Cultist Simulator

Cultist Simulator opens with almost nothing: a table, a handful of unlabelled cards, and a job you hate. From there, founder Alexis Kennedy's design goal was explicit — cosmic horror is supposed to feel unknowable, so the game itself gives you close to no explanation of its own systems, forcing you to drag cards onto slots, watch timers tick down, and work out what "Fascination" or "Dread" or "the Bright Door" actually do through trial, error and, for most players, an open wiki tab. It's a genuinely unusual design choice for a commercial game, and eight years on it's still the single thing every review, positive or negative, is really about.

The writing almost nobody disputes

Start with what's not in question. Cultist Simulator's prose — dense, allusive, closer to weird fiction than typical game text — draws consistently strong praise across the review sample, including from reviewers who otherwise recommend against buying the game. "It's a good worldbuilding exercise and might be a good book," reads one representative negative review, and that's a common shape: real admiration for the writing sitting right next to real frustration with everything wrapped around it. One reviewer, only half joking, says they "would read shopping lists written by Alexis Kennedy." The Lovecraftian 1920s setting, the sense of dread the game builds around ordinary domestic objects turning sinister, and the music all draw similar consistent praise. Whatever else divides the review sample, the game's atmosphere and prose aren't really part of the argument.

Confusion as design, and where it stops working

The argument is almost entirely about the systems underneath that writing. Kennedy's deliberate choice to withhold explanation is exactly the thing a large share of the negative sample singles out as the game's core problem — not as an aesthetic complaint, but a practical one: reviewers report spending hours without a clear sense of what they're meant to be doing, needing external wikis to make basic progress, and dying repeatedly to mechanics they had no way to anticipate. "I literally have no idea on how this game works," reads one review; "cards and icons popping up like poisonous mushrooms, no clear indication of what does what." Crucially, this isn't a complaint from players unwilling to engage with a learning curve — several explicitly say they love steep learning curves in other games and still bounced off this one, distinguishing "hard to learn" from "designed to withhold information past the point of being fun to discover." Set against that, a real number of other reviewers describe exactly the opposite experience: the moment things click, five or ten hours in, as one of the most satisfying "aha" feelings in any game they've played. This is the clearest, most consistent split in the whole review sample, and it doesn't obviously correlate with anything predictable about the reviewer — it reads as a genuine, roughly even divide in what kind of confusion different players find rewarding versus simply frustrating.

Timers, RNG, and losing forty hours to one card

A second, related complaint concerns pacing and randomness. Runs can stretch to 40 real hours, and several specific mechanics — the "expedition" system above all — are described by a meaningful number of reviewers as governed more by chance than by skill or preparation, meaning a well-planned run can still fail for reasons the player couldn't have controlled for. Combined with punishing failure states and a Dread/Contentment cycle several reviewers call "annoying" busywork rather than tense management, this is where "punishing on purpose" tips over into "wastes your time" for a meaningful share of the sample — distinct from, but compounding, the opacity complaint above.

A factor some buyers weigh separately

Worth noting plainly, since a number of reviewers raise it unprompted: in 2019, Weather Factory co-founder Alexis Kennedy was publicly accused by two former colleagues at his previous studio, Failbetter Games, of crossing professional boundaries in relationships with junior colleagues. Kennedy denied the allegations; Failbetter distanced itself from him publicly at the time, and the two parties settled a related legal dispute in 2023. It's a genuinely separate question from the game's quality, and this review scores the game rather than the studio, but it's the kind of documented, reported context — not a fringe rumour — that a number of reviewers say they factor into a purchase decision, and readers deciding whether to support Weather Factory directly may want to weigh it for themselves.

A studio that heard it

The clearest evidence that these complaints reflect something real rather than a mismatch between the game and the wrong audience is what Weather Factory did next. The studio's 2023 successor, Book of Hours, was explicitly designed to be a gentler, more relaxed experience built on similar card-and-table mechanics but without Cultist Simulator's time pressure and much of its opacity — and it went on to sell more copies with a markedly higher Steam review percentage. That's not proof the original game was wrong to be difficult on purpose; plenty of its fans specifically love that about it. But it is a clear signal from the people who understand the design best that the friction reviewers describe here wasn't accidental, and that softening it measurably widened the audience willing to enjoy what Weather Factory does.

Verdict

7 out of 10. Cultist Simulator is a genuinely distinctive, beautifully written game built around a design philosophy — confusion as an emotional tool, not just a difficulty setting — that works exactly as intended for a real share of its players and simply doesn't for another, almost equally large share. Its Mostly Positive rating, lower than most games covered here, is an honest reflection of that split rather than a sign of broad mediocrity. If dense Lovecraftian writing and figuring out opaque systems entirely on your own sounds appealing rather than exhausting, it's worth the price. If you're unsure, the demo is the right way to find out before committing to a run that might cost you forty hours to a single unlucky card.