Alexis Kennedy, co-founder of Failbetter and writer and designer on Fallen London, Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator, has been accused of being an abuser and "well-known predator" by several prominent women in the games industry, including an allegation from a former colleague at Failbetter. The allegations came as part of a recent wave of similar stories shared on Twitter, among them allegations made against composer Jeremy Soule and developer Alec Holowka. Kennedy has denied the allegations on Twitter and via a statement given to RPS, while Failbetter say they "believe and stand with everyone who has come forward."
]]>Enthralling and maddening in equal measure, card-juggling eldritch life sim Cultist Simulator is celebrating its first birthday today, and there's gifts for the devoted. Developer Weather Factory are rolling out the final two planned bits of DLC for the game today, each adding a new playable character, new ways to run your cult, and many more ways to lose. They've also announced Book Of Hours, the next game in the series. A spin-off tasking players with running and organising a forbidden library, and ensuring the clientele find what they seek without getting too badly cursed.
]]>We don’t expect much of a typical video game map. As long as it guides us to our destination (and perhaps looks pretty while doing so) most of us won’t waste a second thought on it. And yet, maps can be much more than tools that make our way from A to B a little more convenient. Some games reject the notion of maps as a tacked-on extraneous layer, and instead treat them as an integral part of their world. These maps can tell us something about their world and its inhabitants that goes far beyond topographical information. Rather than creating distance between us and a game, they root us more firmly in it.
]]>If you've survived dark forces and fancy a greater challenge than wrangling a cult to uncover and master the terrible secrets at the heart of the world (easy peasy tbh), Cultist Simulator has your back. The eldritch... survival RPG (?) today adds a New Game+ mode in a free update, letting us continue our tale in a difficult and terrible new way. It's a right big'un too, bunging in 20,000-odd new words. Some might even be brand new words.
Beyond this, head cultist Alexis Kennedy is kicking around the idea of making a standalone expansion sorta thing about playing a librarian organising an esoteric collection.
]]>In a major free update coming to Cultist Simulator on January 22nd, victory through immortality will be just the beginning. Developers Weather Factory call this second story 'advanced mode', and it lets players resume a completed game in a very clever way. Taking control of an apostle of your now-immortal past self, your new goal is to help your old character ascend to godhood, possibly ending the world in the process. An easy job, then, except for a cadre of rival immortals seeking to throw some eldritch spanners into your machinations.
]]>If my 2018 was the year “of” anything, it was surely the year of knowing your place. The games I've picked out in hindsight are united by the idea of understanding how you fit into a complex world - appreciating the intricacy of the variables and relationships that surround every given moment, whether your overall aim be to subdue them or just survive them. That and a fondness for long words and creative sci-fantasy concepts, anyway. Read on, adventurer, for much talk of gods, spiders and spaceships.
]]>Much as I love Cultist Simulator's atmosphere, I've yet to come close to completing it, my character ground down by the mundanity of maintaining mortal flesh. Today's DLC, The Dancer, might yet give me a chance at victory - or something close to it. Introducing a new career path as a cabaret dancer, those who pursue the art of dance may find it ties more into the world of the unseen than expected. Or players might just earn the lusty eye of a lord or lady - a free update also introduces romances and rivalries, adding more twists to Weather Factory's card-based eldritch life-sim.
]]>Are you in the mood for dancing? If you pick up the upcoming Dancer DLC for card-o-mystery Cultist Simulator, then it won't really matter. That's your job now. Doing jigs in an occult club where "the distinction between pleasure and pain is as delicate and essential as the human skin."
You can dance if you want to. Just leave your earthly friends behind.
]]>I am a lowly aspirant with nothing but my name and my failing body. I am uninitiated. I am a worm in the dark, crawling through the pages of the secret histories of the world.
I'm playing Cultist Simulator.
This is “a game of apocalypse and yearning”, in which players attempt to direct eldritch forces and hidden gods without the faintest idea of what they're doing. Yearning and apocalypse, certainly, but it is also a game of ignorance. This is the essential magic of the game.
]]>Psst. I know mum said you weren’t allowed to listen to those hellions on your favourite podcast anymore, but the hosts of the Electronic Wireless Show won’t tell if you don’t. This week we’re talking about the games we weren’t allowed to play as youngsters, but did anyway. Alice suffered strict rationing of The Sims 2, and Dave (oh hello Dave) was looked at with concern while playing Silent Hill. Brendan’s parents didn’t seem to care. Let’s all go to Brendan’s house. He’s got GTA 2.
]]>I'm still not sure if I actually like Cultist Simulator, but I'm definitely fascinated by it. For now at least, I've finished reading Alexis Kennedy's marvellous in-game words, but I'm not done reading about the game, and enjoying picking over Lottie Bevan's retrospective on the game. She's the other half of dev team Weather Factory, and there's one bit in particular about how she and the publishers felt uneasy about there not being a tutorial - but "Alexis was dead set against it".
]]>In my time with Cultist Simulator, I’ve browsed hidden book shops for arcane grimoires, sent loyal acolytes on doomed expeditions, and felled nosy investigators with poisoned tea. I’ve been reduced to begging in the street for opium money, and I’ve sacrificed followers with antique daggers in secret rites to restore my vitality. Weather Factory’s first outing is what I imagine playing solitaire with Necronomicon pages might feel like, if those pages then formed a map to the location of a much older, much more cryptic tome that made the Necronomicon look like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
]]>As someone who spends a good chunk of their time "meditating on my goal of earthly knowledge" and "studying esoteric philosophies", I'm excited to see that digital board game Cultist Simulator will offer me the chance to do both. It's an upcoming game from Alexis Kennedy, the former creative director at Failbetter who worked on Fallen London and Sunless Sea. Cultist Simulator starts you off living a normal humdrum life, then sends you off into a dark world of perverse rituals and unspeakable terrors. Just like games journalism, then.
As the trailer below reveals, you can delve into that world on May 31st.
]]>Cosmic horror turns out to be a hard habit to break. Former Failbetter creative director, Alexis Kennedy, announced Cultist Simulator [official site]; a digital board game with dark gods, abominable rites and a variable grip on reality a while back. I think it was initially given a tentative release date of Halloween-ish 2017 but ended up slipping a bit and the Kickstarter (which is what prompted this post - that's the news! There's a Kickstarter! I was getting to it, slowly!) now noted an estimated delivery date of May 2018.
Join me for more information further down the page!
]]>Former Failbetter Games creative director Alexis Kennedy is hoping to release his Cultist Simulator [official site] around Halloween next year, he's said. Since leaving the Sunless Sea and Fallen London studio, he's signed up for gigs including writing on Stellaris and for BioWare, but bless 'im he can't resist the call of unspeakable horrors from beyond the stars. Cultist Simulator is a singleplayer digital board game about dreams and hints of dark gods, rituals, research, recruitment, and slowly losing your grip on anything resembling a normal human life. Always a splendid idea, that.
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