About the Game



Cultist Simulator is a game of apocalypse and yearning from Alexis Kennedy, creator of Fallen London and Sunless Sea. Play as a seeker after unholy mysteries, in a 1920s-themed setting of hidden gods and secret histories. Perhaps you're looking for knowledge, or power, or beauty, or revenge. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world.
In this roguelike narrative card game, what you find may transform you forever. Every choice you make, from moment to moment, doesn't just advance the narrative - it also shapes it.
Become a scholar of the unseen arts. Search your dreams for sanity-twisting rituals. Craft tools and summon spirits. Indoctrinate innocents. Seize your place as the herald of a new age.

In this 20-40 hour game, you'll:
Combine cards to tell your own story in a rich, Lovecraftian world of ambition, appetite and abomination. Corrupt your friends. Consume your enemies. There is never only one history.
Found a cult, dedicated to the Red Grail, or the Witch-and-Sister, or the Forge of Days. Recruit Believers and promote them to Disciples to serve as burglars, researchers, cat's-paws. Use your disciples to keep you fed - or feed on your disciples.
Unravel arcane, unacknowledged mysteries. Translate grimoires and glean their lore. Locate and pillage the Star Shattered Fane. Penetrate the realm of the Hours, and win a place in their service. Perhaps - if you are very cunning - you may even glimpse the Mansus.
Outwit rivals, investigators and the increasingly suspicious Authorities. Your own altered Appetites may force you to act abominably, but your Cause must not be stopped.
Transcend death with a story-driven legacy system. Perhaps your inheritors will complete the Rite of the Crucible Soul. Perhaps they'll find peace in a pleasing career. Perhaps they'll bring the Dawn.
Screenshots
16 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
- Fixed font on Chinese menu screen proems
Fixed an Apostle legacy bug that made it impossible to heal followers wounded by an enemy Long - but only if you were playing a localized (non-English) version of the game. No words enough to convey how hard the Devil worked to make this bug possible.
- Some sounds - namely, a card dropping in a slot, and a game speed being changed via a hotkefy - were not playing since god knows when.
- Improved performance in Exile when arriving in a new city with a lot of cash.
- Fixed a rare bug that broke the main menu if you were mashing buttons too eagerly during the splash screen.
- Fixed an erroneous text display in various escaped spirit hauntings.
- There was a missing colon in a substantial Edge commission's label. Could this be the very last typo in the entire game ?! Will you be able, oh dear players, to spot more ?!
- MODDING: IDs of entities are now completely case-insensitive for all purposes (in-game access, modifying, inheriting, localizing etc).
- MODDING: (super nerdy) Console autocomplete suggestions are now only displayed if there's more than 3 characters typed in - this way you aren't presented to choose from every entity in the game that starts with a letter E.
- HOTFIX A.2: Translation is correctly applied to verbs' initial slots.
- Added 150% UI scale.
- Added a Font Size setting. May lead to stranger looks on higher ends.
- MODDING: 'Sort' property for Elements, a string, the format is 'group.order' - ex. 'a1.z1'. Controls the order of Aspects appearance in card and situation info. Aspects are first sorted by 'group', then by 'order', then, within the same order, by the amount of aspect present, starting with the highest.
- Several important Aspects are now sorted.
This leaves us fixing such critical bugs such as:
- A bug with keybinds showing default values until you loaded the tabletop at least once.
- A bug when cancelling a key rebind resulted in keyboard controls not working anymore.
- A bug when using ESC key in the main menu would not close an opened dialog.
- A few typos in mod loading logs.
- 2023.12.s.2: Mouse wheel functionality restored.
- 2023.12.s.2: Fixed a bug with Options menu tabs not initializing.
- 2023.12.s.2: Several small enhancements in a deck draw preview display.
- 2023.12.s.3: A rare greedy slot crash is fixed.
- 2023.12.s.3: A safenet against infinite saving loop on new game.
- 2023.12.s.3: Contentment now *finally* acts correctly on influence upgrade and subversion.
- 2023.12.s.4: Added more belts and braces against a very rare infinite saving chain.
- MODDING: Following the arabic font support added in the previous patch, a possibility for right-to-left text display is added too. "rtl": true in culture JSON to enable.
- Dropping cards on other cards while multi-dragging led to unexpected situations.
- Fixed a confusion in German localization of Skills' descriptions, and other minor problems in various locs.
- Fixed empty description in Starvation verb.
- Yet another fix for GOG achievements not unlocking on the storefront side despite being unlocked in the Collection.
- Greedy slots don't bug out on low framerates.
- When a recipe warmup ends, any card-to-slot travel animation aimed at it completes instead of failing.
- Zoom keys (Q/E by default) work sensibly at last - holding results in a continuous zoom instead of having to tap.
- HOTFIX: Verb SFXes work once again.
- MODDING: new xtrigger morph effect - 'setmutation' - for non-additive mutations.
- MODDING/HOTFIX: expulsions for instant recipes work correctly once again.
- MODDING: At the request, added Arabic font support (for that, set fontscript to 'arabic' in culture file).
- Fixed 'Our Enemy's Identity' description.
- Fixed an assortment of memory leaks.
- Cards in verb slots and outputs don't play their decay animation if the verb window is closed.
- Small rework of the influences' upgrade and subversion:
- Interactions with Contentment are less erratic.
- The Lore slot doesn't spoil lore fragments' descriptions.
- Verb windows now display text in a consistent size and use scrollbars if it doesn't fit.
- Experimental changes in the flow of timers.
- Alt recipes correctly display their deck draws (instead of displaying the main recipe's deck draws).
- Fixed an incorrect description in the Russian localization of the Younger Sister.
- Fixed a verb timer sometimes not assuming the correct colour.
- Restored a special audio cue for the Time verb.
- Cards in the Mansus disappear dramatically again.
- Cards in the Mansus are flipped before vanishing - that was an accidental change, sorry!
- Added a description for missing Essential slot requirements.
- Escape button does not close an opened verb window while the settings window is open.
- Exile cities are properly highlighted and faded once again.
- Cards in verbs don't occasionally jump when clicked.
- Streamlined the pause behaviour in the Mansus and settings menu.
- Fixed the Mansus portal window not closing under mysterious circumstances.
- Fix for cards sometimes thinking that they occupy slightly more space than they are in reality, and thus preventing cards to be placed in a space near them, despite it being actually empty.
- At some point, cards that were supposed to be invisible - but only inside verbs - became also invisible on the table - but, like, confusingly invisible. Now visible again, as they always were.
- MODDING: An order in which element's aspects react to xtriggers is now consistent (by id, alphabetical).
- MODDING: Entities now have a '$depends' and '$incompatible' property - a list of mod ids that are required/forbidden for this entity definition to be applied. More specifically, $depends mean 'all listed mods must be enabled', and $incompatible means 'none of listed mods must be enabled'.
Mod id is taken from serapeum_catalogue_number.txt in the mod's folder - it is created automatically on first Workshop upload, but can be created manually for non-Steam users. If no file is present, mod id equals its name.
- MODDING: Custom input settings now work properly.
- MODDING: Aspect xtriggers are significantly reworked - this was an obscure feature and it collected dust for years, but now, hopefully, assumed its final form:
- All aspects of a card now react to xtriggering (previously only mutations did).
- The 'Transform' morph effect now transforms a card, even when triggered by an aspect. This way, all morph effects work uniformly, regardless of where they are defined.
- MODDING: The new 'xexts' property on the elements. A string-string pair, works in a way similar to xtriggers - whenever a card meets a key-catalyst of an xext, it displays the description of this xext in its current verb.
- MODDING: Fixed a bug when using an expulsion on an instant additional recipe didn't work.
- MODDING: $plus/$minus work again.
- MODDING: Levers now can have default values, and you can change default values of vanilla levers.
- MODDING: Card labels display rich text correctly.
I'M SORRY I CAN ONLY EVER TYPE IN ALL CAPS EVER AGAIN
- HOTFIX: Verb text scrollbars weren't appearing and/or acting irrationally sometimes.
- At some point, cards that were supposed to be invisible - but only inside verbs - became also invisible on the table - but, like, confusingly invisible. Now visible again, as they always were.
- Fix for cards sometimes thinking that they occupy slightly more space than they are in reality, and thus preventing cards to be placed in a space near them, despite it being actually empty.
- MODDING: $plus/$minus work again.
- MODDING: levers now can have default values, and you can change default values of vanilla levers.
- MODDING: Card labels display rich text correctly.
Any time you run someone else’s code on your machine, there’s a risk. In theory, a modder could include malicious code in a DLL mod. The risk is very low – AV programs may notice it, Steam will block malicious modders – and the same applies to games anyway – there’s nothing in principle to stop a game developer from putting malicious functionality in their work.
But there was an incident earlier this year where a modder did include malicious code in a Cities: Skylines mod. It was trivial – it just interfered with other mods as part of some sort of community drama, it wasn’t ransomware or anything. It was spotted within days. And it only affected about fifty people. But it did happen. (A few months later we got an email from a security researcher pointing this out.)
{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/31397842/0bcc7c72f8158d9a08c0e2334bef366f469a8577.png
So from the beginning of next year, we’re making it slightly harder to enable DLL mods. All you’ll need to do is install a gatekeeper mod, Ghirbi, and all Ghirbi does is show you a notice making you aware of the theoretical risk. This is basically the same as making the user tick a box to say ‘I am OK with this’ – but most people tick most checkboxes without reading the notice, especially when they’re playing games.
[You won’t need to download or install Ghirbi to use DLL mods until after our next patch, NEMESIA, but you can install him now to save hassle. If you don’t use Steam, you can download Ghirbi here.]
Honestly I think the risk here isn’t traffic-accident low, it’s hit-by-a-meteorite low. But if someone was hit by a meteorite because they’d installed our game, then even if it was a bizarre accident, we’d feel bad about it. So we’re adding a meteorite warning it’s impossible to ignore. Happy Christmas.
- Yet another round of card-handlery tweaks:
- Cards put more effort into finding a landing zone as close to the hover position as possible.
- Card ghosts sometimes ended up in a wrong position (and generally made no sense).
- Cards save their preferred tabletop location between sessions.
- Cards should no longer completely overlap each other - or, at least, should do this significantly less often.
- Cards correctly replace each other in slots.
- Dropzones are now more proficient (and elegant) in their craft.
- Verbs occupy a more modest space on the grid.
- Verbs go straight to the dropzone when spawned.
- Different kinds of camera movement should feel smoother, and are less interruptive towards each other.
- Dragged cards follow the camera movement.
- When a card is moving into a verb slot, it no longer slows down if said verb's windows opens or closes.
- Initial board setup respects the grid.
- Interactions with the Mansus are slightly oiled up.
And also:
- Shattered Risen could sometimes lack Follower aspect.
- Buying a profane weapon with another profane weapon does not result in mutual annihilation.
- Rare freeze on \"Collect All\" is fixed.
- MODDING: Deck effects now support aspect references, as in <i>\"deckeffects\": { \"deckeffects\": \"lantern\" }</i>.",
Current Release
22090405
Uploaded Apr 17, 2026
System Requirements
How to Install
cultistsimulator.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
323 MB
22090405
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View AllDownload Cultist Simulator for PC with a direct link or via torrent. Get the full version of Cultist Simulator for free. Cultist Simulator is a Indie released by Weather Factory.