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[lemon10]

For the most part I maintain the Cultist Simulator is a great game. However aside from all the smaller flaws it has a single fundamental problem drags it down a huge amount: the game is a terrible rougelike. Pretty much the most important thing for rougelike is randomness and different paths.

DCSS/TOME 4, and pretty much all traditional rougelikes? You pick a different class/race which all fundamentally change the game, and tacked onto that you get different items that also change gameplay pretty substantially.
FTL/Binding of Issac/Slay the spire/Pretty much any non-traditional rougelike thats really any good? The same is also true. There is always some mechanism to add a substantial amount of differences between games to give a great degree of difference and thus replayability.

Cultist simulator has functionally none of that. You will always get the same cultists. Over the course of the game you will always get the same lore even if it takes a while. You will always get all the same locations. And once you have discovered a way to do something it will always be the exact same in the next game.

Now, there are small differences between games. You might have a different cult, you might pick a different passion, you will get different artifacts and different lore levels (eg. one game you get lantern high early, another you get high grail early). But those are all pretty much cosmetic differences that have fairly minor differences to your actual gameplay.

If there was a great deal more variability between games it would work. If there was no permadeath (eg. there are massive penalties for the current lose conditions, but it didn't actually end the game) it would work. If there was less grinding or a way to automate stuff it would work. But with all three the game gets stale after what amounts to a single major playthrough and getting to the end after a couple of deaths fairly far into it is kind of just a grind.
And honestly, there is nothing wrong with what amounts to a puzzle and lore game just being good for a single playthrough or like 20 hours, but the fact that you have to just do the same thing over and over thanks to the permadeath does feel pretty bad.

My opinion on the game has done almost a complete 180 over the past couple days.  When you first start the mystique and the interesting lore draw you in, but once you've seen it you've seen it.  There's nothing else to the game.

Yup, basically. I won a Power victory yesterday, and it was sort of underwhelming the way I suddenly realized that I was holding onto all the pieces I needed to win. It turns out I had seen basically everything on a previous run, and now that I understood the mechanics better it was just a matter of grinding things out. I had previously thought that the midgame was a drag, but had hoped the endgame would be more interesting. Well, it turns out there is no end game content, just a long and tedious midgame. I think I got everything I needed to win just from the level 6 expeditions.

Yeah, I'm fairly sure that in the game I just lost I either had or could easily get everything I needed to win if I had only figured out what to do.
Now I'm about the same stage expedition wise but all my lore is about two levels lower across the board for some reason.

[Warmist]

<...>

Nicely put. Totally agree with it.

I think I'll play it again after a LOOONG time when it will feel new again or new content is added.

[lemon10]

Finally won. I indeed had literally everything I needed in my previous game (somehow about two tiers of expeditions earlier then I did in this game) if I had just pushed at it.
I do agree that it doesn't really feel like there is true endgame content just a very long midgame, which does indeed kind of suck.

I will note that I edited my save file this game to give myself infinite money (because grinding work is a pain in the ass) and that I quit then reloaded to avoid two crisis (both fascination) that I only noticed at literally the last second when it was too late to do anything about them. Because seriously, I was not going to go through another ~10 hours of the exact same thing just because I wasn't paying perfect attention to the random crisis spawns.

Like Warmist, this will be it for me for this game for a long time.

[ZeroGravitas]

<...>

Nicely put. Totally agree with it.

I think I'll play it again after a LOOONG time when it will feel new again or new content is added.

it's apparently sold better than expected so there is some DLC in the works

[nenjin]

The DLC reads like they'll be new legacies. Which is basically a different starting intro and some stats and stuff. But maybe I'm wrong, or maybe there will be more to it than that.

[Majestic7]

I completely agree with lemon10.

In addition, I think the UI is a mess and it makes the game unnecessarily harder. Basically all the cards going all over the table make a mess. Even if you organize them by yourself, they sometimes jump in other places. Plus new cards always slap in random spots. This makes things hard to understand at times. Plus the count-downs sometimes go at edges where you don't notice them in time.

It is just very annoying that the hardest battle in the game is against the user interface. That is like a step back into the 1990s game design.

Mind you, I still like the game, I'm just frustrated because it could be so much better.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I completely agree with lemon10.

In addition, I think the UI is a mess and it makes the game unnecessarily harder. Basically all the cards going all over the table make a mess. Even if you organize them by yourself, they sometimes jump in other places. Plus new cards always slap in random spots. This makes things hard to understand at times. Plus the count-downs sometimes go at edges where you don't notice them in time.

It is just very annoying that the hardest battle in the game is against the user interface. That is like a step back into the 1990s game design.

Mind you, I still like the game, I'm just frustrated because it could be so much better.

I almost feel like the UI is a conscious choice, at some points it creates a sense of frantic panic and anxiety, especially involving countdowns that go on around the edges of your sight, and I compulsively organize and re-organize it.

It adds to the overall deranged cultist experience. It is a bit like the purposefully shoddy controls in Resident Evil 1 and 2 (not sure about the rest of the series), it wants you to panic a little while struggling to control everything. Which I guess would make it a bit like 90s game design, but some people are into that.

[lemon10]

I completely agree with lemon10.

In addition, I think the UI is a mess and it makes the game unnecessarily harder. Basically all the cards going all over the table make a mess. Even if you organize them by yourself, they sometimes jump in other places. Plus new cards always slap in random spots. This makes things hard to understand at times. Plus the count-downs sometimes go at edges where you don't notice them in time.

It is just very annoying that the hardest battle in the game is against the user interface. That is like a step back into the 1990s game design.

Mind you, I still like the game, I'm just frustrated because it could be so much better.

New count downs (verbs) seem to either A) Try to go where they were last time, and if this doesn't work B) next to another verb in open space. I *think* it tries to use the most recently spawned one verb, but it might just go to the most clear one.

That means that you *never* want to have *any* verb near to the edge or off the screen since that means that there is a good chance that it will just spawn a bunch of stuff off the screen where you don't see it and then you die of despair 10 minutes later.

Additionally you always want to leave the middle open for cards to spawn randomly in so that it doesn't mess up any of your properly set up cards.
Personally I left a big middle space open for the card spawns, and I used the lower middle and absolute top of the screen for new verb spawns.

[Cruxador]

Personally, I just let my desk be messy.

As for the game itself, yeah, I'm disappointed that the various lores and cults are all so similar to each other in how you play and interact with them. Seems like the only bits that are really different from one game to another are numbers and colors. Legacies are different, but they're only relevant in the early game, there needs to be something that's different for the different playthroughs in the midgame and the lategame too.

[E. Albright]

Legacies are different, but they're only relevant in the early game, there needs to be something that's different for the different playthroughs in the midgame and the lategame too.

Welcome to every Alexis Kennedy game ever.

[nenjin]

Yeah, I can't really claim to be disappointed when I knew what I was getting in to. It's a good AK game. But it's grindy in a way that even Sunless Sea is not. Maintaining funds with work is a serious drag, and w/o that I think the overall game would be much shorter than it already is.

[lemon10]

Yeah, I can't really claim to be disappointed when I knew what I was getting in to. It's a good AK game. But it's grindy in a way that even Sunless Sea is not. Maintaining funds with work is a serious drag, and w/o that I think the overall game would be much shorter than it already is.

On my last playthrough I just edited the savefile for 999 funds after I passed early game (aka, the point where work was a real limiting factor and money was an actual concern). Not having to worry about it at all makes the game quite a bit more enjoyable without actually decreasing the challenge in any real way besides making the game go faster.

Also interface tip to doing repeat actions faster:
Step 1: Grab the card you want to use again. Do not let go of it.
Step 2: Press C on your keyboard to collect all the other cards and finish the task.
Step 3: The card now appears to be underneath the verb window. Drag it over to the now open card slot (note that as it is behind the window the card appears to disappear) and drop it there.
Step 4: Congratulations, you just saved a couple of seconds on repeating the action thanks to not having to drag it all the way over from its position on the other side of the screen. Over the course of the entire game this adds up to a very significant amount of time and just as importantly a lot less card dragging. On single card actions its saves a particularly large amount of time.
Note that if you let go of the card anywhere on the window after pressing C besides the card slot the card will then disappear from the board, and you have to exit then restart the game. Its still worth it in time costs though.

Oh, and the bird/worm toggle? Apparently it does something or allows you to do something. Somehow. What it actually is isn't on the internet (although its heavily implied on the author's twitter that 75 or so people have found out), but it does something.

[Cruxador]

Legacies are different, but they're only relevant in the early game, there needs to be something that's different for the different playthroughs in the midgame and the lategame too.

Welcome to every Alexis Kennedy game ever.

Sunless Sea has lots of different islands with their own storyline, which is better than any equivalent in Cultist Simulator. I was hoping that, being unburdened by the constraints of game mechanics or the need for any real assets, the narrative portion of the game could be more diverse, not less.

Yeah, I can't really claim to be disappointed when I knew what I was getting in to. It's a good AK game. But it's grindy in a way that even Sunless Sea is not. Maintaining funds with work is a serious drag, and w/o that I think the overall game would be much shorter than it already is.

I don't really see how it shortens the game much. It becomes irrelevant, sure, but it doesn't take that much time to either drag your position at the institute or your art skill and some other things to the work verb. And I haven't encountered a situation were liquidity issues slowed my acquisition of new lore past the midgame, it's always been more held up by the sheer number of things that need to go through Study than anything else.

[nenjin]

More I was meaning it's a compulsory act that ties up a fairly important slot. Half of my juggling is around the job verb. Without it it'd be one less spinning plate to distract and you and cause you to miss one of the other important failure conditions.

[Majestic7]

Yeah I get it that the UI is no accident, but what I'm saying is that it is a bad design. I get it that conveys a message, for example, how easy it is to forget about having a job you need to attend on a regular basis when you are going crazy with the occult. I just think that using a messy UI to convey that message is a bad user experience that needlessly frustrates the players. I'm fine with obscure mechanics and story and lack of holding your hand, but bad UI just annoys me. It starts to feel too much like work. Which is a reason I'm annoyed by grinding too.