I’m on 10.13.4, so maybe something to do with current MacOS ?
Diego
Unfortunately this isn’t true.
Specifically, you can use a follower or hireling or enemy on the Talk verb, and then it will let you use cards as the subject that result in the timer ticking down and it saying “Nothing, then” and dumping all the involved cards back out to no purpose. And indeed most of the cards I’ve tried to use as a subject do this.
It also does things like highlight the Skill cards when you check what can be used with the Dream verb and then not actually let you do anything when you try using them. But I assume that sort of thing is an unintentional thing based on those cards sharing tags of cards that are eligible, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s fixed soon. The “Nothing, then” result from talking seems more intentional and I don’t understand why it’s in the game.
I am on 10.13.4 as well and will probably pick it up Friday night so I will let you know. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was High Sierra thing though.
I’m usually a cheapskate, so it’s rare for me to get a game the minute it comes out. Exciting!
So, first impressions. So far, it seems like they’ve achieved exactly what they did with Fallen London and Sunless Sea: a game with compelling prose that tries its best to discourage you from actually reading it. The game is a blur of ticking timers you have to stop constantly to get a bearing on what’s going on and y’know, read the text. As said above, the font size is kind of a hindrance too. Once again, the game is a mess of qualities or perks or whatever, sometimes multiple layers deep, all with byzantine names like “Glimmering”, “Edge” or “Aspect: the Winter”. One action had a dozen of these “qualities” attached, none of which made any sense to me. Finding what card goes in what slot is not a simple task either, even with the game’s help. The mystical aspect so far is written like a bunch of random word salads and seems to have little bearing on what would attract real people to a cult.
I still kinda like it. Those timers have a hypnotic quality to them and you’re never more than 30 seconds from a new card/event. But I have a feeling the game will eventually get so bogged down in menial tasks (perhaps on future playthroughs) that a point will come where I’ll never even have the courage to start it up again, much like Sunless Sea. It’ll be nice for a while, though.
It’s not “they”, in this case. Alexis Kennedy worked on (and indeed was primary writer and conceiver of, as far as I know,) Fallen London and Sunless Sea. But he then left Failbetter and this is his debut game with the new team he put together.
My understanding, concerning the “talk” command, is that the options are there but might not be usable depending of who you are talking to: in my experience, when you can expect a results, the text of the “mission” (don’t know how to call it) box changed from the default one, telling you what odds are of something to happen. It is probably a limitation of the way things are implemented, but after some initial errands I find that this all grows on me. I’d even relate the interface to Deep Sixed, in how you get familiar with your space and what to expect from some actions.
Well, yeah, if you continue to do something that the game clearly tells you had no purpose, nothing is going to continue to happen. When you put a valid card in that slot that will cause something to happen, the game will tell you. It’s an open slot on a timer for a reason, and it lets you put a variety of cards in there for a reason. I can spoil those reasons for you if you want, but it’s not trying to trick you into blind trial and error. That’s my point.
I agree with this part. :) It will be true of a lot of Cultist Simulator until a certain point.
My suggestion is to pay more attention to the aspects. Slots accept certain aspects. That’s just the game’s vocabulary. It’s not a bug.
-Tom
This is good to know. I just timed out my first run as the Inspector because I was trying different talk options and didn’t get anywhere productive before my dread filled up.
Just to be clear, is the time management people are talking about here real-world time or in-game time (i.e. a certain number of turns/actions)?
There are timers associated with certain cards and actions, that go on in real time (typically 30s-2m), but you can pause at will.
The real time makes sense to limit the player in certain ways I’ll let you discover. It’s not the most elegant system and can look confusing at first, but you quickly get the hang of it.
It is not meant to put pressure on you in anyway, time-wise. (as far as I can tell)
I do kind of wish it was explicitly turn based, though. Maybe it being fully real time will make more sense when I get further into the game, but it just seems to be adding unnecessary stress at this point (“Oh crap I forgot to pause again”, “Must ensure to pause during the two second window between this tile becoming available and this card expiring”).
There may be some intent in the design. As in, you get carried away into your… studies and oh oops, you forgot about your daytime job. That is quite a clever way to drag the player into the characters’ world, actually!
I disagree that it’s clear about telling you that these things will be unproductive - it may be clear in contrast to what happens if you use a card that does make something happen, but that doesn’t help if you haven’t found anything of that sort. I also don’t like that you have to commit to tying up the verb and the initiating card before you can tell if you have anything that will get you anywhere. Which I think explicitly forces blind trial and error.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat game, I just don’t think it’s quite as polished as you are making out.
An excellent update on Mac crashing:
I emailed support with the crash logs and sample save file a few hours ago and just got A DIRECT RESPONSE from Alexis saying he’s fixed it and updated the build on GOG (not sure if updated on Steam since I didn’t buy it that way). What crazy GREAT support!
Going to download and try again when get home later tonight.
Diego
On my second life. There’s a choice of “career” when you start again. Decided to be a police inspector. Had to choose a name for my cultist. Choice was obvious:
Inspector Cthulouseau
4.5 hours played. First impression: Hey this game is cool.
Second impression: it’s very cool!
The game has a really good, novel idea, and it explores it with a good amount of detail, while still being vague and playing with mystery. The writing is great and ties perfectly with the card aspect of the game, I believe this style of writing fits perfectly for this style of ‘micro fiction’ (I hate saying ‘tweet-sized fiction’!).
You can make up your own cult, send your followers to investigate around the city, avoid suspicion and trying to not be discovered, doing rituals, making expeditions to recover mysterious, losing your sanity studying forbidden books, going to forbidden places, and trying to ‘ascend’ in different ways.
Although it has some less positive parts: It has a cheap price because it has, in fact, a limited value. I’m starting already to see mostly repeated lore texts and events already. And to be honest, this kind of game is great when it’s an unknown, when you can enjoy that aura of mystery, awe and wonder, when the game can surprise you, it delights you with cool lore tidbits, and you aren’t sure of how much freedom and possibilities there are in the game. It will shine in that first time.
I suspect in a second game run already the game will feel notably less good, with most of the fiction tidbits not being new, with the possibilities and limits of your actions being already known and the mechanics of the game appearing bare to the player who already know how things really work. I suspect it won’t have a high replay value.
Something I would love it’s if they make the game moddable, so people can just plug-in new items, events, characters, jobs, etc. It would really expand it.
Now, for a game that mechanically speaking is simply about moving and clicking some cards/events/token on screen, and that’s it, it’s pretty damn mediocre. The UI is full of small (and big) flaws. Some examples:
-You can combine item A with item B in slot X, but the game doesn’t recognize combining item B with item A (in the same slot). I discovered this trying to translate a Latin book.
-The game has a function to highlight what cards are valid for a slot. Cool, otherwise the truth is, the game would be pretty damn bothersome, trying blindly what cards can go every time a new slot appears.
Except you have to click the slot instead of just hovering the slot, the tooltip doesn’t disappear when you move over to another thing, and even more importantly, it fails sometimes because it only checks the main ‘filter’ for that slot, the primary type of card, while in reality some slots have two or three conditions that has to be fulfilled to activate the slot. it’s confusing because the player at first learns the highlight signals what cards are valid for a slot… and then discover that sometimes the highlight lies. It will let you drag the card to a slot (unlike the ‘invalid’ cards for the slot) but the action can’t be activated.
-There is a fair bit of trial and error. Some actions don’t produce any result, even if intuitively I think they should. If I choose to talk with a detective, it’s because I was trying to prove I’m a ‘normal’ innocent person, trying to look inconspicuous. If I talk with a believer about a sacred grail item, I was trying to make then investigate them, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. This ties up with the previous point, because the game UI lets you do this actions, even if there is already a mechanism that allow some actions and disallows the ‘invalid ones’.
-A small detail, but the game spawn some new events almost outside of what the player sees in a given moment, just in the screen edges, despite having free space available, obligating the player to scroll.
-The game hints also can be deceiving. It will say you can combine two glimmerings to gain a passion, for example, but that only works I believe for the first passion point. It should deactivate messages like that once they are not valid for you.
-While I like the the idea of having freedom to place the cards and items on the table as you choose, it also would have been a good idea to have more options like:
- auto sort. 2. snap to grid. 3. fixed categories (people, places, items, feelings, attributes, etc, so the cards go to the appropriate place. In the end I organized my own table like that, but I have to move manually every new cards that spawns to the right ‘categories’. A pain in the ass. Believe me, after a few hours, you can have a mess of three dozen cards on screen.
-There is a small legibility issue with the text that appear on top of the screen, if you move the floating window up and down, you will notice the top of the screen has some kind of darker shade or layer. Moody, I guess, but depending of your eyesight, light on your room, screen size, etc, you will have to move the dialog window to a lower position to read it more clearly.
-When a card disappears, it should show in a text log in a corner (or in any other way) what card was. There is nothing more aggravating than noticing something disappeared from the screen (because there is an animation) but not knowing what exactly disappeared.
Oh man. That would be great. I can just imagine the Dragonball Z Cthulhu Babylon 5 Thundercats lore now.
I see one reason for why actions that don’t accomplish anything exist. When a card is the subject of an action, it’s timer doesn’t run off. So you can extend the life of some cards by talking to someone about them, even if the action doesn’t seem to do anything.
Doesn’t explain why you can talk to someone about the card without timers that just result in “never mind”.