this one is tough to rate because I feel like you can leave it dissatisfied after a few hours and still think to yourself that maybe if you gave it a little big more time, you'd come around and enjoy it. cultist sim is a resource management style game that's primarily text based with lots of room for personal strategies and interesting mechanics but unfortunately this game has so much that it gives you right off the bat, the amount of content is almost to its detriment. the stories on the cards you unlock are interesting, but the way the minigames are paced means it is hardly possible to really take a moment to stop and read/think/immerse yourself in the stories being told to you. maybe i'm an idiot or something, but i felt like i was just playing with my brain off and being thrown so much all at once with no time to slow down. couldn't vibe with it but i tried.

I've never felt so compelled to play through such a bad game to completion. The situations in the game are nicely varied and the dialogue options can be highly amusing and were just enough to pull me through to see what came next.

But the act of playing the game was almost painful. With the base speed of the main character, traversing the world can be akin to wading through a swamp unless you permanently hold down the run button, in which case it feels like Yakety Sax should be playing in the background - there's just no happy medium. At one point in the game you're forced to give an old lady a piggyback which slows everything down to a crawl but even then I swear that was faster than just walking normally.

Less painful and more pointless, there are also hunger/thirst/bladder meters for you to manage (even though nothing actually happens as a result of letting any of these get too low). There's a moral points system that doesn't affect anything, and while the dialogue choices can be hilarious it's all window dressing - there is exactly one time in the game where your decisions have any impact.

And there's a whole host of other issues. I wasn't super fussed by framerate problems or other technical hitches, but the audio design might be some of the worst I've experiences in a game. Footsteps drown out every other sound, the world feels lifeless and dialogue snippets repeat constantly while sounding completely out of place. Everything just feels so lifeless - I'm not expecting a sweeping score and I know there will be some occasions where silence has more impact, but there needed some kind of atmospheric background noise.

But then you get moments where you accuse someone of arson in front of a whole town while wearing frilled cowboy chaps and tall chef hat with a tengu mask strapped to your face with pink sunglasses underneath which almost make the experience worth it. Almost. That's what the 2nd star is for I guess.

Definition of "liked not loved." There's a lot to like here, mind you! I think the cast of characters is a lot of fun, the soundtrack is pretty catchy, and it's a good on-ramp to the world of Picross. But the actual mysteries are pretty limp, and the game flings so many puzzles at you that the pace of the story is way out of wack. And even if you are here for the puzzles, they sort of top out at difficulty relatively early on.

I was also frustrated that the game's focus slowly shifted from Honor to Scout as it went along; I found Honor a much more interesting character, and Scout's backstory and conflict to be pretty generic sci-fi conspiracy stuff.