Cultist Simulator: Cards against humanity, am I right?
Alexis Kennedy – founder of Failbetter Games, creator of Fallen London, director of Sunless Seas, freelance writer for BioWare and Paradox, and the cause of some of the worst vocabulary envy we’ve ever experienced – has a new game, folks.
It’s a computer card/board game called Cultist Simulator, and yes, it’s a bit weird. We’d be frankly concerned about him if it wasn’t.
Though it’s just launched on Kickstarter today, we’ve known about Cultist Simulator for a little while. We keep up-to-date with what Kennedy’s up to and – other than strictly off-limits things like secret Dragon Age projects – he’s pretty forthcoming with what’s going on.
Cultist Simulator is Kennedy’s first in-house project for new microstudio, Weather Factory, since he left Failbetter Games amicably in 2016, though he has written for various games and publications in the intervening period.
There’s also been a prototype available of the game on itch.io (which Kennedy tells us has seen “8,000 downloads; not bad for no marketing”) and there’s a rather spiffy trailer, too:
We typically don’t cover Kickstarter games before they’re at least funded, as we don’t want to feel like we have, in any way, contributed to the swirling vortex of entropy-fuelled disappointment that so often befalls crowdfunding.
In this case, though, given Kennedy’s track record with other projects (all of Failbetter’s games have seen crowdfunding in some form) and the relatively modest scope of the project, it’s probably about as safe a bet as you could see within the scope of crowdfunded video games. Plus a playable prototype of Cultist Simulator – as we saw with the System Shock remake – goes a long way to settle the collective nerves.
At the time of writing, Cultist Simulator has already raised over eleven grand. That’s an indicator of the love that exists for Kennedy and his own particular brand of abstruse, arcane wordsmithery, and disturbing but beautiful world-building. We’d be very surprised if this one needed the whole weekend to be funded, never mind the full 30 days afforded to the project on Kickstarter.
Oh, and there’s a reward level where you get to choose some art from the game to be tattooed onto Kennedy’s flesh, subject to veto approval from his girlfriend.
Things are gonna get weird, folks. Good weird.
