Cultist Simulator cover
Cultist Simulator screenshot
Linux PC Mac Android iOS Steam Gog
Genre: Role-playing (RPG), Simulator, Adventure, Indie, Card & Board Game

Cultist Simulator

The New Form

"The Wood opens around me, but with my new eyes, I see another path now..."



OK, this quote from Cultist Simulator is possibly one of the grimmest things AK ever wrote in the game (the 'Marinette ending' from The Dancer DLC. IYKYK). But I am repurposing it to herald to a good thing and that good thing is some secret Cultist Simulator news! Namely:

Cultist Simulator's coming to console!





Screenshots from the PlayStation dev kit

This is not a drill! Cultist Simulator is coming to Xbox and Playstation on 8th August 2024.  We partnered with Polish publishers Klabater because a) they clearly know what's what and b) we love the Poles. (I used to date one and AK used to live there. One winter's day his hair literally froze into icicles.)

Cultist Simulator's console UI is heavily based on Playdigious's excellent rework for the Nintendo Switch, which we think is the best way to transform a fundamentally clicky PC-first game to a controller-friendly game. So here are the key details to know:


  • Launch date: Thursday 8th August 2024
  • Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5


Versions and prices:


  • Initiate Edition (game plus mini DLC: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLC) - $24.99 / €24.99
  • The Exile DLC - $9.99 / €9.99
  • Anthology Edition (everything together: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC) - $29.99 / €29.99


Wishlist the game today if you're interested! Click to wishlist on....



Perhaps some people reading this have had enough of being nice and homey in BOOK OF HOURS and want to start a new run of hubristic Lovecraftian fun. Maybe you want to go through the game to find something AK wrote that's even more upsetting than Marinette's story. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world. Whatever your motivation, I hope you pick Cultist Simulator up on your platform of choice next month. It's the first time we've ever released any game on console (including any of our work on Fallen London or Sunless Sea) so we are excited! Excite alongside us, if you like. ♥

(Also, more news on the Lucid Tarot and BOOK OF HOURS updates on the blog, if you're interested in other Weather Factory news.)

2024.A.2 'AGNES' from beta->live
Chel's patch notes:

Fixed an Apostle legacy bug that made it impossible to heal followers wounded by an enemy Long - but only if you were playing a localized (non-English) version of the game. No words enough to convey how hard the Devil worked to make this bug possible.

- Some sounds - namely, a card dropping in a slot, and a game speed being changed via a hotkefy - were not playing since god knows when.

- Improved performance in Exile when arriving in a new city with a lot of cash.

- Fixed a rare bug that broke the main menu if you were mashing buttons too eagerly during the splash screen.

- Fixed an erroneous text display in various escaped spirit hauntings.

- There was a missing colon in a substantial Edge commission's label. Could this be the very last typo in the entire game ?! Will you be able, oh dear players, to spot more ?!

- MODDING: IDs of entities are now completely case-insensitive for all purposes (in-game access, modifying, inheriting, localizing etc).

- MODDING: (super nerdy) Console autocomplete suggestions are now only displayed if there's more than 3 characters typed in - this way you aren't presented to choose from every entity in the game that starts with a letter E.

- HOTFIX A.2: Translation is correctly applied to verbs' initial slots.

Cultist Simulator has a Daily Deal!
First things first: Cultist Simulator is today's Daily Deal, at a deepest-ever (and frankly insane) 75% off. Check it out, and watch the ever-marvellous Systemchalk Broadcasting live on the store page now.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/718670/Cultist_Simulator

Oh! And all our merch is 25% off for the weekend, to celebrate Cultist being culty. Happy Friday, everyone!

In other news, AK posted this to the subreddit last night:



"Celebrating the completion of the Further Visitor Stories in HOUSE OF LIGHT. That means we're at 80% done, which means in turn that I should be sending out a handful of beta keys to the lucky few end of next week (sorry, if you haven't already heard, you didn't get your name drawn from the Clutches). HOUSE OF LIGHT is a chonker: already the same word count that the whole of Cultist Simulator was at launch."

So that means we hope you'll really like the upcoming expansion to BOOK OF HOURS, HOUSE OF LIGHT, and we should have a suitably chonky blog post with updates for you soon!

In the meantime, we're also trying something new. We've just uploaded the first episode of what we hope will become a fortnightly communal attempt to predict the future! This is the Weather Forecast. This is the Weather Forecast. We love games - you love games too, probably. We talk about games all the time - you have actual lives, and maybe only talk about games a bit. So we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain on professional game development and take a look at the week's top ten most popular upcoming games on Steam. Using publicly accessible data and a bit of Google-fu, we then each try to estimate that game's Week 1 review score, which is a general indicator of a game's 'success' at launch. One developer's success criterion is different from another's, of course - a first-time solo dev could be rightfully delighted by 50 reviews in the first week, but 50 reviews in the first week for an Electronic Arts launch would probably cause heads to roll. So this isn't about judging games as 'good' or 'bad' or even 'successful' or 'unsuccessful' - it's about seeing whether we can reliably predict the fortunes of a game just before launch, because that would be really useful for all our future Weather Factory games. And we happen to think it's pretty interesting, too.

So take a look at the first episode, join in with a YouTube comment if you like, and come back in a fortnight for us to see if we got any of the numbers right!



A few things to note:


  • All data we're using is publicly available. We don't have any insider knowledge, other than experience making games ourselves!
  • The 'Popular Upcoming' list on Steam is region-specific, so if you're not in the UK you may see a different list. There are loads of games in 'Popular Upcoming' that are never mentioned by traditional games press or streamers. Hopefully you'll discover some games you've never heard of that you actually quite fancy playing.
  • We'd love you to join in if you'd like to. If you want to guess any Week 1 review numbers, just leave a comment on the video. You can be smug in the next video when we recap what actually happened against our predicted numbers.
  • This isn't a value judgement on any of the featured games. We're just looking at data and talking about what it might mean.


Good luck to all games mentioned! We hope your launches - which are by far the scariest part of game dev - go brilliantly. And happy culting, everyone else!

The Mansus Has No Walls

“In the Mansus, the Hours strive one against another. As the struggles are resolved, they iron out the impossible, exalt the possible, tie the fraying braids of what has been into one golden ribbon of future. Everything is resolved. History becomes the past…”



“…There are, however, exceptions.” It’s Cultist Simulator‘s sixth birthday today, so let’s make an exception for her. This quote is from a high-level Secret Histories fragment called ‘Unresolved Ambiguity’, and it could absolutely be a metaphor for game development in general. Cultist could have been a hundred different games, but it ended up consolidated in the one it became (and the one it evolved into, after years of post-lauch DLC and updates). You may remember that we made Cultist Simulator in 11 months, with a budget of around £150,000. It’s now reached somewhere between 850,000 to a million people, making some serious allowances for chaotic data like Humble Bundles and Amazon Prime. So in honour of her birthday here’s a whirlwind tour of just under a year’s game development, starting with the most important part of all: the What Even Is This Javascript Greybox Prototype.





People who’ve played Cultist Simulator will recognise a surprising amount in these early prototypes. The art direction isn’t there – AK is definitely theme and mechanics first, ‘colours’ second – but the game’s Cookie Clicker influence is particularly apparent, as are important other factes of the final game like verbs (Study, Dream, Work…), timers (45s countdown for ‘The body has its needs…’) and resource-based storytelling (Secret Histories 1 + Occult Scrap 1 = Recruit an Aficionado of Conspiracies). I’ve worked with AK since 2015, when we met at his previous studio, and he always has a weirdly clear idea of what the game will be at the start. It’s just difficult for him to explain it and for anyone else to see inside his head. I’m now well-versed in the two to six months of trust where I have no idea what this game is that we’re apparently making, before it all falls into place. That moment for Cultist was this updated prototype, where you could first see the basic card interface:





I get it now! I see what all those grey buttons on their grey backgrounds represented! This gives me a lot to work with – I can now see what needs to be artified – while being flexible enough for AK to still be able to play with basic mechanics and the all-important recipes at the heart of the final game. Looks recognisable now, right? But where it really comes to life is when AK and Catherine Unger, our brilliant freelance artist, settled on a suitable art style:





It now looks so much like the real Cultist Simulator, but with enough difference, to trigger a bit of sense of the uncanny valley. I still mourn those stick-timers on the verb tokens, for instance! But this was where people really started to sit up and take notice of the game we were about four months out from completing. So with a bunch of hard game dev, which looks in real terms like this…




…Cultist Simulator, as we know and love her, was born. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GAME ABOUT PEELING BACK THE SKIN OF THE WORLD! We all really love you.* ♥

*Apart from Dread. Nobody loves Dread.

HOTFIX
HOTFIX: lore consumed on influence upgrades, sorry!

2023.12.s.4 "SARCODES"
- Steam Deck support! A nice excuse to add a QoL/accessibility feature here and there.

- Added 150% UI scale.

- Added a Font Size setting. May lead to stranger looks on higher ends.

- MODDING: 'Sort' property for Elements, a string, the format is 'group.order' - ex. 'a1.z1'. Controls the order of Aspects appearance in card and situation info. Aspects are first sorted by 'group', then by 'order', then, within the same order, by the amount of aspect present, starting with the highest.
- Several important Aspects are now sorted.

This leaves us fixing such critical bugs such as:

- A bug with keybinds showing default values until you loaded the tabletop at least once.

- A bug when cancelling a key rebind resulted in keyboard controls not working anymore.

- A bug when using ESC key in the main menu would not close an opened dialog.

- A few typos in mod loading logs.

- 2023.12.s.2: Mouse wheel functionality restored.

- 2023.12.s.2: Fixed a bug with Options menu tabs not initializing.

- 2023.12.s.2: Several small enhancements in a deck draw preview display.

- 2023.12.s.3: A rare greedy slot crash is fixed.

- 2023.12.s.3: A safenet against infinite saving loop on new game.

- 2023.12.s.3: Contentment now *finally* acts correctly on influence upgrade and subversion.

- 2023.12.s.4: Added more belts and braces against a very rare infinite saving chain.

- MODDING: Following the arabic font support added in the previous patch, a possibility for right-to-left text display is added too. "rtl": true in culture JSON to enable.

Advent Calendar 2023
It's the first of December, and we're trying something NEW this year! BOOK OF HOURS seems such an obvious fit, so starting from today we're running...

...a 25-day advent calendar of Hush House! 🎄🎁





(There are some real-world Weather Factory gifts, and at least one Cultist Simulator-related treat - though the in-game items are all in BOOK OF HOURS.)

Each day we'll open a door containing treats in-game or the 'real' world (you'll see it on all of our socials [ Twitter / Facebook / Instagram ], and we'll update our advent megablog daily with What's Behind Today's Door).

Most are tasty amuses-bouches. Some are pretty major reveals. A few real world treats will only last for 24hrs, but you'll never miss anything in-game. Playing BOOK OF HOURS any time in December will give you everything the calendar's revealed to date whenever in-game winter rolls around. So there's no stress if you're 'out' having 'fun' with 'friends'. Except, you know. Have a think about your life choices there.

To start with today's door as an example, it reveals:

Door 1: Seasonal art in BOOK OF HOURS



The next time you're playing BOOK OF HOURS and winter comes around, you'll notice some festive cheer sprinkled throughout Brancrug Village and Hush House. For anyone who wants to be left alone like the Weary Detective and his Illustrated London News, there's an option to turn off seasonal art in the Settings menu. For everyone else, take careful note of Reverend Timothy's Christmas tree next to the Rectory...



More like this every day from now until Christmas Day. Check the advent megablog if you're not sure what today's gift is - we'll announce them every day at noon.

That's it! Warmth, good cheer and a glass of Chateau Raveline to you and yours. Merry Christmas, friend.

2023.10.r.9 RANUNCULUS
- Fade during an autosave is made gentler and more gradual to prevent the feeling of flickering on high saving speeds.

- Dropping cards on other cards while multi-dragging led to unexpected situations.

- Fixed a confusion in German localization of Skills' descriptions, and other minor problems in various locs.

- Fixed empty description in Starvation verb.

- Yet another fix for GOG achievements not unlocking on the storefront side despite being unlocked in the Collection.

- Greedy slots don't bug out on low framerates.

- When a recipe warmup ends, any card-to-slot travel animation aimed at it completes instead of failing.

- Zoom keys (Q/E by default) work sensibly at last - holding results in a continuous zoom instead of having to tap.

- HOTFIX: Verb SFXes work once again.

- MODDING: new xtrigger morph effect - 'setmutation' - for non-additive mutations.

- MODDING/HOTFIX: expulsions for instant recipes work correctly once again.

- MODDING: At the request, added Arabic font support (for that, set fontscript to 'arabic' in culture file).

2023.5.p.12 PEONY
- Made it more clear that allies can't kill the Foe in Exile.

- Fixed 'Our Enemy's Identity' description.

- Fixed an assortment of memory leaks.

- Cards in verb slots and outputs don't play their decay animation if the verb window is closed.

- Small rework of the influences' upgrade and subversion:
- Interactions with Contentment are less erratic.
- The Lore slot doesn't spoil lore fragments' descriptions.

- Verb windows now display text in a consistent size and use scrollbars if it doesn't fit.

- Experimental changes in the flow of timers.

- Alt recipes correctly display their deck draws (instead of displaying the main recipe's deck draws).

- Fixed an incorrect description in the Russian localization of the Younger Sister.

- Fixed a verb timer sometimes not assuming the correct colour.

- Restored a special audio cue for the Time verb.

- Cards in the Mansus disappear dramatically again.

- Cards in the Mansus are flipped before vanishing - that was an accidental change, sorry!

- Added a description for missing Essential slot requirements.

- Escape button does not close an opened verb window while the settings window is open.

- Exile cities are properly highlighted and faded once again.

- Cards in verbs don't occasionally jump when clicked.

- Streamlined the pause behaviour in the Mansus and settings menu.

- Fixed the Mansus portal window not closing under mysterious circumstances.

- Fix for cards sometimes thinking that they occupy slightly more space than they are in reality, and thus preventing cards to be placed in a space near them, despite it being actually empty.

- At some point, cards that were supposed to be invisible - but only inside verbs - became also invisible on the table - but, like, confusingly invisible. Now visible again, as they always were.

- MODDING: An order in which element's aspects react to xtriggers is now consistent (by id, alphabetical).

- MODDING: Entities now have a '$depends' and '$incompatible' property - a list of mod ids that are required/forbidden for this entity definition to be applied. More specifically, $depends mean 'all listed mods must be enabled', and $incompatible means 'none of listed mods must be enabled'.
Mod id is taken from serapeum_catalogue_number.txt in the mod's folder - it is created automatically on first Workshop upload, but can be created manually for non-Steam users. If no file is present, mod id equals its name.

- MODDING: Custom input settings now work properly.

- MODDING: Aspect xtriggers are significantly reworked - this was an obscure feature and it collected dust for years, but now, hopefully, assumed its final form:
- All aspects of a card now react to xtriggering (previously only mutations did).
- The 'Transform' morph effect now transforms a card, even when triggered by an aspect. This way, all morph effects work uniformly, regardless of where they are defined.

- MODDING: The new 'xexts' property on the elements. A string-string pair, works in a way similar to xtriggers - whenever a card meets a key-catalyst of an xext, it displays the description of this xext in its current verb.

- MODDING: Fixed a bug when using an expulsion on an instant additional recipe didn't work.

- MODDING: $plus/$minus work again.

- MODDING: Levers now can have default values, and you can change default values of vanilla levers.

- MODDING: Card labels display rich text correctly.

THIS UPDATE JUST PUTS A 'BOOK OF HOURS IS OUT NOW' BUTTON IN THE MENU
THIS UPDATE JUST PUTS A 'BOOK OF HOURS IS OUT NOW' BUTTON IN THE MENU

I'M SORRY I CAN ONLY EVER TYPE IN ALL CAPS EVER AGAIN
Newer posts Older posts