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Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Rick and Ted have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
What’s the fastest you’ve ever fallen in love with a game? I think I have a new record: about 0.3 seconds into CultGame, when launching it from Steam spawned not a regular game window, but a command prompt instance. Perfection. Chef’s kiss. No notes.
Like the Bay 12 games (Dwarf Fortress and especially Liberal Crime Squad) it clearly takes inspiration from, CultGame is gloriously text-based. Its art is ASCII, its options selected by tippy-tapping the numpad, its maps are carpets of symbols: lurid at signs and hashes as far as the eye can see.
It’s a management game, first and foremost. Once you have generated a world and a history for it, you choose the precise nature of cult leader you wish to be: Defector Cleric, Occult Scholar, Con Artist, or Lunatic, and off you go. I was Gideon Faircloth, the fallen cleric, and my object of reverence was a ‘World’s Best Grandpa’ Cup whose domains were blood and fire.
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CultGame lets you rewrite basically everything, including the deity type you follow; it does not protest, I learnt, when you write some absolute nonsense in there. I learnt this lesson again when the game asked me to choose a creed for my nascent faith and I wrote “Opinions are not those of my employer”.
Like Dwarf Fortress, CultGame will procedurally gin up an entire worldmap for you at the game’s start and speckle it with locations of interest. There are barren plains and thick, unpeopled woodlands aplenty, but also dense urban spaces, pre-existing religions, political factions and more, all just waiting for you to get in there and start corrupting the populace. As a former preacher, I already had some skill points in preaching, so on turn one I set up shop in an area the game had named “The Friendly Wilds of Evil” to begin hollering at the hoi polloi.
My charisma and probably-airtight cup-centric theology quickly won the crowd’s adoration. Before long, I was accruing ~60 followers a turn. As the masses converted, they began generating followers themselves like a religious Roth IRA. Before long, I had my first recruit—not just a passive follower, but someone I could directly control and recruit just like Gideon. He was called Leopold Blackwood and he soon got to preaching, doubling my monthly followers. Soon, a new recruit, more preaching, more followers, and so on.
The tithes I was extracting from the rubes gathered in mountains. I had closets full of gold, and before long I was initiating grand public works in the areas of my preaching—shrines and gardens about town that made me look very generous indeed. Even the indigenous religion didn’t mind me so much: when its apostles had challenged my preaching, I succeeded in a skill check that made them rather like me. I was munificent and popular—a beloved figure.
It was time to start killing people.
One of the labours you can set your cult minions about in CultGame’s demo is ritual-making. Depending on your deity’s chosen domain, you get access to a set of thematically appropriate magic tricks you can expend resources to cast. Our World’s Best Grandpa Cup started off as a blood-domain deity and added fire when we got enough followers to branch out. This meant our cardinals were very good at reworking the flesh of man and could, if you catch them in the right mood, raze a city with a targeted meteor strike.
So we got about doing that, mostly just to see what would happen. Our flesh rituals were powered by blood, which meant we had to induct some recruits we might normally have turned away due to their poor stats and start converting them to non-renewable energy. I put a recruit named Isabella in charge of the abattoir; her ritual-casting ability trumped everyone else’s. She did a great job. Well done, Isabel. Everyone say well done Isabel.
Before long I had converted two underperforming cultists named John and Sarah into a single, flesh-joined creature named Jorah the Grafted, who met expectations. Isabel also summoned a blood demon, a new employee named Morfangrag whose stats were off-the-charts good to the extent that it made everyone else in the cult look like additional potential fleshgrafting candidates. Morfangrag was incredibly useful, and would not kill us so long as he got a monthly dose of blood, which was fine: we still had plenty of low-quality recruits knocking on our door looking to sign up.
Things were going very well, but I had yet to check out the demo’s Crusade feature, whereby you can dispatch a follower or followers to set heathen areas aflame with the light of the true faith. I sent Morfangrag to a cave. He easily dispatched the skeletons, spiders, and so on within. And yet…
Just before Morfangrag set out, the cult of the World’s Best Grandpa Cup levelled up to the point that it could adopt a new belief. I picked the one that let us speak to animals. Possessed of a perhaps religious vision, I sidled Morfangrag up to an escargatoire of three snails and hit the Flirt option.
My blood demon successfully charmed all three snails, who collectively became his girlfriend and, thereby, minions of the cult. They didn’t even mind that he took them on (free) dates to the local dump instead of (expensive) dates to a fancy restaurant. They were into it, if anything.
Anyway, they were all eventually sacrificed to fuel some more fleshgrafting. CultGame is a very good time.
