To counter the inevitable hangover that comes with long evenings drinking deep from the chalice of forbidden knowledge, you’ll need to find a reliable source of ever-elusive contentment. There’s also a big, creamy, comforting bowl of creeping dread to contend with. Just make sure you’re prepared to make good on the debt when she returns. You may even convince a shadowy acquaintance to fork over a sizeable investment. Auctioning off ancient tomes or painting impossible paintings of unpaintable stuff are both reliable, if volatile, sacrificial cash cows. Which, let’s be honest, you definitely are, you cheeky dabbler of doom you. There are also less traditional paths to fund your delphic ventures, if you’re so inclined. Some are more precarious, requiring commitments of passion as well as time to keep demanding bosses off your pentagram-tattooed back. Some jobs are permanent - providing a steady source of coinage for séance Doritos, tentacle wash and eldritch, unspeakable council tax - and allow you turn up when you feel like it. The physician begins with solid employment at the institute (‘Long hours, but good pay’) while the lowly aspirant scrapes by as a porter (‘Miserable, but it’s all you can find just now’). So you’ll need a job, or ‘an arrangement to exchange one’s life for money’, as the game calls it. Chiefly, if you don’t have funds, then you will die. While Cultist Simulator initially keeps much of its hand hidden from you, goading you to parse out esoteric rules through frenzied alchemical experimentation, it does make a few things very clear from the outset. The black expanse of Sunless Sea’s Unterzee (another realm given life by Cultist Sim's writer Alexis Kennedy) is here traded out for cozy bohemian townhouses, opium tinctures and burlesque clubs, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less of a struggle to keep your head above the water. Mostly, though, they’ll just produce ever more maddeningly fascinating questions. Long, plodding work days in boredom haunted offices or hurried jaunts at secret clubs. They can tell stories in themselves, sometimes. Timers tick and brew and search in the dark. When the timers run down, you’ll flip the tiles, and check the results.
Begin to combine one or more of these with the verb tiles, and you’ll set timers into motion. There are manifestations of your passion, and of your ability to reason. Some are scraps of lore gleaned from tattered books. Some cards represent acquaintances, curious but unversed in the dark arts. One of your earliest tasks is to form your own cult. By combining cards with tiles that represent verbs like ‘explore’ ‘talk’ ‘work’ and ‘dream’, you’ll gradually uncover mysteries, gain arcane knowledge, and learn to effectively blend certain combinations to give you the results you’ll need to survive and progress. Stripped down to its skeleton-patterned underwear, it's a game of time and resource management, of crafting and experimentation. Weather Factory’s first outing is what I imagine playing solitaire with Necronomicon pages might feel like, if those pages then formed a map to the location of a much older, much more cryptic tome that made the Necronomicon look like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I’ve been reduced to begging in the street for opium money, and I’ve sacrificed followers with antique daggers in secret rites to restore my vitality. In my time with Cultist Simulator, I’ve browsed hidden book shops for arcane grimoires, sent loyal acolytes on doomed expeditions, and felled nosy investigators with poisoned tea.
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