demagogue on 30/5/2020 at 01:38
In fairness to you, the game itself could better cater to flow and gaming things too.
Often I felt like I was just reacting to events, picking random tracks because I don't know whatever, and waiting to make progress on the big things when I could ... not thinking so much about strategy beyond putting cards into thematic piles so I know where they are when I need them. But sometimes I'll get on a track that seems to have an interesting development for a while.
I feel like if I played it long enough, I'd start understanding ways you can have some kind of strategy, but I'm not there yet. Now I haven't played it for so long I can't even remember most of the systems, not that I even understood all of them so well when I was actually playing. There's not really another game like it though, so I come back to it sometimes just out of curiosity.
Anarchic Fox on 30/5/2020 at 02:00
Quote Posted by demagogue
There's not really another game like it though, so I come back to it sometimes just out of curiosity.
Thinking about it, the games that
feel most similar are "energy"-based Internet games like Kingdom of Loathing, BBS door games, or modern PBBG ones, which give you an hourly or daily allotment of actions. Except in those games, you have to wait an hour (or a day!) before your next increment of progress, whereas in
Cultist Simulator the interval is some twenty to sixty seconds.
I've been thinking lately about therapeutic games, games that can help you understand and subvert the compulsive behaviors ingrained by many other games. Most examples that come to mind are therapeutic by virtue of their generosity. Before
Cookie Clicker, clicker games and their ilk doled out rewards on a quadratic or cubic progression.
Cookie Clicker, in its manic comedy, said "to hell with it" and gave its players exponential growth. It was deeply compelling to those of us wired to expect no such generosity. (Then game developers figured out how to exploit and monetize exponential growth. Now there's a genre based on it, mostly on smartphones where all the other shittiest games reside. Oh well.)
The point of that is, I think
Cultist Simulator may be such a therapeutic game, since it has the reward structure of energy-based games at sixty times the pace. But therapy stops working when you stop focusing on yourself and your own experience and start focusing on the therapist and what they're doing. I'll come back to the game for sure, once I'm no longer thinking so much about its systems.