At the same time, Cultist Simulator is also a rogue-lite game with little progression between each playthrough. Whether you fail early on or near the end, first time or fifth, you stat off relatively the same way.
When you finally understand the game and everything is going your way, it feels pretty rewarding to play. However, between when you first boot the game up and that time of flow, you have many hours of potential frustration and not knowing what you're doing.
There are many ways Cultist Simulator can chip away at you. Sometimes game over is simple and straightforward, but sometimes you can enter a more subtle death spiral.
The quick deaths usually involve not managing your mental status. You can get depressed, or obsessed. If you don't manage those imbalances and accumulate 3 of the same status effects, you die. The first time this happens you probably won't know what's going on - the game is fairly unceremonious about it, and with so many cards and timers moving around the screen you can easily lose track of what's important. Later on even when you know what you're looking for, you can still be screwed over by RNG and have 3 of the same status effects generate in a row and just game over you. You can also have a minor victory game over if you do too well at your work and autopilot through some options. It can feel cheap for some.
This is an organised end-game board from someone that knows what they are doing.
Imagine how this looks during the first playthrough...The slightly slower category of game overs involve not managing certain events. As you're engaging your occult activities, your actions will draw attention of the suppression bureau. They'll try to uncover your dark dealings and lock you up. You usually get notoriety from robbing places for their valuable old books, but sometimes you can get it for painting with your occult knowledge or sending your followers to do some crimes. There can be a few gotchas in that department, and if you stack more than one notoriety, you're already at risk of losing the game. This can easily trip up new players that won't understand what they did wrong.
The slow death spirals involve either running out of followers, or running out of your own health. You can get sick in this game, and if you don't treat it, you lose a permanent health. As with all things, sickness can get lost and buried in the clutter on your screen. Trip up a few times too many and you're dead.
Followers in Cultist Simulator are a limited resource - there are 2-3 named NPCs for each school of lore you have, and then you have 1 unnamed NPC per lore as well. If any of them get wounded on a mission, get put to jail, or get killed by some dark monsters you decided to summon, that's chipping away at your finite resources. While you can complete the game with a fair number of your followers missing, it can get progressively harder, especially if you lose all of your followers from one lore type.
You also have the numerous items you come across through the game. Many of them bear the cryptic reminder that they are unique and once lost, cannot be replaced. This makes you really want to hold onto each and every trinket, never sell them, and never sacrifice them in a ritual, just in case you need it at some point in the future (you probably won't, with a few exceptions).
End-game item cluster. Need to hoard it all!
All of those things encourage the player to save scum and make sure they play the game perfectly. You don't want to lose any followers, any items, any health, anything really. The feeling of loss aversion is pretty strong, even if I know I won't really need something, because every loss is permanent.
Now, many of the above issues wouldn't be a problem if this was a game you could finish in an hour or two. But playing Cultist Simulator conservatively, you can spend 10-20 hours in one playthrough that could end within minutes of not paying attention. Sure, this isn't as bad as ADOM's 80 hour rogue-like permadeath playthrough, but it's still pretty bad for anyone but the most dedicated players.
While the game encourages you to experiment and take risks, it also punishes you for making mistakes. Sometimes quite badly. You may be willing to risk an hour or two of a run to experiment, but when you're creeping on 5+ hours and know that failure will reset you back to zero, you will save scum.
The game even encourages save scumming by featuring a link to your savegame files in its menu:
It also lets you cheese the game. You can hold certain bad cards in your hand so they won't go into bad events to make them even worse. This would let you wait out any problems and let the bad card expire without an issue. This feels like a quite deliberate choice on the developer's perspective, seeing as those bad events can even pull cards out of other non-essential events.
The game can even encourage some people to edit their saves to remove some game-ending problems. Wanderbots for example did this a few times for fun during his playthrough not to lose many hours of progress for his live stream:
While I enjoy Cultist Simulator after playing it for 60 hours, I'd really like to have an option to play it more leisurely. Something with a better save management system. A game more focused on temporary setbacks rather than permanent losses, where for the most part you could claw your way back up to where you were no matter what happened.