Cultist Simulator - Manage your Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Alexis Kennedy, formerly of Failbetter Games, now working for BioWare, has a side project.

Cutlist Simulator.

[quote]
CULTIST SIMULATOR IS A SINGLE-PLAYER DIGITAL BOARD GAME OF MYSTERY, EXPERIMENTATION AND SELF-DESTRUCTION FROM ALEXIS KENNEDY (THAT’S ME!), THE INSTIGATOR OF FALLEN LONDON, SUNLESS SEA AND DRAGON AGE: THE LAST COURT. Find abominable rites in dreams. Craft tools and summon spirits. Indoctrinate innocents. Choose between sane and insane victory conditions. Become the herald of a new age

THE WOOD GROWS AROUND THE WALLS OF THE MANSUS. AS ANY STUDENT OF THE HISTORIES KNOWS, THE MANSUS HAS NO WALLS.[/quote]

There’s a free alpha version available here.

Fnord.

I tried that alpha, but it felt a bit like Doodle God, as in I had no real idea idea of what to do past a certain point, but was trying blindly to mix elements, hoping to see the “start” button appear.
Also not a fan of having non-stop time pressure in a (supposedly) text game.

1.0 or GTFO.

-Tom

P.S. So excited…

Oh… that Alexis Kennedy. Okay, downloaded it. Confused. But looking forward to it nonetheless.

Nice! I was afraid he would get busy with other things and not follow up on this. The alpha looked very promising to me. The writing is like Fallen London but there is actually some gameplay to keep you on your toes.

In. So in.

…and the kickstarter is live.

…and the Kickstarter is funded!

Looking quite good.

So, uh, a guess a pre-release dev build is close enough to 1.0?

I’m loving this. I recommend against watching streams of later gameplay, since a lot of the game is learning the game. Here’s my pretty much spoiler-free stream.

-Tom

Ok the stream sold me. Going in!

rats, its not early access, I have to wait. Sad trombone.

Yeah, I’m sold on this one too. Looks really unusual.

They didn’t put any exclusive DLC in the kickstarter, I hope?

IIRC the kickstarter edition gets all the dlc for free.

Ah, that’s fine.

EDIT: watched a little bit of the stream. Seems like they found a more interesting way to manage things like “passion” and “reason”. Fallen London and Sunless Sea had lots of things like “burning insights” to manage, but they behaved like any old item, and in the most godawfully unintuitive inventory system to boot. I’m not sure they’ll get it right, but it seems promising so far. I don’t want to watch too much of the videos on the game, though.

I kind of feel bad for this game:

It’s got a very different tone (100% comedy), and not much gameplay to it. You make decisions, stats change because reasons, and then you win or lose after six turns. It just made me want to get back to Cultist Simulator.

-Tom

Aaah, yeah saw that too, but it’s one of those story games where you pick a location, read a little story and make one of two choices and get a stat boost of some kind for the final test, like Monster Prom, Vlad the Impaler and The Yawg.

Doesn’t it feel like exhibit 74 in the case of “Lovecraft is overused”? It feels worse when the theme is played only for laughs, which wasn’t entirely the case for Failbetter games.

I would characterize it more as “Lovecraft is poorly used”. :)

By the way, based on stuff that happened to me last night in Cultist Simulator, I want to stress again that anyone interested in playing shouldn’t watch streaming of anything that happens beyond the first, say, thirty minutes or so.

-Tom

I think you’re the only streamer in the history of Youtube/Twitch that has advised fans not to watch for their own good. Thanks for the warning!