// PC GAMER — GAMING
I summoned 1 blood demon, stitched 2 of my disciples together, and seduced 3 snails in this excellent cult simulator in the spirit of Dwarf Fortress
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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.
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.
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