools and ingredients, currencies, etc. The game's mechanics are presented as a combination of playing cards and timed "verb" boxes/action buttons in which the cards are placed. The player's actions may lead to their creating an illegal cult in pursuit of semi-divinity for themselves or others. Success requires partial familiarization with an intricate "Secret Histories" mythology invented for this game and for connected Weather Factory projects "Book of Hours" (a followup game slated for 2023 release) and tabletop RPG "The Lady Afterwards."Ĭultist 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 game is experienced through an array of playing cards moved about on a tabletop, with cards occasionally pulled from a map representing a transcendent reality accessible in dreams. In a 1920s Lovecraftian horror setting, the player amasses and expends human and nonhuman followers alongside occult texts and tools, in discovering and then pursuing any of a number of wildly differing paths to immortality, while carefully avoiding deaths arising from starvation, despair, madness, or the attention of powerful adversaries. A port for Nintendo Switch was released in February 2021. It was released for Microsoft Windows, macOS and Linux computer systems in May 2018, with mobile versions developed by Playdigious and released in April 2019. Cultist Simulator is a card-based simulation video game developed by indie studio Weather Factory and published by Humble Bundle.
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