Cultist Simulator - punishing experimentation

Cultist Simulator is a very interesting unfolding game of occult and mystery. It's a game about exploring the world, and exploring the mechanics. Heck, the game encourages you to explore and take risks every time you boot it up:

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.

When challenge turns to tedium

I enjoy a fair number of games with survival mechanics. Subnautica, Rimworld, Banished, 7 Days to Die, etc. They can be a fun mechanic in games of all shapes and sizes. However, there often comes a time when the challenge of survival turns to tedium.

Unfolding mechanics

A lot of games, survival or otherwise, slowly reveal new mechanics to the player over time. This is a great design choice - giving the player only a few tools to start means they won't suffer from choice paralysis and won't get overwhelmed by the game. Gradually introducing new mechanics and concepts builds the complexity up in a manageable way. Heck, here are even some games that are built entirely on unfolding into some weird and bizarre mechanics:

Unfolding games

The problem might come though when one aspect of the game doesn't advance much, yet is still required to progress in the game.

Cultist Simulator and money

Cultist Simulator is a very interesting game about exploring the unknown, building a cult and dealing with magic in a lovecraftian world. You start the game being a simple person struggling to get by, having to earn enough money to get by while discovering the world of the unknown. Early on, scraping that money, dealing with ailments and what not are your core challenges. You'll have a job that say, produces 1-2 gold per minute and you'll be burning your cash at 1 gold per 3 minutes.

Then, the game starts unfolding...

So many cards, so many things to do!

Fast forward to mid-game. You are now able to make a living doing occult research, or being on a board of directors for a company. You can easily make 5-15 gold per minute if you try, you know exactly how to handle most of your ailments, and now your main loop is focused on exploring the world and looking for hidden lore all the while avoiding getting caught.

At the same time, you are still dealing with having to pay a coin every 3 minutes and having to go through the motions of cycling through work. It's no longer a challenge, it's something you've mastered. The mechanics haven't changed much, but have grown a few more steps to them. What has been a challenge early on has now turned into tedium.

The game could've addressed this in a few ways. Perhaps if the player has maxed out one or two careers, they could've gotten some stipend through some shady means that would give them some money instead of taking it away. Maybe the player could make some of their cultists work for the cult on a self-repeating loop and earn money, but be locked from doing anything else. Similarly there could be some rituals in place for the player to get rid of a few other looping tediums (for example, removing the "getting sick every now and then" mechanic, which essentially requires spending 1 extra coin) .

When a game moves so far past the initial challenges, there ought to be a way to solve those problems permanently using resources from much further in the game.

Subnautica and sustenance

Subnautica is an underwater survival game. You start the game crash landed on an ocean planet and have to gather the resources to survive and eventually build up to leaving the planet, but not before solving some mysteries first. You will have to keep an eye out on your oxygen meter as you dive in deeper and deeper looking for those resources. If you chose to play on full survival mode, you will also have to keep an eye out for everyone's favourite food and thirst meters.

Early game, those pose a bit of a challenge. You have to catch some fish to cook them, as well as extracting water from them using some chemical reactions. Food in your inventory would spoil over time if you don't cure it, etc. It's a decent enough mechanic overall.

However, as you move much further into the game, begin exploring underwater caves and diving ever more deeply, the sustenance mechanics will still be there to bug you. By now you can have base elements that produce water on their own, planters that grow fruit, aquariums that make more fish, knife that instantly cooks said fish, heck, even a suit that reclaims water you sweat. You have a lot of options at your disposal, but your inventory can only hold so many items, and your sustenance bars only fill so much.

By the point you grow bored of that mechanic you might already have to take care of a submarine, a handful of other vehicles, batteries for all your tools, not to mention looking for a lot of resources from all over the map to make your next tier of upgrades. As fun as it is to have the extra survival challenge at the start of the game, I never play on full survival anymore because of the drag that is feeding yourself in the end game.

The game could've addressed the mechanic by creating some high-tech consumables that make your sustenance meters last a few times longer than usual, or add some gizmo that removes that mechanic entirely.

When addressing the needs of a mechanic is no longer a challenge but a chore and players are unlikely to fail at it, it's time to move past it.

Conclusions

While survival mechanics might be interesting, but you have to recognise when a challenge of survival has turned to tedium and try addressing these issues. This is especially true when the mechanics you start the game with are much simpler than the ones you end the game with. Move players from smaller problems that challenge them early games to bigger problems for the late game.