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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2805 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 18, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Hello! Have you played Cultist Simulator? It is a cool roguelite digital board game about building your own cult. I'm just going to copy the Wikipedia synopsis and link a trailer, because I don't play a lot of board games and don't really know how to describe it.

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. 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.

Success requires partial familiarization with an intricate "Secret Histories" mythology invented for this game

Cultist Simulator Trailer

Anyway, it's been out for about 5 years now (and it's on every major platform, including android and ios, although if you go that route you will want a tablet or ipad, it requires a good chunk of screen real estate) and while it has a steep learning curve, it is very tense, a lot of fun, and very well written - if you haven't played it, check it out.

But before you do that, you should check out the newly released sequel - Book of Hours - which is why I have gathered you all here today. One of the big stumbling blocks people have with Cultist Simulator is the aforementioned tension - you really have to be on the ball when playing it, it moves at a breakneck speed and doesn't hold your hand at all. You basically figure everything out through trial and error and then memorising the numerous elements making up the game, until eventually you know how to handle anything thrown at you.

The Book of Hours takes the Cultist Simulator formula, but eliminates a lot of the non-diegetic tension. In it you play the new librarian of Hush House, a massive, sprawling estate on the English coast in the 30s that was considered a new library of Alexandria before a fire took the life of the last librarian. Your job is to restore it to its former glory by researching and cataloguing the books it contains - and the secrets they contain.

But whereas in CS you had a very strict timetable and the threat of doom constantly breathing down your neck, in BOH things are a lot calmer (what you might call cozy if you wanted me to hate you). You can take as long as you like to figure out what you are doing, and you don't have to worry about other cults coming for you. Which is excellent news, because BOH demands you figure shit out for yourself. It has even less of a tutorial than CS did, but it is also much more tolerant of experimenting - the idea is for you to try everything and learn from the consequences, piecing together how the world works as you go. But while a mistake in CS is usually very costly, if not fatal, a mistake in BOH rarely costs you anything (although money is a bit of an exception).

I have been having a lot of fun playing it these past two days, and I think it would be up a lot of motters' alleys. And if it sounds like it might be up yours, there is no better time to buy it than now, as everyone who purchases it before August 24th gets the Perpetual edition, which includes the base game plus every piece of dlc that gets released in the future. They did the same for CS when that was released, and released 4 dlc packs, so it's probably not a gimmick. Or just a gimmick.

Book of Hours trailer

Steam

GOG

I had a lot of fun with Cultist Simulator. The main thing I liked was how failed runs would continue into a narrative, which made the learning curve become thematic instead of frustrating. My first character find an eldritch book, tries to study it, goes mad (going mad being my first failure state). My second character works at the madhouse and learns some eldritch secrets from my first character, becomes a painter with a cult following (ha), a then goes mad. My third character, a layabout son of a gentryman, learns about the painter from his dying father who was a big fan of his paintings. He investigates and discovers the eldritch book and by this point I had learned enough to prevent him from going mad. He gathered a real cult, stole some artifacts, summoned monsters to attempt to kill plucky detectives, escaped conviction in the courts, and managed to transform himself into an immortal being of twisted flesh. Great success!

The game clearly expects you to fail a few times before you get your feet under you, and that really works. Delving into the secrets that men were not meant to know should be dangerous, with a high casualty rate.

I'll have to check out BOH. Thanks for the recommendation.

I think /u/Southkraut or someone else on this forum said this game is pretentious so now I’m afraid to play it.

Pretense is just the hater's word for atmospheric.

Maybe? That still implies I found something hate-able about those game's attempts at atmosphere. It's not like I dislike atmosphere in general.

I won't spend too much effort trying to explain myself there, but I think what bothers me is that those games touch upon a lot of interesting topics, and use a lot of grandiloquent language to do so, but ultimately treat their ostensible subject matter as a thin layer of aesthetics seemingly meant to make very simple games look deeper than thy are. It feels disappointingly superficial.

If anything, I'd say it's the opposite. The gameplay is a thin layer to make the subject matter feel more earned/discovered. It is supposed to be esoteric, after all, so simply giving you a textbook on the world would be counterproductive to the feeling the author is trying to cultivate. I suppose that you could describe much of the writing as thin. But that isn't because the subject matter is thin. That is because the writing is meant to obliquely reference things you have to cobble together for yourself. Again, this adds to the esoteric atmosphere.

I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't like that sort of thing, but let's be accurate about just what it is. Kennedy does a very good job at what he wants to do, but it certainly isn't for everyone.

So I did.

I've played Cultist Simulator, and it's great. It fills a niche I didn't even know existed.

There are a lot of games (and other stories) that present something mysterious and ask you to find the answers. Cultist Simulator is part of the rare breed that makes you find the questions first. Some of the (gameplay-related) questions I discovered quite late are:

  • Are the different lore types (moth, lantern, forge, etc.) sorted, or unsorted?
  • Do the available rewards from dreaming in Mansus change based on your choices?
  • How about challenges in expeditions?

The friend who recommended CS to me shared a screenshot of his recent playthrough, and he still hasn't asked that first question, and therefore can't take advantage of what the answer reveals.

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