This is a repost of something that I accidentally deleted due to phone interface stupidity.  No new content.

So, the short version is:

Does anyone know where to find a full content spoiler for Cultist Simulator?  (Adept’s Build, since that’s what we’ve got right now.)  

Because I would find such a thing very valuable.  Honestly, I would probably offer good money for someone to create one, if it weren’t otherwise going to come into existence.

Which is to say –

Cultist Simulator may be the first video game I’ve ever encountered where “paying for the privilege of not playing the game” seems like an eminently rational thing to do.  

Which is to say –

Alexis Kennedy is a literary genius within his own peculiar, fragmented medium.  We all knew that already, but it’s still true.  

Cultist Simulator in particular is a marvel of atmosphere and flavor.  You’re an occultist, brilliant and awkward and lonely and charismatic and steadily going insane – and, above all, desperate to unlock and understand the hidden mythic truths of the world – and those mythic truths, as you encounter them, (mostly) feel like they grow out of a dream logic that is more real than reality – and the secret gods in their secret house are both terrifyingly inhuman and terrifyingly resonant – and it is all so brilliantly executed. It does the thing so much better than like 99.9% of Cthulhu Mythos works (and pastiches) out there, because the writer understands that you can’t just wave some tentacles around and call it “enlightened madness,” you have to give your audience something that will make him actually feel as though he is both mad and enlightened.  

The text on every card, the narration for every event, honestly feels like a reward when you receive it.  Even the art style, the whole weird elegant minimalistic Evil Art Deco thing, manages to carry a lot of power in these tiny two-color game graphics.

I want to roll around in this game.  I want to have access to all the lore, all the words, all the pictures.  I want to write big elaborate Cultist Simulator fangames.  (I’ve already thought about how the LARP would work.  It would be amazing.)  

There’s just one problem, which is that the actual experience of gameplay is kind of…bad.  

Imagine Doodle God if it were heavily dependent on a random number generator, and if you were playing it under constant resource pressure.  You throw money at the bookshop and hope that you get useful things out of it, but you have no real control.  You throw hints of secret lore into the public square and hope that you get intriguing acquaintances whom you can recruit into your cult, but you have no real control.  There are a lot of mechanics like that.  Meanwhile you’re trying to figure out how to combine scraps of occult lore into spells, and how to put resources into your spells such that they actually do anything, and how to unlock various subsidiary mechanics via obscure combinations of cards and action dials, and it’s all very Use Pie on Cat – you just have to learn the seemingly-random recipes.  All this while you’re constantly maintaining your Do Work to Get Money to Eat to Live routine, while the investigators are slowly eating away at your followers, while sporadic illness eats away at your health.  And it’s not interesting.   It’s fiddly and frustrating and makes you waste a lot of time treading water in order to wring out each new piece of actual content.  

Which is a pretty good, uh, simulation of the cultist experience.  I guess.   So, touche.  But “successfully simulate the un-fun aspects of the thing” is not really good design.