I've always wanted to join a cult. But I'm too lazy for cross-fit, not Machiavellian enough for Magic The Gathering and too lazy for Pokemon Go. (Good grief am I laz...)
As such, I was very pleased indeed to discover this little game that allowed me to pretend I was a cult leader, with minions, probably an evil laugh, and power over who lives and dies. Mwahahahaha.
Your cult is trying to raise an elder god. (Which is legally distinct from other elder gods. Maybe. Lovecraft copyright is a horrible quagmire.) To that end, you have a small village at your disposal, containing five major families. You have to keep all five families happy enough to prevent them rebelling against you, while hunting down traitors to offer up to your god.
The basic gameplay is relatively simple. You have to survive three years, with each year broken down into the four seasons. Each season, you have to pick one advisor (out of a possible six) from each family. Each advisor can improve or destroy one of the five characteristics of your cult through either their vices or virtues. These are things like discipline, fervor, ignorance (more ignorant is good; this is a cult) and so on. For example, one advisor might be particularly good at burning books, improving ignorance, while not being terribly punctual, destroying discipline. Letting any of the five characteristics drop too low tends to result in your messy death.
Every season, your god has to have a sacrifice, selected from one of your five advisors. Killing off a family member tends to annoy the great families, so you have to carefully choose between murdering someone who's really annoyed you for whatever reason (perhaps they embezzle, or say "um, like" a lot) and dispatching someone whose only vice might be excessive reading, but their family aren't going to rebel just because you pushed Steve off a cliff into the tentacle-y waters.
The game gets significantly easier the longer you survive, as you gain more and more information about your worshippers, and people get less annoyed once you discover major vices, and murder people for those. The last year will probably fly by as you casually slaughter the really troublesome.
And that fly by is a bit of a problem, in that it's a relatively short game, and it probably doesn't have much replay value for most. Different play-throughs give you a different set of characteristics to work out in each family, but once you've cracked the strategy, it isn't going to prove very difficult. It's not bad for a single run through, and it's definitely got an interesting art style, but don't expect to be plowing days into it.
One for those who've always wanted to run a monochrome cult.
Recommended.
Tagged: Game Puzzle 2D Easy difficulty PC