Meet the occult librarian simulation you never expected to want so badly.
Weather Factory has announced an Anthology Edition of its debut game, Cultist Simulator – and dropped an official announcement of its next, Book of Hours.
Cultist Simulator: Anthology Edition is a definitive version of the game with brand new additions, a celebration of the bizarre narrative card game’s 1st birthday, and seems also to mark the end of the game’s development. Thankfully, we know what’s coming next, thanks to a new trailer:
Book of Hours began life as a speculative tweet from Weather Factory co-founder Alexis Kennedy (you can read it below), but it’s become more than the mooted Cultist Simulator ‘expandalone’ in the months since that first mention.
“That original tweet really was the product of about ninety seconds thought,” explains Kennedy to IGN, “and we’ve grown the team so we can do something a bit fancier. So it’s going to be a fully-fledged game. It’s all the same setting [as Cultist Simulator], which we’re calling the Secret Histories, and you might recognise some of the library visitors if you’ve played Cultist Simulator, but this is a new route into that setting. An easier route than Cultist, honestly.”
Book of Hours has you taking on the role of a librarian for a repository of the occult, and is being designed as a more contemplative, less punishing take on Cultist Simulator’s narrative card game approach. Players will be tasked with talking to visitors to the library, finding books to serve their needs and, in the process, altering the tales of those characters and the world outside your place of work.
idea: extremely relaxed Cultist Simulator expandalone
you’re a librarian
books arrive in your occult library and you just examine, catalogue and arrange them, then provide them to visitors
very low challenge, lots of careful board organisation
— Alexis Kennedy (@alexiskennedy) January 16, 2019
“We’re re-using some of the core mechanics [of Cultist Simulator]”, Kennedy explains. “So you’re still combining cards – for Reason or Passion or The Secret of Stones or An Unusually Reptilian Cat – to unlock snippets of story and manage resources. But you can take books off the shelves to combine with those cards, and when visitors come in you can decide how the dialogue goes by popping cards into their speech slot – so Reason to talk them round or Contentment to talk them down or the second volume of Travelling at Night to teach them how to access secret dreams. Or a Shush card to get them to stop talking. Or an Unusually Reptilian Cat to make them shut up and go away.”
Rather than the air of oppression created by Cultist Simulator’s ticking timers and the looming permadeath they can portend, fellow co-founder Lottie Bevan’s come up with a neat description of the atmosphere Weather Factory’s aiming for with Book of Hours: ‘spooky hygge’.
“We want you to feel that you’re in a familiar room with the rain rattling on the roof and the firelight playing on the old leather spines of the books,” explains Kennedy, “but also that there’s a storm getting up outside and the sea’s smashing on the rocks and if you open the wrong book you might see something you really regret.”
As you might be able to tell, that cosier approach doesn’t mean Book of Hours will be non-threatening – “if you’re careless and keep opening cursed books without taking precautions it’s game over” – but it will certainly allow for a little more experimentation than its predecessor. That’s a very deliberate choice: “We want to keep the air of discovery from Cultist, but we want people to spend much less time fumbling in the dark and much less time looking at a game-over screen.”
Our only look at Book of Hours so far is this image. Shh!
Existing fans will be glad to know that there’s a layer of complexity beyond the base interactions, using the knowledge and power of your books and the relationships they help you form to serve or irritate the warring gods of the world, with grand or dire consequences (consequences varied enough, I imagine, that replays are very much encouraged).
But at the core of it all is the simple joy and myriad effects of reading. Books will serve as a background stories, an upgrade system (learning Latin from one book, for example, might help you read another) and a dialogue tool. You won’t be reading them in full but, like a true scholar, using snippets to help you in myriad ways. “Think about the books on a wizard’s shelf,” Kennedy tells me, “or the books in Giles’ library in Buffy. You keep hitting the books to find stuff out.”
And above all of this, you can live out your wildest, most perverted librarian fantasies: “I want people to be able to alphabetise obsessively, or to invent their own classification systems, or just to dump all the books in a pile on the shelf and post screenshots that drive other players wild with rage.”
As someone who loves the obtuse set-up of Cultist Simulator, but felt cowed by its sheer difficulty, Book of Hours sounds like it comes with a lowered point of entry I want, but without losing its predecessors’ depth. There’s just one caveat: “It’s not a game you’ll enjoy unless you want to read,” warns Kennedy, “but I can’t see many people buying a game set in a library unless they do.”
What you’ll get as part of Cultist Simulator: Anthology Edition.
Book of Hours will be getting a Kickstarter campaign later this year (and you can join the Weather Factory mailing list to learn more as it appears), but if you want a taste of Weather Factory’s unique brand of eldritch card dealings, Cultist Simulator: Anthology Edition will arrive on May 30. It comprises the base game, all its free updates, a New Game+ mode, a revamped UI system, the previously released Dancer DLC, the game’s full soundtrack and two new story DLC packs: Priest and Ghoul (which existing players can buy separately).
Cultist Simulator: Anthology Edition will be available on Steam, Humble and GoG for £25.90 / $33.11 USD (those unusual pricings are because it amounts to 15% off all Cultist Simulator content). Bought separately, the Priest and Ghoul DLC packs will cost £2.50 / $2.99 USD each.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s UK Deputy Editor, and a teenage career aptitude test told him to be a librarian. It’s fate. Follow him on Twitter.
Disclosure: Humble Bundle is owned by Ziff Davis, the parent company of IGN. Humble Bundle and IGN operate completely independently, and no special consideration is given to Humble Bundle announcements or promotions for coverage.
