Imagine you’re playing an fps game. It has all the normal elements of an fps, multiple weapons, interesting environments, good enemy selection etc. Now imagine that the controls to this fps were the function keys and you had no way to remap them. You’re going to fire with f5, turn with f9, reload with f3. All the ways you know how to play an fps have been changed for no reason or gain, but it’s still an fps. That is the best way I can describe Cultist simulator.

It’s an interesting adventure game that for unknown reasons pretends to be a card game. The cards are how you control everything and advance the story but it’s so obtuse and pointlessly convoluted a control scheme that the challenge isn’t in the gameplay, but rather in just playing the game itself.

The fact that nothing is explained is cute and quirky but mostly exists to add mystery and a false sense of achievement in just figuring out how to play the damn thing. Every act is trial and error. “Can I drag that card onto that timer and… no. Ok but that one can be dragged... but I have no idea what it’s going to do. Hey that timer just snatched a card.” Everything is opaque until you do it. At which point it becomes known (kinda). And that’s the game.

Moving cards around your board until the timer you’re dragging it over lights up to let you know you can do something. That is the entirety of the game. You don’t have any real agency because the outcomes are unknown and unknowable until you do it. You can’t try to figure it out with logic before an action because other than the very rare instance, such as dragging a location to the explore timer explores the location, cause and effect are not really linked in anyway that makes sense. You just drag and wait for the glow to tell you did something right. Which is less of a game than it is a check on eyesight.

In the background you have a semblance of a narrative that could probably be pretty cool if it was front and center. But instead, you have timers and cards with the story being drip fed to you as you put the cards in the right slots, so you can open up more slots so you can keep doing it.

I can forgive ugly graphics, uninteresting sound, even a terrible control scheme if the reward in gameplay was there. Simply put, it’s not. I played a flash game years ago called alchemy, where the whole game was dragging sprites on top of other sprites so that they would merge and create a new, third sprite. That wasn’t a good game either, but they didn’t have the balls to charge for it.