
While Kennedy provided user interface elements to help the player understand where to place cards, much of the strategy and reasoning was something he wanted players to discover for themselves.
#Fascination cultist simulator wiki simulator
Cultist Simulator represented the most minimalist take Kennedy could take with the card-based concept, since cards represented a vast vocabulary of terms within the game. Kennedy said that a card-based approach helped to make concepts tangible and allowed players to organize the cards as they saw best fit. The use of card-driven narrative systems was already something Kennedy was familiar with through Fallen London. Cultist Simulator represented the studio's first game and an experimental title that they could produce quickly with minimal costs. Kennedy split from Failbetter and founded Weather Factory in 2016, looking for a more hands-on role in designing and writing than his management-focused role at Failbetter. Failbetter had developed several gothic and Lovecraftian horror story-driven games, including Fallen London. Weather Factory is an independent game studio created by Alexis Kennedy, who previously had founded Failbetter Games. The game ultimately has many different parallel victory and failure conditions, both based on "sane" and "insane" routes that the player's character may uncover. The game takes place in real-time, but the player has the option of pausing the game to review cards and actions, and to place or collect cards from the board. Some cards, often generated by action buttons, also have timers attached, either which they will burn out, or may revert to a different card type. For example, players will eventually get an action button that reflects the passage of their character's time in the game, which will automatically consume wealth cards should the player have no wealth cards when this action's timer completes, they will gain Hunger cards, which leads to a chain of cards and action buttons that can lead to the death of the character. Other action buttons are a detriment to the player's progress. Some of these are beneficial, adding more options that players can do, such as Study, Talk, Explore, or Dream. The first action button is "Work" placing their career card on this earns the player "Funds" cards.Īs the game progresses, new action buttons can appear. When complete, the player clicks the action, collecting played cards and additional rewards, which may be random or predetermined based on the action. To play, the player drops cards onto slots contained within the action buttons, then starts the action which triggers a timer. With the Aspirant, the default choice of character, the player starts with two cards: a career and one health. Cards represent a range of different elements: persons, attributes like health or reason, emotions, locations, items, wealth, lore, and others. The game's mechanics are presented as a combination of cards and action buttons. Cultist Simulator is a narrative-driven simulation game that has the player take on the role of a citizen in a nameless society where their actions may lead to their creating a cultlike following.
