Please read these four selections from Cultist Simulator. After you read them, there will be a short quiz....
This was a lie; there was no quiz. Click-baited by the man again…
If you swap ‘smile’ for ‘rictus’ and ‘face’ for ‘visage’ it’s not so bad.
That reminds me of the problem I ran into with Fallen London. When you start, it’s a delightful process of uncovering a wild and weird world full of things to poke at and accomplish. And then as you progress, you start to spend more and more time just making numbers go up in the hope that this might unlock some nugget of story somewhere. But does it?
I’m an Exceptional Person, in Fallen London. My stats are well over a hundred in every category. I’ve done every major storyline I can find. I know for a fact there are more out there, but I have no idea what they are or where or how I would begin them. Unless I’ve missed something important about governing a colony or the execrable cyclical grind of Polythreme, of course. Nor could I ask for spoilers, because I don’t know what to ask for. And I have no interest in going back to the site over and over for months to spend my 20 actions on the same repeated grinds and hoping something emerges.
I’m well shy of hitting that point with Cultist Simulator, thankfully, and equally thankfully Cultist Simulator at least doesn’t have the freaking energy mechanic that Fallen London does. But I suspect it’s coming sooner or later.
I absolutely concurr. This really feels like the game Echo Bazaar/Fallen London could have been without that weird model. It’s still flawed, but it is much more enjoyable. I also love how atmospheric the whole experience is, in opposition to a browser’s window.
Well, my point was that Fallen London hits a point where the path to fresh content is simply too obscure to keep playing, and I can already see the road to hitting that sort of wall in Cultist Simulator.
I think I experienced this issue quite early in Fallen London. Distillating content was part of their flawed model. I guess you can get stuck in Cultist Simulator in some ways (I know I have been, because of what I attribute to a stupid iconography oversight on their part). The problem of cultist simulator is that when starting over, you go through the motions. But at least you get familiar with what you are looking for, and you aren’t asked to collect 100 pieces of stuff over and over — although the RNG element seems strangely as present as in Fallen London. I think while the game may be frustrating in some aspect, I am confident it won’t be to the levels of the browser ancestry. The path to new content may be a bit “grindy”, but I am not sure it may ever be really obscure.
Well, time will tell!
Tom skipped the best piece of writing in the game:
St Agnes Hospital
They did good work here, once. Certainly there were a few too many amputations, but then there are individuals one would prefer not to walk the city streets.
– H.P. Dadcraft
But seriously, I am loving this game. I spent an absolutely magical first night with it, even if now the grind is starting to set in.
I hit the wall. It took me 15 hours to see what the final step is to beat the game, but to get there from here might take another 10 hours. I’ve long since seen every mechanic the game has to offer, so I anticipate a huge slog. I think I’ll give up. That’s just too much time spent shuffling around the same cards and re-reading the same entries and getting the same microscopic incremental progress.
You can’t see it at first glance, but multiple aspects of the game seem unfinished. It this stealth Early Access?
For those wondering about the “very recent and very popular RPG that features a lot of text, and a lot of gameplay, and a lot of appeal for people who might read fantasy novels”, it’s Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. ;)
It was in Early Access (or at least a backer beta, I’m not sure if it was formally Early Access or not) for some time before this release.
Yeah. My point is that some parts of it still seem to be early-accessy.
OK, so this game is like Fallen London but with, you know, visuals? This is the most interesting thing I’ve yet to hear about the game.
Oh. So like Sunless Sea. I guess that’s what I should have expected.
I’m 7 hours in and I’m still making progress and enjoying it, but I’m going to start backing up my saved games. There’s no way I’m going to accept my guy dying and start over again. The gameplay is just not interesting to replay once you know how it works.
No, unless by “visuals” you mean “at least the icons are bigger”.
Oh I definitely recommend making a backup of your save file. I’ve never seen a game this coy about it. The game has a “one-save-file-no-backsies” system, but a button in the settings conveniently opens a window right where the save file is located.
Plus, the only pinned discussion by the dev on the steam boards states how simple it is to hack your plain text save file. Funny.
I failed the quiz miserably because I have the artistic appreciation capacity of a 3rd grader. You now have me worried about my ability to enjoy the game :(
The two things going through my head when I booted up Pillars 2 were 1) Egad, this writing is terrible, and 2) Uh, I have no idea what’s going on so I should probably go back and play Pillars 1 instead.
-Tom
They are calling it a “living game,” which I think some might interpret as Ever-Early-Access, I suppose.
They’ve announced that they’re going to sell .txt files of various locations that aren’t written yet but you can pledge money for their development.
From the Steam page:
I wonder what price they are going to put to the DLC, if they are going to alternate free dlc with paid dlc, etc.