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Cultist Simulator
Cultist Simulator is currently ≈ $1.08 at 
Kinguin, matching the lowest price tracked here. That makes this a timely option if you want a solitary card-driven mystery where combinations, occult research, and consequential choices shape your own story. Check that the confirmed interface languages suit you before settling into its text-rich exploration. Its appeal is in uncovering secrets at your own pace, rather than playing with others. At $19.99 from Kinguin, Cultist Simulator is at the lowest price tracked here; Simplified Chinese, English, Russian, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish are the confirmed interface languages.
KinguinCultist Simulator PC Steam CD Key
K4GCultist Simulator Standard Edition Steam CD Key
GGselCultist Simulator (STEAM Ключ / РФ+Global)Credit/Debit CardAll-time low ~ $4.99across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $2.652026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $19.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+654%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Cultist Simulator
In Cultist Simulator, explore an alternate 1920s world where hidden gods and secret histories shape a quest for knowledge, power, beauty, or revenge. Combine cards, investigate occult mysteries, and shape a roguelike narrative through consequential choices. On Steam PC, 82%% of 10,587 player reviews are positive. The game was released on May 31, 2018. Supported interface languages: Simplified Chinese, English, Russian, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.
Credits
Developer
Weather Factory
Publisher
Weather Factory
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$2.652026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
Show 4 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Play mode
The Steam PC version is a single-player narrative card game with roguelike elements.
Language
English and Simplified Chinese are listed as interface languages, with subtitles but no full audio in either.
03Frequently asked questions
How does the gameplay work?
Combine cards to explore secrets, prepare rituals, and shape your own narrative.
Does it have a legacy system?
Yes. The description includes a story-driven legacy system that transcends death.
Can I build a cult?
You can found a cult, recruit believers, and promote them to disciples.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
TL;DR: ◥▶◀◤ Saturated with intrigue, Cultist Simulator is an innovative & unique singleplayer roguelike card game w/ a steep learning curve. Highly replayable due to branching events, experimentation, & RNG. Non-existent tutorial, but community is helpful. Week 1 buy grants all future DLC for free, for life ✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂---✂--- * Starter's guide & helpful links follow review. Recommendation: ☑ Content quality is a value at full price. ☐ Positive experience, but wait to buy when it's on sale. ☐ Negative experience. Wait for improvements before buying. ☐ Very negative experience. Save your money. What I like about Cultist Simulator: + Active pause. + Achievements. + 1920's setting. + Legacy system. + Alluring premise. + Very well-written. + High replayability. + Apocalyptic humor. + Fast forward option. + Simple & effective art. + Mouse zoom for tiny text. + 20-40 hours of gameplay. + Eye-pleasing color palette. + Very helpful & friendly community. + Music invokes a feeling of mystique. + Plays smoothly. No bugs that I ran into. + Study lore & discover forbidden secrets. + Hints when clicking on icons & empty slots. + Authorities can be alerted to your "activities." Indifferent: ~/= Waiting for a critical card to turn up can be like waiting for the stars to align, but that's the nature of the game: to play the hand that you've been given wisely. ~/= Static screen hints default size is too small. Go to Settings & switch to 100%+ Room for improvements: - No tutorial. - Some grindiness. - Late game can be convoluted. - Timers try my patience ...at times. :P - Add mouseover tooltips for Legacy selection cards. - Automatically PAUSE gameplay upon returning to game. - There are times that no matter how well you play, the RNG will just totally screw you. Other thoughts: Cultist Simulator is not a quick, pick-up-and-play card game, but it sure is devilishly entertaining once it clicks. Be prepared to devote some time to learning, mainly because it is so different from other card games. Part of the challenge getting started is wrapping your head around all the combinations of how the cards interact with one another. It can be daunting at first, but once you've dedicated some time to it & have a bit of a handle on what you're doing, it's smooth(er) sailing. - END _________________________ ꧁HOW TO START PLAYING:꧂ https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1398521932 (Follow along while playing & using active pause) Cultist Simulator starts you off with a single Work Verb. This is a square-shaped icon on the game board which you will click on to reveal its empty card slots. Clicking on an empty slot will reveal what types of cards you can place there. You will see a description on the tooltip, with some Aspect icons at the base of it. Clicking on those icons will give you a description of the type of Aspect that can fill that card slot. In this case, your starting card, Menial Employment, fulfills the requirement as an "Aspect: Job" & may be dragged over & added to the empty slot. This enables you to begin work as a miserable hospital porter. Side note: Clicking & beginning to drag a card will highlight the Verbs in purple that the card can be used with. To begin your job, now that you have added the Menial Employment card to the Work Verb, click START, & the Work Verb timer will begin. Once the timer has elapsed, open the Work Verb, & you will see 2 new cards: Funds & Health. Collect them all, & they will now appear down on the game board area. You will notice a new Dream Verb has appeared on the game board with its own timer. Once the initial Dream Verb timer elapses, you will see that another new Verb has appeared: Time Passes. Without adding any cards to the Dream Verb, let the Time Passes Verb timer run down to initiate the next Verb: A Bequest Arrives. For the purposes of getting started, I'm leaving the Dream Verb (& Contentment card) be, but it's helpful in discovering lore & recovering from negative statuses. Dreaming can also eventually cause you to go insane. The mini magnet icon on a Verb means that it will automatically grab a card (like how the Time Passes Verb will grab the Funds card each cycle of its timer for example, whether you add Funds manually or not). The Bequest Verb delivers news that the old man you dreamt of at the hospital named you in his will. Allow the new Bequest Verb's counter to run down to award you with 8 new Funds cards plus 3 others. Collect them, & at this point, you will also see on the game board, a Bequest card, a Reason card, & a Passion card. Pause the timers while you consider your next actions, because the Time Passes Verb has just grabbed one of your Funds cards (due to its magnet icon). This is your recurring expenses upkeep (every 1 minute on the Time Passes Verb timer). Keeping yourself stacked with Funds cards is important, as running out of them will eventually affect your hunger & ultimately your Health, setting you up to lose the game. Negative effects like hunger, ailments, & injury cost Funds cards to remove. The late game will also introduce additional money sinks. Be careful how you use your Health card(s) as they are critical to keeping yourself away from a losing scenario. In the early game, they can be added to the Work Verb with a chance to be turned into an Injury Card (use Funds to fix). The Bequest Verb has now changed into the Study Verb despite having the same light bulb icon. You also now have a Bequest card that you will add to the Study Verb. Notice that while having the Study Verb open with the new Bequest card slotted in it, that it opens a new "Approach" card slot. Make a decision to add either your Reason or Passion card into this slot & click START. Remember, you can click on empty slots & tooltip icons for additional hints & descriptions. Now that your Study Verb has been slotted with the Bequest card & either the Reason or Passion card, it's time to unpause the game. Allow the Study Verb timer to run down to receive additional text cards that you can add to the Study Verb when you wish. Most likely the Time Passes Verb timer also ran down by this point & grabbed another Funds card from your stash. Pause the game while you consider your next moves. One of the best ways to keep money flowing is by climbing the corporate ladder of Glover & Glover. You can open this opportunity up by adding the Reason Card to the Work Verb. Be wary, your boss will be a hardass & demand a perfectionistic work ethic... You should now have a basic understanding of how the game flows & can begin to experiment with how using different cards & combinations on various Verbs branches out the story & gameplay. As storylines unfold, your play area will fill up with cards & Verbs that will allow you to do a great many things like founding a cult, sending disciples out on missions, summoning "things," etc. 😈 Helpful Links for Getting Started: ➥ Community Discord: https://discord.gg/ub2tE6Y ➥ Beginner's Guide - by Tssha ➥ Reference Guide (w/ spoilers!) - by Escapade84 _______________________________ * For my 11k character review & guide version, CLICK HERE. (Steam limit is 8k) I hope you found this helpful! ◥▶◀◤Show moreShow less
40.3 hours at review217 people found this helpful
Received for free
Not recommendedSteam player
You've seen them. The negative reviews where the reviewer had clocked a gameplay time in the triple digits. And you've wondered, as I have, what boob can put his thumb down after so much playing, regardless of what the game is? Well, while I can't speak for other cases, Cultist Simulator is what it took to make me such a boob. The world-building is brilliant. The writing, excellent. The atmosphere, gripping. The H.P.Lovecraftiness, unmatched by any other game I've heard of. It's downright remarkable how some old musty table, with some cards strewn across, can be all it takes to transport you into a vivid penny-dreadful Victorian London, full of supernatural forces and odd characters. The game is a series of pure 10/10's -- apart from that one little thing, that -50/10. The interaction with the game itself. It is more brutally horrendous than any of the Lovecraftian abominations otherwise depicted in-game. I cannot fathom that the devs do not want to implement a few simple checkboxes, which would rid you of the mind-numbing endlessly repetitive drudgeries that ultimately become the game itself, letting you instead focus on managing the higher-level strategies that you're trying to accomplish as you enjoy the game's excellent writing and atmosphere. I mean, you've just finished the 1735th round of your "daily job", which you must fit in alongside your other Cult activities lest you go bankrupt. So now you have to click-and-drag for the 1736th time that yes you do want to perform again that job. As your hand drags the mouse, you can hear the agonizing death screams of a million of your brain cells that just got eaten alive by Chtulhu, and then -- as you need again to click-and-drag how yes you will also provide the mandatory Health (or Reason) card for that job, which you do have available, justlemmefindit okhereitis -- you can hear the helpless pathetic death rattle of the next million brain cells. Instead of there being a checkbox which, until unchecked, simply keeps repeating the same last action that was ordered, never interrupting the flow until something abnormal happens, like it can't find a Health card. When the player wants to pursue some other work next (e.g. Cult rituals), she just unchecks the box and the flow will halt when that work finishes. So much worthless waste of the player's time would be eliminated just by that. The other necessary checkbox would be per-card, saying "stop the flow when this card decays or transforms". That would keep the entirety of the game-design as it is, while killing the drudgery. But right now, 90% of the gameplay is spent attentively looking at three to ten timers, waiting and waiting for the right moment, so to manually stop the flow when something needs to be undertaken. This makes playing Cultist Simulator a strangely manic form of watching paint dry. It shouldn't be like this. As counterexample, take the Civilization games. In them, you are concurrently juggling more pins than you are in Cultist Simulator, except that the game respects you. Civilization will always take you in turn through the items that require your attention, handling by itself the items you already told it how to handle, and letting you reconfigure any of that anytime. Cultist Simulator just needs a checkbox on Actions and a checkbox on Cards to do the same -- filling the rest with a fast-forward that's actually fast. If the devs do add those checkboxes, they'll get an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me. Until they do, this thumbs-down is all I can do to alert wary travellers, BEWARE. Come not near this tavern. It's a trap. For behind its widely and justifiably lauded highlights hides Chtulhu, who will murder your hours and devour your brain cells.Show moreShow less
127 hours at review1,128 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This game reminds me a lot of Pathologic. It's compelling, not fun. It's interesting, not delightful. It's brutal, not comfortable. It's story, not gameplay. It's confusing, not clear. It's niche, not pandering. It's unique, not mundane. It's unrecommendable, but it has a lot going for it.Show moreShow less
33.9 hours at review156 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
If you've played Sunless Sea, you know how this goes: wonderful setting, theming, writing, and tone, paired with absolutely horrible gameplay that mandates drudgery and repetition. It celebrates a lack of clarity as "exploration" and opacity as "mystery," which is forgivable except that you need to repeat the same actions X-hundred times to get to your next nugget of exploration or story. I desperately want to like these games. They seem to be made by people who are placing an abstract concept of art over the concrete necessity of gameplay. I know players who have really gotten into it and really enjoyed it. That is you investing your time and effort to make up for bad design decisions.Show moreShow less
1.4 hours at review625 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I was somewhere I didn't want to be. I was unable to leave for 4 years. During one of those years, I was somewhere where I was allowed to have a tablet system. One could buy songs. One could rent movies. One could buy games. Looking through the list of games I stumbled upon Cultist Simulator. Being a captive audience, I woke each day, obtained my tablet, and sat down for nonstop Cultist Simulator sessions... I liked the game. Then I loved it. Then I worshiped it. Then it became a part of me. And then, just like that, no tablet. No cultist simulator while captive in another dark place where I could only spend time playing sudoku, and teaching a double murderer how to read. Now I am in a brighter place. A place where I can determine the channel by holding a TV remote. Where I can choose my food. Where I can wear pants without an elastic waistband. And looking back, I remember I had three things on my list once liberated: * Go to Subway and get a foot-long; * Get a laptop computer; and * Download/install Cultist Simulator. And start all over again. Sometimes we find the best things in the darkest of places. -- Paul --------- 4/13/24 UPDATE: Still playing after 1.5 years of freedom, and still loving it.Show moreShow less
0.4 hours at review140 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Yuk. Started off loving this game... intriguing idea to start a game having no idea who you even are, what you're doing or how game works and find out / define all those things as you play. Also, great writing, nice art style and I'm a fan of anything Cthulu-esque and noir in style. However, game play rapidly gets VERY annoying as there's a constant set of timers all going on different speeds and you have to keep mashing pause - it sort of ends up feeling like a game of whack-a-mole after a while where insteadof taking in the unfolding story or lush art you're just taking orders from the timers like a maniacal machine. I would have preferred this to use a turn-based system instead I think, in which case I think I'd have probably loved it. As it is, game somehow made me feel a little ill - which is perhaps appropriate for a Lovecraftian tale but not when it comes from getting sick of the core gameplay.Show moreShow less
3.4 hours at review391 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Cultist Simulator is a cute resource management game with robust intertwining systems. In this game, you move a bunch of cards of different colors around, using them with a number of verbs, which can lead to unexpected results. At the same time, you need to balance various aspects of your life, because excess in almost any area can lead to a game over. Some people also call Cultist Simulator 'story rich' and 'narrative driven', but I can't for the love of me see why. Don't get me wrong: as expected from Kennedy, the worldbuilding is flavorful and odd, and the writing is great. The thing is, you can skip almost all of it, mostly using color-coding to achieve your goal. But even if you don't (why would you play a text-heavy game if you were planning to skip it, after all?), it doesn't turn into a narrative for me. Cultists aren't characters I get any sort of attachment to, they're just variously-colored faceless cards. I don't choose my cult's core ideology based on which I like best, but based on gameplay perks they provide. And the repetitious actions quickly become a chore—which, I guess, was the plan with your mundane dayjob, but are dreams and expeditions also supposed to feel repetitive? I doubt it. It's not like the game doesn't create narratives—like I said, it is mechanically robust, which leads to interesting interactions. But those are interactions of mechanics and numbers, not characters and concepts. If a cultist dies, it does not become a story of tragic personal loss (because he's a faceless card, not an actually fleshed-out character), but rather an 'ugh, I've ran out of sugar, guess I'll leave baking until tomorrow then' type of story: a story about resources. Compare and contrast that to Sunless Sea, A House of Many Doors, or even Fallen London itself, all of which had actual characters and plots, that you could get attached to. Cultist Simulator is definitely not a bad game. It's a nice management sim, if you like juggling resources. The flavor is brillinat (how many games do you know that have a stat called 'Moth'?). The execution is fully serviceable. The trial and error, through which you are supposed to explore the robust systems, are fine by me. But I personally think that the game utterly fails at what people seem to praise it for. It has flavor instead of a story, resourse systems instead of a world, and nothing, really, instead of a protagonist that you could identify and sympathize with. It's like a Magic the Gathering match. MtG also has characters, factions, and flavor, and a duel can sure as hell be memorable. But would you really call it story-driven?Show moreShow less
3.4 hours at review103 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game is worth a lot, but it is not worth the time it asks of you. It's not even close. Are there interesting things to discover? Absolutely. Does the complete lack of a tutorial allow you to discover more? Definitely. But it will take several hours, even playing on the highest speed, to learn even the basics. You will lose without understanding what you could have done differently. You will lose several times having barely scratched the surface of any of the actual mysteries. And every time you lose, you will have to start over, including the crushingly boring early stages that you've already mastered. Absolutely nothing would have been lost by explaining the most basic mechanics. It teaches you how to earn money, but doesn't teach you how to deal with the other basic threats, and there is nothing gained from this. By all means, the occult stuff should be unexplained, it should be cryptic, it should be there for you to discover, but there is no reason that the basic mechanics should be hidden, and it really hurts the game that you have to either fail repeatedly, replaying the least interesting parts of the game while you trial-and-error your way to learning the basic defenses or look up those basics and risk accidentally spoiling some of the more interesting stuff too. In the first six hours, I played basically the same 2 hours three times. The second game, I learned how to overcome the problem I had in the first. In the third game, I learned to overcome the problem from the second. I was kicked out of the third game, with seemingly no warning, by a "minor victory" because I put a card into a slot asking for that card. This "minor victory" is clearly supposed to be a joke, but it was not a joke worth several hours of my time. This is the main theme with Cultist Simulator: it does not respect your time at all. By this point, I had figured out how to avoid most of the basic threats, and I knew how to avoid that "victory", but I could not bear to replay the beginning, and it took me about a week to come back to the game. When I initially wrote this review, I had given up. I have now completed a normal victory, and have a reasonably strong understanding of all the basic mechanics. And I feel even more strongly that this game is not worth your time. Initially, the unexplained mechanics caused me to lose, forcing me to redo large swathes of the early game. But later, once you understand how to handle them, they become an annoyance. The middle and late game are characterized by an endless shuffling of cards, going through the same motions to deal with the basic threats every time, over and over, for hours. Game-ending frustration is merely replaced with interminable tedium. This is once again a theme in the game's mechanics, and upon reflection I think maybe why they're unexplained: they're all mystery, no substance. Once the mystery is gone, the only thing left is tedious repetition. Once you get to the mid-game, you will likely spend a long time struggling through, and it will feel very grindy at points. There might be ways to mitigate the grind, but you won't know them. You will get runs of bad luck - the game has a tremendous amount of RNG. If you get too unlucky: start over. You will have long periods of frustrating, uninteresting two-steps-forward-one-step back progression. You will finally achieve something new and interesting, and then have to go through the motions cleaning up the fallout in the same ways for another ten minutes, or you will be trying to progress towards something, put everything in place, and an inopportune event will require you to start all your preparations over again. The final move to complete a normal victory is a particularly salient example of the latter. What little UI is there is not explained at all, and you quickly have to manage an enormous number of cards essentially by hand. I understand wanting to cater to people who want to make their own card organization, but there should be basic tools to make that doable, and there are not. The logic with which the cards are placed is frustrating and seemingly inconsistent. Something as simple as keeping your basic three types of resource cards stacked is impossible without doing it by hand. Identical cards with identical traits will sometimes still refuse to stack for no clear reason. If you have a window open that needs five cards, and you have four placed, and you accidentally click a card that doesn't go into one of the slots, the window will close and open a random different window in which to use that card you clicked. There are different mechanical types of cards, but there is no way to keep those types grouped except by hand. You will often find yourself wanting to repeat the same action over and over, but there is no way to do this except by hand. Likewise, there is no way to queue anything, and many timings will be fairly tight, so you will likely pause often. Once you have a handle on how to deal with threats, here is no way to automate or reduce the card shuffling this entails in any way. Speaking of pausing - you must do it by hand. There no option to simply skip time forward to the next thing that changes state, or to slow down. Sometimes you will be mashing pause and unpause trying to just barely catch a .2 second window. Even on fast, you will frequently feel like you are playing an idle game, and there is no way to make it go faster. The game is adamant about wasting your time. Several elements of the UI are seemingly just broken. Clicking a slot in a verb makes all the cards that can go into that slot shimmer. But you will quickly begin to encounter cards that can go into the slot...but don't do anything. Either they can go into the slot, but you can't actually hit the start button (why can they go in the slot then?!) or they go into the slot, don't change the text, and when the timer runs out you just get them back (again, why can they go in the slot?!). The performance is often surprisingly bad, especially after playing for a few hours (and my desktop profoundly exceeds the specifications for the game). Restarting fixes it, but given how much time the game takes, it is frustrating that this occurs. Even when it isn't stuttering or slowing down, the autosave (by default every 5 minutes) frequently prevents all other actions: you'll be going to drag a card into a slot, and it simply won't go in, and then you'll notice the tiny autosave icon in the corner, and have to grab the card again. Over many hours and the endless shuffling through of rote patterns, this becomes very annoying. These are minor issues, but the performance and the interruption during autosaves feel incredibly silly for a card-and-timer game in 2019. The game is full of very neat ideas. The writing is fantastic, and there is an incredible depth to the lore if you are interested in looking for it. There were things that brought a genuine smile to my face. The occult stuff does a great job giving the feeling of plumbing mysterious and dangerous depths. But then I looked at the clock, saw how many hours I had spent on pointless tedium, rubbed my sore clicking finger, and asked myself if I had gotten as much out of it as I put in. And the answer was a resounding "no". This is a game by a developer who respects the player's intelligence, but has absolutely zero respect for their time. It's worth a lot, but it's not worth the amount of time it asks of you. There is no reason it should ask so much, and there are so many ways it could have been made more reasonable without losing any of what makes it special. It is a game of uncompromising ideas that demonstrates starkly why compromise is sometimes important.Show moreShow less
5.6 hours at review277 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Some games you play and then recommend them to all your friends. This is not one. Other games you play and then (stop playing, thinking you're done, and then go back and play some more, and then) recommend it to your one specific weird gamer friend who has decent tolerance for grind and really appreciates great writing and atmosphere and quirky unexpected mechanics. But you recommend it to them SO HARD, because for that particular kind of person, Cultist Simulator is an amazing experience.Show moreShow less
154.7 hours at review99 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game is just not fun. I really wanted to enjoy this game. I liked Fallen London and Sundless Sea, but unfortunately this game suffers from the #1 flaw that Sunless Sea had, but enphasized it even more. Permadeath does not work in thematic games. The first time around I was really immersed in the text of the game. All the little tidbits were really facinating and I loved it. Then I failed. And just like Sunless Sea, no matter how many different choices you made, all the text and game play felt pretty much the same. So, you stop paying attention to the theme to understand how the game works, so you can make it all the way through the couple hours it takes to set yourself up to where you were. Then you focus on the new bits of text you get and you fail to see your facination or dread get too high. That isn't fun. Fun rougelikes work with permadeath because the gameplay itself is fun. It is about the journey, not the destination. This game and Sunless Sea are not like that. The more you play while experiencing less new things, the more tedious it becomes. That is exactly what will happen. I am not even going to detil how awful trying to manage the organization of the cards is, because that is second seat to the game play, but it is horrible. Great concept, horrible execution. I love permadeath games, but they just don't know how to do it. Stick to theme over gameplay, that's always been the stong points of the games.Show moreShow less
30.1 hours at review276 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.