Cultist Simulator

VentureBeat / Gamesbeat (90 out of 100)

That’s the real beauty of Weather Factor’s debut title — the world feels so large and full of possibilities, even though everything is mainly told through small snippets of text. It’s filled with poetry, like descriptions of a vial of Greydawn Oil that’s “the precise color of the hours when one cannot sleep,” and it makes you want to explore and unravel its mysteries. And it makes you work for it, reading between the lines and imagining a realm unseen. Though I have some minor quibbles about the game’s interface, I find myself returning to its world again and again.

PC Gamer (85 out of 100)

A dark, engrossing, and challenging narrative card and crafting game.

HonestGamers (Staff reviews only) ( )

Your journey grinds on, plagued with the same beginnings, but unique in their dreadful outcomes. Your failures, both mundane and fantastical, entwine into awful knowledge you might have been happier having never known. Slowly, you have learnt a terrible balancing act; you know how to keep yourself fed and clothed, you’ve learnt how to foster a false bubble of normality so the foolish outside world thinks of you as nothing but ordinary. But you also know which hands to shake, which smiles to return, which abandoned buildings to infest. Little by little, you’re that much closer to kicking at the pillars of the universe. You may not be too pleased with what that can often dredge up.

GameCrate (7.75 out of 10)

Cultist Simulator certainly isn’t for everyone, but if you’re a strategy fan who enjoys being immersed in dark Lovecraftian-style lore while having to carefully manage an obtuse gameplay system that isn’t afraid to toss you into the proverbial deep end, there’s also a lot of potential for players who relish a good challenge. In much the same way as similarly structured games like Sunless Seas or even the board game Arkham Horror, players who don’t mind failing repeatedly and who appreciate the merits of learning from those failures will thrive in Cultist Simulator’s minimal yet highly replayable dark fantasy format.

Games TM (7 out of 10)

The wonderfully slow peeling back of the game's layers, the rich narrative, the scope for experimentation and the risk that comes with your every unorthodox endeavour makes this a card game that's worth getting dealt into.

COGConnected / Canadian Online Gamers Network (67 out of 100)

However, the quality of Cultist Simulator‘s writing and intriguing setting coupled with its arduous gameplay made me wish I was reading a surrealist novel rather than grasping at some sort of narrative with all these disparate cards. While I can appreciate the game’s own attempt at experimentation with its indefinite gameplay, tabletop format, and fragmented story, I could not find much enjoyment in constantly wondering what I was doing and asking myself why I was still playing.

The Digital Fix (5 out of 10)

With so little gameplay and almost no visual flair, the combination of broadly described ideas and impetus on the player to find their own story just don't come together. It's like the bare bones of a game without any of the meat.

The Indie Game Website N/A

Cultist Simulator is about a world out to get you at every turn through illness, madness, despair, and sacrificial rituals. It’s just a shame the game seems to kill your fun too early.