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Vertinsky and Damiil again

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bachelor of medicine arriving in town. oh boy i sure hope nothing bad happens

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Meta: On Iterating

I know I've said this before, and it's probably been said a million times by older fans of the game, but the spirit has taken me now that I'm 2/3 of the way through the Changeling Run of Classic.

And... I have thoughts. Thoughts i can now expand upon because I've seen a good portion of every plotline.

I know the HBomberGuy video most people seem to base their assessment of the first game on (especially if they're disinclined to play it. Which no shade because this game handles like ASS. The only way I've been able to get this far is with console commands. Fr.) Claims that if you aren't playing as them, a given healer is At Their Worst.

But... That's not what I got from actually sitting down for...

...76 hours, apparently. And playing it. And this DOESN'T take into consideration the time I've spent reading the scripts to see alternative dialogue trees.

What I got was, that every session, if played in order (Bachelor, Haruspex, then Changeling), feels like it Iterates on the one that came before it. Playing as the Bachelor is first iteration. The first round of attempts. No one knows what the fuck they're doing or what is going on, and as Daniil you kind of have to go along with events as they are. As such, THIS is the playthrough where everyone is At Their Worst and fucking up.

Justification and further explanations below the cut because I'm possessed this fine Thursday morning.

Also... Just, up top: I know a lot of this can be explained by the Devs saying they ran out of time to make the game they expected to and had to recycle characters and such. And it might even be Dev intention for the characters to be at their worst when not being played... Yadda Yadda. But I live in a world where I take things that are made as they exist and try to justify them internally. It makes for a more fun, more compelling view of the narrative. It's very easy to say "well, creator intent" or "creator failings and constraints" but that's... boring as shit. Cool for context, dull for meta. Anyway. Onward.

So, Like... In the Bachelor Run we see shit that clearly shows everyone is still figuring things out:

The Haruspex is never once in his lair. He works out of the Long Block of the Termitary for the middle chunk of the game. Even when you're healing his Bound for him, you have to talk to him in the building next door. Which is fucking Bizarre in context because in the Changeling Run he's there as early as what? Day 1? And quite often. and will even send other people there if they expect to find him. (See: Day 7 when he tells you to bring a family Daniil fucked over a bunch of Medicine while they wait for him there.) Almost like... that never worked out for him in the first iteration of the plague.

The Changeling has hardly any part in Daniil's playthrough too. You hardly see her until the Evening of Day 6. (And you meet Artemy on what? Day 5? Everyone is super wary of each other.) She barely interferes with his handling of things. Almost like she doesn't know the pattern yet either.

And in the Bachelor Run (and maybe this is just me being biased as a person that does disease research and public health nonsense) you don't really have much motivation to choose the Bachelor's ending. Artemy's argument is much more compelling when you're a doctor there to help and save people. Especially when you consider what the Utopian's plan actually is. Like. "we're gonna destroy the town and build a new settlement under the Polyhedron but it's thematically the same." Like... nah fam. Y'all are in the middle of fucking nowhere. The train station is still going to be on the other side of the river. You don't have the infrastructure to move it! You HAVE NO INFRASTRUCTURE. (Something Daniil has a wholeass Quest to complain about.) Sure, yes, move the settlement but Razing It To The Ground is not how you should do that considering how many people fucking live here with nowhere to go are you shitting me? It's September in Russia. By the time you get any sincere building done it'll be winter and people are gonna start dying again. That makes Zero Sense.

And Daniil's handling of finding out he's a toy bears the crushing gravitas of that being a first revelation. Like the Player finds out and is the same level of "quiet but with feeling: what the fuck" Daniil is. And no one believes him, but they're still gentle with him.

Then you boot up the Haruspex playthrough and try again. And AS THE HARUSPEX, you get access to things like a lair. You talk to Aspity early on. You start building this rapport with her (which becomes RELEVANT in the Changeling Run).

Daniil clearly remembers what happened in his run and takes measures to stop it or fix things, even at his detriment. He bars Eva from being able to go into the Cathedral so she doesn't fucking die on Day 7. He tries to give the kids fake bullets so they don't shoot at the military and put themselves in danger. He's willing to talk to, vouch for, and take in Artemy (something he says to Fat Vlad) on Day One instead of waiting until Day 5 to meet him and the tentative rapport and respect they established, possibly even affection considering how Artemy responds to being told they're both toys in the bachelor's run:

"You are also better-crafted than me, oynon. Take a look at us-a closer look. You are probably right about me, I'm not a toy to keep-unbending, leather-made, old, and shabby. You, on the other hand, are an entirely different thing! I'm surprised they're playing such a bad game with you..."

Is still there. and he even OPENS with the "two hands clutching the same head" thing like he remembers this tender bullshit from the end of his run.

Clara is also much more active in the Haruspex run. She's actively meddling in his shit near the end and giving him additional ways to weasel around certain portions of his plotline. Like; you can find out about Oyun killing Isidor through a variety of means OTHER than Clara's field trip into the kaiur, but she gives you the option to go and talk to her bound to some Profound Insights not about even about Oyun if you ask the right questions. Even though she doesn't need to. Even though it doesn't quite line up with the narrative you've been working in so far. She reaches out to you on the Day 11 to show you, the player, the extent of her powers and what she's capable of. Because she couldn't convince you she was actually a miracle worker the first time because you never actually saw her DOING THE THING.

The Bachelor's ending also makes way more sense in the Context of Daniil REMEMBERING what happened during his run. Choosing the town didn't save it. We're still here. We're still doing this. People are still dying. Maybe the key to saving people is the crystal tower? Maybe Simon is on to something and the bonds of earthly limitations are what's causing the cycle to repeat. Hence why he tries SO HARD to convince Artemy that Simon/The Polyhedron is his udurgh, not the town. His whole thing is fighting Death and Inevitability so when you're in a town slowly dying in a constant state of Deja Vu over every major event, by the like 8th day, you're probably like "okay, my first instinct, the one to save the town, is probably what I went for last time. And it clearly wasn't the way. What other options are there?" And you end up with Utopian Daniil, who knows the town can't be saved because he tried that already.

And Artemy has the option to listen and to side with him. Not just at the end, but before, when it comes to his udurgh. Like, it's a whole part of the quest where Artemy asks questions Daniil gave him the ideas for. "Can the udurgh be a person? Especially if it's a person like Simon?"

Before people be like "well, maybe Artemy is lying to get info and quest prompts." it's revealed iirc a little in every playthrough that people in Gorkhon can't lie. I think Georgiy says it to Daniil; something easily written off. Katerina confesses it to Artemy when she says that smoke and mirrors are the only control she has over the way she answers questions. And the Rat Prophet just out and out says "everything is true, even the contradictory things" to Clara. Which like, considering the fact that the only out-and-out lie we see is Clara lying about her "sister" and then the town MAKES A SISTER FOR HER to make her statement true, I'm inclined to believe that Artemy's doubt and ability to side with the utopians in his run is... legitimate should the player choose it.

So like.

Also, now that we're here, the Changeling run really clenches things when it comes to "they're iterating and each playthrough is not a Unique Entity. It is influenced by the plotlines that came before it." Artemy is much more active in his lair than he is in the Bachelor run. Daniil is out and about doing shit too, often beating events he was late for in his playthrough (eg. the dead guy at Anna's house, who's still alive when he gets there but was dead in his own run. Who Artemy healed by working with the Ace-of-Diamonds bro in his own playthrough to... no consequence so why not just take his blood the second time and use it to start making tinctures. Those are way more useful than this random guy that tried to fuckin knife me at the train station.)

Both of the other healers are interfering WITH EACH OTHER as well. Daniil doesn't save the prisoners at personal cost because he knows it doesn't matter; Artemy sends medicine to their families. Artemy kills a random Bride instead of Willow Mellow; Daniil arms the gatherer with a shotgun. Despite what I thought going in to the playthrough, Artemy and Daniil aren't looking for each other after the first instance in the plague-infected houses. (And an argument could be made that they are on some level trying to neutralize each other/cancel each other out in Clara's run; Artemy likely being bitter because Daniil tried to lead him "astray" in his own run. Daniil being Extra Bitter about having to do this shit a Third Fucking Time because it's inevitable and fuck this noise. Which also runs into my headcanon that their endings are actually inverted. But that's another meta.) They're playing the game with each other. Trying to fix their own stories while minimizing the damage the other is doing; Artemy playing the Optimist, Daniil the Nihilist. It's why Daniil comes off as weirdly demonic to Clara. He's been through this twice now and just... Does. Not. Care.

Also from a more meta perspective. If each game is an iteration, the player is much more inclined to take risks and do weird shit with every pass. You know what's coming up so you prepare for it. Or you go "I wonder what would happen here." You stock up on food on Day 1 because you know the prices skyrocket on Day 2. You decide which Vlad Oglimsky needs to be given to the termitary based on who you need and who is more likely to die. You say the harsher, weirder shit because you're not compelled by needing more lore to understand what is happening. You already know.

And like... the love plots. The ones that make no sense when you look at each playthrough individually but make way more sense if you take it as a subconscious groundhog's day situation for all of the Taglur. Everyone subconsciously remembering the events from previous playthroughs. Aspity being in love with Artemy makes sense in the Changeling Run despite her having not met him yet in that Run if you consider she had the whole Haruspex plotline to fall. Aglaya's feelings for Artemy starting up after she tells him that they're toys and he handles it well in the Bachelor run, and then his continued determination to save the town in his own being the final nail in the coffin for her. Eva being increasingly infatuated with the Bachelor for three wholeass runs makes her being willing to do Anything For Him in the Changeling run make more sense. Maria and Daniil's whole... nonsense being this weird co-dependent powerplay that starts with her trying to manipulate him and ends with him trying to manipulate Artemy to see where her proposition goes.

HELL DANIIL'S BEEF WITH AGLAYA MAKES MORE SENSE. Like, in the first run it makes sense that he'd be highkey annoyed with her for manipulating him into being involved in her family drama. But not necessarily enough to kill her. By playthrough 2 though, with the context he has, and knowing just how much she knows and how much she manipulated him. Like: "You knew we were toys this whole time. You knew there was no way to win. That failure and replay was inevitable and you STILL involved me in your family bullshit and crushed my whole life for funsies? Get FUCKED." like I'd be PISSED too at that point. I already did a meta about Daniil being just... so bitter and angry at the world because he remembers shit, and this me doubling down on that interpretation.

So yeah, to conclude: I think the general assessment of everyone being Their Worst when they aren't being controlled by the player is... not what we're getting from this game. Instead it's a sliding scale of "I have no idea what is going on" to "I HAVE CEASED TO GIVE ANY FUCKS." on the part of the Bachelor, "-blind panic and constantly being beset upon by people who think he's a serial killer-" to "Well, at least I can mitigate harm I guess? fml" on the part of the Haruspex, and "What am I doing? What even are my powers." to "FUCK ALL YOU BITCHES I'M BASICALLY GOD" on the Part of the Changeling. There's an evolution of competence, a depletion of fucks to give, and an increased inclination to chaos as the iterations of the plague progress and each healer is trying newer things, cleverer things, or bolder things with every attempt because the whole crux of the game is the fight against Inevitability. In order to fight that enemy, you have to find what things are inevitable, it takes, I'd argue, two attempts. The first to get the lay of the land and the powers at play and what events are occurring (the Bachelor run), a second to try to act on the knowledge you acquired before (The Haruspex run). and then the third where you give god the finger and figure shit out (The Changeling Run.) or at least try to.

It's a game where each run isn't an island. Each is influenced by the one that came before it creating this tone of increased desperation to try and break free of the cycle. It's not even about the plague anymore after a while. It's about being trapped by the inevitable. And you feel it. You really do. Logging 80+ hours into a game like this. A game with long silences and lulls. A game that can and will turn on you at the drop of a hat, just when you think you've gotten the rhythm down. That shows you, slowly and with every iteration, just where the inevitability lives. Just what is unavoidable. Is crucial. Is what you are fighting against.

Every time you switch characters it's less like you're starting a new game and more like you're reloading an old save to try something different. But in this case everyone remembers something. Little things. Subconscious things for NPCs. Larger things for Past PCs. But The Player is the only one that remembers everything.

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hello hello i am back in pathologic hell

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Prompted by a comment on this youtube video I made of an Amiga 500 game project I was working on a couple years ago, I finally got around to writing up a little about how the scrolling worked. I really should've been blogging this at the time, instead of just tweeting about it. :)

First thing, my bitplanes are interleaved by lines, so BPLxMOD is set to three-tile-widths plus three whole lines, since I'm using 4 bitplanes. Interleaving by lines lets me blit an entire tile in a single blitter op, instead of one for each bitplane. Saves a little bit of CPU time on each blit, basically.

So this all runs in a big toroidal buffer (that is, a rectangular buffer that wraps horizontally and vertically. If you only scroll on one axis, that's a circular buffer) that is sized to fit 23 tiles width and 19 tiles + 1 line height, so BPLxMOD are configured accordingly. The viewport is 20 tiles wide and 16 tiles high, cause it's PAL 320x256. The buffer is logically a 22x18 tile "free scrolling" area, plus a 1 tile L-shaped edge for drawing new tiles into. By "free scrolling", I mean: if you take center 20x16 tiles of the viewport as the starting position, I can scroll up to 16 pixels in any direction—to show any part of the free scrolling area—just by setting BPLxPTx and BPLCONx appropriately at the start of my copperlist, and without needing to redraw any tiles. Because redrawing is slow!

As soon as I start to scroll from that starting point, I then know if I'm scrolling up or down, and left or right, and I can prepare to draw new tiles into the offscreen L-shaped part of the buffer—whose actual position in memory of course depends on the BPLxPTx pointers and whether I am treating it as being top+left, top+right, bottom+left, or bottom+right—that are appropriate for the direction that I've started to scroll in. So that's just blitter work; but because it's offscreen, I wait until after VBLANK to start it, and it just runs while Denise is pushing pixels out to the monitor, and the CPU busy-waits for the blitter. This makes my blitting much slower, of course, since Denise's memory reads take priority, but it's fast enough: I still get the two tile strips drawn in about half a frame.

The tricky bit in all of this is when the viewport overlaps the end of the buffer. If we only ever scroll vertically, it's much simpler: on any given frame, we have N full scanlines in the buffer between the BPLxPTx address and the buffer's end, so during vblank just set up the copper to wait until hblank of scanline N and then reset BPLxPTx to the start of the buffer. Denise then happily draws the remainder of the screen from there.

But with horizontal scrolling as well, the end of the buffer ends up somewhere in the middle of a scanline, so now on any given frame we have N full scanlines, and one scanline with only M words in it (BPLCONx of course managing up to 16 pixels of horizontal scroll, so the contents of the buffer are always word-aligned—which is also necessary for blitting). It's possible to have the copper wait until midway across the scanline before writing BPLxPTx, but this always left a glitch of a few pixels when I did that. It might be possible without the glitch, I dunno, but I didn't manage it. So that's where the 1 extra line in the buffer's height comes in. It's an overflow area, so that whenever the viewport would overlap the end of the buffer mid-scanline, I instead have this scanline filled with duplicate pixels so I can let the scanline finish then in hblank, set BPLxPTx to the top of the buffer + 1. Whenever I draw new tiles, I afterwards get the blitter to copy the whole scanline from the opposite edge of the buffer into this overflow area, so it's ready and waiting when the viewport gets there.

And with all that, I get infinite horizontal and vertical smooth scrolling at a pretty high speed.

Now I mentioned I've got a 22x18 tile free scrolling area. You can get infinite scrolling with just one row and one column of extra tiles, so 21x17, but that means you can only scroll up to 8 pixels in any one direction before you absolutely must draw new tiles. That reduces the maximum scroll speed you can get, or (looking at it the other way around) means you need to draw new tiles more frequently. Since drawing tiles is pretty slow (especially when done while the screen is displaying), I can't get much other work done on a frame where I have to redraw. I didn't get this project to the point of adding sound—perhaps I'll pick it up again one day—but since audio must take priority over video (cause the glitches are much more irritating), I wanted to give myself breathing room so that I could happily defer tile redraws for a frame or maybe two if I needed to give priority to handling audio. And so the two rows and columns of extra tiles in the 22x18 free scrolling area gives me better scroll speed and much more timing flexibility.

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Loud Rooms

Have I talked about loud rooms? I don't think so. I'm gonna talk about loud rooms.

First for those of you who haven't played Thief, sound is super significant in the game. You can hear enemies, and enemies can hear you. In Thief, sound travels: across rooms, around corners and through doors (though muffled).

Making noise, whether by throwing objects, using explosives, or even just your clanking footsteps on a noisy surface will get you discovered. As such, being aware of the sounds you're making, and predicting the sounds you will make if you take certain paths or actions is a crucial skill for the player to master.

In addition to the sounds made by the player and NPCs, there's ambient sounds too of course: water lapping, steam hissing, machinery clanking, and REALLY LOUD MACHINERY CLANKING. That last one in particular makes it really hard for the player to hear enemy NPCs.

But here's the thing: although Thief models sounds being attenuated by distance, (with a sound's path traced via a simplified spatial model), its model for AI's hearing only takes each sound's magnitude into account individually. So an NPC hearing REALLY LOUD MACHINERY CLANKING (which naturally doesn't signify anything to them) and simultaneously hearing the player's footsteps tapping a little bit loud on a tile floor, can still hear those footsteps just as easily as if there was no other noise. And so while it feels like a really loud noise going on should mask the player's own noise a bit, that unfortunately just doesn't happen. Now the devs must have realised this sometime during or after Thief 1's development, because in Thief 2 there's a new feature to address it. You can see where I'm going with this:

No, this feature didn't end up actually being used in the shipping game.

Now everything from here comes from me reading the source code and (mis)understanding it, so there's probably a few mistakes, but I think the gist is clear:

In Thief 2 there's a new property that can be added to room brushes, called "Loud Room". It seems clear to me from the name and its implementation that the intent was to have an approximation to sound-masking available to level designers, without making major AI changes. Loud Room is a single float, presumably from 0.0 to 1.0. The volume of sounds transmitted from this room to adjacent rooms are multiplied by this float. This works in a similar way to how doors between rooms affects sound: each type of door has a similar float property that defines how much it blocks sound; and the volume of sounds is multiplied by (1.0 - blocking_factor) when a door is closed.

So the way I interpret Loud Room to have been intended to use, is to set it to, say, 0.6 on a room with the REALLY LOUD CLANKING MACHINERY, which probably has metal floors too just for laughs. Then the player's noisy footsteps on the floor in that room would sound 40% quieter to NPCs outwith the room, making the player harder to audibly detect. Sound masking! …right?

The problem is, sound goes both ways. Although the effect seems about right when the player's in the loud room, it'll seem entirely wrong if the player is outwith the room listening to an NPC walking on that metal floor inside it. Because all the sound from the room is attenuated, the player outwith the room will hear the NPC's footsteps as 40% quieter, and the REALLY LOUD MACHINE CLANKS will be 40% quieter too. Which would be just weird.

And that no doubt explains why they didn't use this feature in shipping levels: I'm guessing they came up with this simple system (in terms of implementation: it's not much more than two lines of code), tried it out, then cut it when it didn't work right.

Now in all the levels that shipped with Thief 2, it turns out that there is actually a single room with this Loud Room property set on it. In the mission Framed, in the basement of the City Watch headquarters, is a "machinery room". And it has the Loud Room property on it! Which seems appropriate, since it is full of machinery. Though fairly quiet machinery as these things go.

As it happens, the Loud Room value set on it is 1.0, which means the property isn't causing any attenuation of sounds anyway.

And apart from that, this room is basically a dead end at the end of a hallway in the basement: there's never any NPCs just outside it to listen; there's no noisy floor surfaces in the room (it's all stone); so it's not even a situation where Loud Room would make much difference.

(There is an NPC who will walk to this room and hang around inside it. But there's also no reason for the alternative interesting situation to arise either: where the player just outside the loud room makes noise that is masked for the NPC inside.)

And that's the story of Loud Rooms.

Okay, I just had to do the test. Turns out my reading of the code was missing one thing: the "loud room" attenuation factor is also applied to sounds originating within the loud room that the player is hearing in the loud room too! I suppose that would let you walk clangily around in a loud room that had a hostile NPC in it, with the NPC's hearing perception reduced accordingly. But as a player it's very weird to hear your footsteps in the room before, but then they suddenly get quieter to you as you enter the loud room with the same floor!

Here's my test:

The first room with marble floors is a normal room, as a control. The green room in the middle has no room brush so that sound cannot propagate through it, just to isolate. The second room with metal floors is the loud room, with an attenuation factor of 0.5.

Notice how my footsteps get audibly quieter as I enter the loud room. Note also how the machinery in the loud room, despite having the same volume settings, actually sounds quieter than that in the control.

Because the loud room property is actually applied to sounds that stay within the room, all the sounds in the room are quieter! Doing this test shows that the "actually the sounds get quieter so the NPCs won't hear them so well" approach to sound masking is pretty flawed.

(The doors at the end attenuate the sound with a factor of 0.2 by the way. I just needed to shut that infernal noise up!)

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Lighting the Player in Thief

So I've heard a couple people mentioning that Thief calculates how lit the player is by sampling the lightmap where the player is standing.

But this sounded wrong to me. On numerous occasions I've been standing in what looks like a shadow, yet been lit much more brightly than the ground would indicate—like this "safe-ish" example from Robert Yang's blog:

And thinking about the player moving through the Z axis: when climbing up a rope, for example, you can see the light gem change as you move in and out of view of lights around you. Sampling lightmaps doesn't work here either.

If the player does stay grounded all the time, then sampling lightmaps is a pretty good way of determining visibility that is excellent for player feedback. But it seemed clear that Thief couldn't be doing that—or not only that.

So, curious about how it actually calculates it, I dug into the Thief 2 source code again. Obviously things may have changed between Thief 1 and 2, but it seems unlikely on the face of it.

So for starters: the light gem code determines which of the light gem models to display by looking up player's "Visibility" property to get the light level. So it must have already been calculated earlier this frame.

Following the trail of breadcrumbs through the game, eventually I find the light level (ignoring other visibility modifiers like crouching, holding a weapon, moving and so on) being calculated by compute_object_lighting().

So compute_object_lighting() seems fairly straightforward in principle: it just adds up the contributions from all the lights around. The bitfield and inner_frac stuff is a bit confusing though.

Digging into objGetShadows() makes it clearer: there's a global cache with one entry for each object in the game, that keeps track of which BSP cell the object was last seen in, and a 96 bit field. Each bit there relates to one of the lights that touches that cell.

When the static lighting is computed for the level (in the editor), each cell stores the indices of every static light in the map that reaches it. Cells can be quite large, so this could be a lot of static lights. No more than 96 though, I guess?

Then for each object in that cell, this shadow cache bitfield has each bit corresponding to one of those lights: 1 if the object is visible to that light, and 0 if not. The location_sees_light() call does raycasts to check if the object is visible to a light.

Since most objects don't move much, the cache avoids having to do the expensive raycasts very often. Since a map in Thief 2 (pre-NewDark) could have at most 4096 objects total, this cache is 64kB.

Anyway, the conclusion of all that is: calculating the light falling on the player or any other object is done by iterating through the BSP cells' array of lights — WR_CELL(cell)->light_indices — and doesn't touch its lightmaps at all.

This boring code spelunk brought to you by the letter V and the number 96.

I previously posted all this on twitter, but twitter is bad for finding information again. So here's a more permanent home for the thread.

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Jalopy, Part 4

Continued from Part 3

4:17 AM - 13 Jun 2018

These aren't the words I wanted to hear from the border guard.

There's a problem, you say, Mr. Border Guard? You have no idea.

Had to save and reload. When I did: all my coffee, most of my medicine, my two spare tyres, and my full jerry cans had all gone! Confiscated or destroyed by random physics, I can't say. 😂

I don't have the money to replace it all. I guess I just try to keep going.

At least I can wash all the mud off the car. That doesn't cost anything!

I have just $12 left. Better hope I don't need to spend on anything 😅

4:37 AM - 13 Jun 2018

Found some decals in a box by the side of the road. Now my car is 🔥!

No, not on fire.

Not yet.

5:11 AM - 13 Jun 2018

Didn't have enough money to pay for the motel! So I sold the spare tyres I snagged off an abandoned car, which left me enough for the night. Also bought a couple tyre repair kits: probably going to need them now I don't have any spares.

Next stop: Dresden!

Not two minutes later: bang! flubble flubble flubble flubble.

Yep, another flat.

5:16 AM - 13 Jun 2018

Four!? Four boxes that fell off the back of a truck? The game's being super generous now I'm almost broke! 😀

Two of them were full of wine (which sells for a lot!), one of tobacco (eh, okay), and the other I didn't open, just put it on my roof rack. It's a mystery for later!

Let's just hope I find a shop soon—or I'm allowed to take alcohol across the border into Germany.

Fate is smiling on me now. A little further on, I found three more boxes by the railway tracks: one full of wine, one jam packed full of cigarettes, and the third with a few packs of coffee. I had to leave the coffee behind: no more room in the car!

Just look at all this contraband!

5:29 AM - 13 Jun 2018

Crossed the train tracks and another tire blew!

But I'm out of repair kits.

I guess I'm driving on a flat for the next 250km 😬

Luckily I don't think this game simulates ruining your rims.

5:35 AM - 13 Jun 2018

It's beautiful!

You what? But I've got so much stuff to sell! You can't be out. Not out out, surely? 😭

5:58 AM - 13 Jun 2018

So after buying four new tyres, an engine repair kit, two tyre repair kits, a bottle of oil, a full tank of fuel, and a full jerry can of fuel, I was able to sell all the rest of my textiles, wine and medicine—and make a tidy profit!

6:00 AM - 13 Jun 2018

It's 206 miles to Berlin. I've got a full tank of gas, two dozen cartons of cigarettes, it's dark, and I'm wearing sunglasses.

Well, I've got to get to Dresden first, and that nice wash job will soon be obsoleted by the dirt roads I'm travelling. But it feels good anyway. 😄

6:20 AM - 13 Jun 2018

Sold all of my cigarettes. There were quite a lot! Total cash now: a nice round $500.

6:43 AM - 13 Jun 2018

Here I am, back where I began, on the outskirts of Berlin.

Twelve days later. Five hundred dollars better off. Five thousand, nine hundred, and forty-four kilometres travelled. Almost every part of the car has been replaced and upgraded twice over.

Time for a good night's rest!

And that's my run through Jalopy complete!

It's rather a bit clunky. It won't win any awards for looks. It breaks down more often than I'd prefer. But I love it, and I really enjoyed my time with it.

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Jalopy, Part 3

Continued from Part 2

1:44 AM - 13 Jun 2018

Found an abandoned car on the side of the road, so just casually swapped engines with it, as you do, because its was a little more powerful. Needs maintenance though.

2:09 AM - 13 Jun 2018

A beautiful sunrise as I depart Malko Tornova, heading through the mountains towards Dubrovnik.

Jalopy is Oregon Trail, but in a ramshackle Trabant-alike through Eastern Europe, and instead of hunting and avoiding dysentery, you scavenge roadside junk and maintain your car.

Jalopy doesn't have highly-detailed reproductions of the countries you drive through of course! But it does have recognisable landmarks from time to time.

2:25 AM - 13 Jun 2018

Jalopy has a really good take on first-person inventory. As you walk around, you can carry up to three things in your hands. Often only need two: jerry can and an oil bottle; a spare tyre and a jack. You can cycle which is in your right hand to be used, and which two in the left.

This is much, much better than only being able to carry a single item in hand, like many similar games. And feels much more appropriate than having a huge inventory on your person.

But this limit is a nuisance when you're buying or selling half a dozen or more small items at a shop: cigarettes, wine, coffee, and so on.

So every shop has baskets! You can stack items in a basket, and take them back out again. And you can sell a whole basketload at once.

And you can put full baskets into the boot, or on the roofrack (if you bought one). It's super neat!

2:49 AM - 13 Jun 2018

In this instance I was buying coffee and medicine here because it was discounted. I'm hoping I'll be able to sell it for a modest profit in Croatia.

At the Bulgaria-Croatia border. Looks like medicine and coffee are allowed: only tobacco is proscribed at the moment. So thankfully I won't have to worry about being caught and fined (or worse!).

But neither coffee nor medicine is in demand. I guess I'm taking them further with me.

3:11 AM - 13 Jun 2018

It's a beautiful morning by the ocean. A beautiful morning for getting a flat.

4:05 AM - 13 Jun 2018

The way mud splashes on and builds up on your windows and windscreen is lovely.

Sir, are you all right? Do you need directions? The road's this way, sir, not that way.

Continued in Part 4

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Jalopy, Part 2

Continued from Part 1

6:45 PM - 12 Jun 2018

This is a very cool bridge.

6:51 PM - 12 Jun 2018

What's this? Oh, just a box of sausages I found on the side of the road. I'm sure they're good and edible. I'll just sell them at the next shop I come to.

There: all packed away neatly! There was a second box with a bunch of—"textiles" it called them, but it looks like yarn to me—which I've stacked up on the left.

6:58 PM - 12 Jun 2018

Oh damn, looks like we've got a flat.

No problem: get the jack and the repair kit out of the boot. Jack up the car. Loosen the wheel nuts. Take off the wheel. Patch it up. Put the wheel back on. Tighten up the nuts. Lower the jack. Pick it up and put it back in the boot. And on we go again!

It's very relaxing to play, even as my car falls apart under me.

Why is it that interacting with objects in games is so much fun? It was such a big thing in the 90s—from Ultima VII to Duke Nukem 3D—yet all but forgotten by big games these days. Thankfully indies are picking up the slack.

"Fun" isn't quite the right word there. Satisfying. Interacting with objects is very satisfying.

This was why Receiver was enjoyable to play. It's why Gone Home was enjoyable. And it's a big part of Jalopy's attraction too.

7:24 PM - 12 Jun 2018

Someone driving on the left side of the road? Must be a British tourist. Those locals aren't going to be very happy with them.

7:40 PM - 12 Jun 2018

Filling up the car and the jerry can. Mustn't forget the oil.

Bought some new tires, so let's change out the old worn out ones.

7:57 PM - 12 Jun 2018

Ran out of fuel again. But no worries, I have a full jerrycan.

Only it's not letting me fill the car. This is an unfortunate bug.

Save and quit, and then I can continue. But it's restarted me back at the motel at the start of the day. Eeh.

8:30 PM - 12 Jun 2018

:(

The refueling bug happened again. This time I'd only just left the motel in Dubrovnik, so not really having to retrace ground at least.

If you read the newspapers, you can find out which goods are in demand in the next country, or which are banned. There's the opportunity to make a little money by trading accordingly.

I've not yet tried carrying banned goods across the border though.

9:28 PM - 12 Jun 2018

I'm in Malko Tornova, Bulgaria, about to cross the border into Turkey. But the battery's flat, so the car won't start.

And seems there's no way to charge it, nor does the shop here sell new batteries.

If this is the end, it's a rather ignominious one.

Okay, the petrol station doesn't sell batteries, but the Laika dealer does. Problem solved.

10:02 PM - 12 Jun 2018

Made it to Istanbul. 2500+km and 6 days after setting out.

I suppose the next thing to do would be to drive all the way back.

Continued in Part 3

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Jalopy, Part 1

7:56 AM - 12 Jun 2018

Finally trying out Jalopy. (Available to buy from GOG, Humble, and Steam).

It won't let me put oil into the engine :(

I do like how my character can just walk around casually carrying the engine block though.

This car is a beast! 0 to 60 in just 22.5 seconds!

There are wisps of smoking coming from the bonnet. Should I be worried?

Spent the night at the motel, but now it won't let me start the car? Doesn't say why at all, just beeps at me when I try to :(

Looking at the steam forums to try to find out what I'm missing, and wow are there a ton of threads about bugs 😧

Right, I'd forgotten to select a route on the map.

A bigger problem: for some reason, although I filled up the petrol tank and the jerry can, we ran out of fuel in minutes, and the jerry can is now empty?!?

Also somehow it's night again already? The day lasted like five minutes??

8:48 AM - 12 Jun 2018

Walking back to the petrol station—which is on the other side of the border.

The guards don't seem to mind me crossing the border on foot though, they just ignore me.

Oops, I forgot the jerry can and my wallet. Back across the border to the car, then all the way back again.

Okay, got some fuel. Made it back to the car, filled it up. Went to add oil to the mix, but whoops: out of oil.

Guess we're driving on straight petrol then! Hope the bearings don't seize up 🙃

9:04 AM - 12 Jun 2018

Found a cardboard box full of medicine just sitting in the middle of a mountain road. How strange.

Taking it with me, cause that stuff's valuable!

Car's rather a mess after driving on these muddy roads!

Uh, yeah. Don't think we're going to be able to drive across there.

I guess we're driving over the railway bridge instead! 😅

9:29 AM - 12 Jun 2018

Ran out of fuel again, right on the train tracks!

Classic.

The jerry can was full this time, so at least we're not stuck here.

9:49 AM - 12 Jun 2018

So... got to the town, and realised I'd bought some stuff way back at the petrol station just by the railway bridge, but had forgotten to collect it.

Rather than drive the car all the way back, wearing it down, and consuming fuel and stuff, I thought I'd just walk back.

It doesn't take very much longer at all. Even though the distance is (according to the road signs) 210 km 😂

Also the days are short, but this night lasts forever.

The time and space compression in this game is really weird.

Okay, back at the car. Found a couple of boxes along the way too, so I had more medicine and wine to sell. Only had to walk 420km, totally worth it!

10:12 AM - 12 Jun 2018

Right. Spent the night in the motel at Sturovo. Now to cross the Hungarian border.

But first, I'm going to bed: the 2 hours sleep I got last night is catching up to me.

Anyway: Jalopy is cheap and cheerful. Even though the controls are fiddly, it's not unpleasant to play. Drive around, collect things, buy things, maintain the car.

Biggest complaint is just how fast the car eats through fuel and how fast all its parts degrade.

Continued in Part 2

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Cultist Simulator, Day 6

Continued from Day 5.

4:38 PM - 6 Jun 2018

So, about 60 hours into the game, I have come across a new Rite that has markedly different requirements. It looks like another potential ending, but not the true one.

Which I guess means I now know how to get one poor ending and one I guess middling ending?

4:41 PM - 6 Jun 2018

One source of my frustration in this game is the flavour text, some of which is significant and some of which is not. Which leads to confusion and disappointment when I think I've figured something out, only it doesn't work.

Example, rot13'd for Peacock Door spoilers:

Sebz Gur Jbbq hc gb gur Crnpbpx Qbbe, gur cngu gb gur arkg qbbe jnf sbhaq ol qernzvat bs n qbbe nybat jvgu bar fcrpvsvp cvrpr bs yber. Gur Crnpbpx Qbbe vf qvssrerag: vafgrnq bs yber, jura lbh qernz vg gnxrf n gbby. Anghenyyl V gubhtug vg jnf n znggre bs svaqvat gur evtug gbby. Jura lbh chg gur Crnpbpx Qbbe vagb Qernz, gur grkg pnyyf vg: "gur zbfg nqzvenoyr bs Qbbef, gur Qbbe juvpu fuvarf yvxr n zveebe. Creuncf, jvgu gur evtug erfbheprf, V pna cnff vg." Naq fb gurer ner zveebe vgrzf—V unir sbhaq gjb qvssrerag barf bs Ynagrea nfcrpg—gung bcra gur qbbe. Whfg nf Cnffvba bcraf Gur Jbbq ohg gur evtug Yber yrnqf gb gur Juvgr Qbbe, naq Ernfba bcraf gur Fgnt Qbbe ohg gur evtug Yber yrnqf gb gur Fcvqre Qbbe, V svther gung jvgu gur evtug gbby—cebonoyl abg n zveebe—gur Crnpbpx'f Qbbe jvyy yrnq gb gur Gevphfcvq Tngr. Fb lbh pna vzntvar zl rkpvgrzrag jura bar bs zl rkcrqvgvbaf ergheaf jvgu na vagrerfgvat vgrz: "Gur Ngynf bs Qernzf". Vg'f n gbby, bs Frperg Uvfgbevrf nfcrpg (guhf hahfhny). Vgf qrfpevcgvba ernqf nf sbyybjf: "Gur funcr bs gur jbeyq punatrf va rnpu cnfg, ohg gur funcr bs gur Znafhf vf ersyrpgrq va nyy bs gurz. Bar pnaabg znc gur Znafhf, ohg bar pna znxr na nggrzcg gb znc vgf ersyrpgvbaf." N znc. N znc bs gur Znafhf'f ersyrpgvbaf. Vg'f _boivbhf_ gung guvf zhfg or gur gbby gung yrnqf ba sebz gur Crnpbpx'f Qbbe, juvpu bcraf bayl gb zveebef. Qba'g tvir vg n zveebe, ohg hfr n znc bs ersyrpgvbaf gb svaq gur jnl gb gur arkg qbbe. Vg nyy fhqqrayl znxrf frafr. Ohg bs pbhefr vg qbrfa'g jbex ng nyy. Gur Crnpbpx'f Qbbe whfg qbrfa'g erpbtavfr vg, whfg yvxr nal bgure enaqbz aba-zveebe gbby.

This is like the classic adventure game puzzle problem again, where you can't use that crowbar you're carrying to break that window (to get the mysterious chalice in the display), but can only use the rock found three screens away to break it.

Intentional red herrings aside, this is a difficult problem to identify as a designer, because you're generally too close the problem itself. And you're thinking about them from a different point of view: you already know the solution.

While a player has much more limited knowledge: they only know the facets of the problem they can see, and while they know the items they're carrying, they bring a different set of preconceptions about the items with them.

So while adventure game players have limited knowledge, but essentially unlimited imagination. They will come up with solution scenarios—that aren't the puzzle's solution—ranging from straightforward and eminently reasonable to creative and fantastical.

And they'll have a good chain of reasoning that links it all together, and explains why their scenario should work.

When they hit upon the designed solution in this manner—especially when creative and fantastical—that's the eureka moment that the puzzles exist for.

But when they don't—and again, the more creative the solution, the bigger the effect here—they feel disappointed, frustrated, perhaps even angry.

This is the tightrope that all puzzle-based adventure games have to walk.

To bring it back to Cultist Simulator: the highly specific solutions to most problems, coupled with the plethora of cards and the "experiment to figure things out" ethos of not directly teaching the player much means it's also walking this tightrope.

And I lost my balance and fell off a few times already.

5:09 PM - 6 Jun 2018

Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, waiting for this expedition to finish so I can send some minions to recruit some volunteer… uh, …prisoners. Yes.

Wait: not yet. Gonna finish the series of expeditions first, because I have the minions already. And anyway, the Red Hook is coming up next, and I won't have time to get a prisoner for it before it's too late.

5:18 PM - 6 Jun 2018

Random PS to the big train of thought earlier: the general obscurity in Cultist Simulator is definitely intentional. It's both part of the roguelike tradition, and in this case meant to be suggestive of its fiction: studying arcane lore to understand occult mysteries.

Unfortunately it never really ends up feeling like that for me. I'm rarely piecing together clues (and when I am they are often false anyway). I'm not studying, slowly advancing in knowledge. I'm grinding: repeating a similar series of actions over and over to make numbers go up.

5:26 PM - 6 Jun 2018

That's two different expeditions in a row now that have only brought back spintriae. Are there no more books or tools to be found? Going to have to upgrade some secret histories lore so I've got some higher level locations to expeditionize.

5:34 PM - 6 Jun 2018

What is the most pointless card in Cultist Simulator? My shortlist, in no particular order, is:

Streets Strange By Moonlight

A Consciousness of Radiance

Fleeting Memory

6:10 PM - 6 Jun 2018

Building up a nice little collection here!

6:19 PM - 6 Jun 2018

So this thing where I turn my followers into prisoners, and then presumably eat them: I guess that makes them…

Filet Minion

😎

6:42 PM - 6 Jun 2018

I now have a reliable way of generating Dread when needed—that is, one without risk of generating Fascination instead. So Visions is no longer really a threat to me.

(It used to be: Visions nearly killed me about 40 hours into the game. It was the closest I've come to death.)

6:47 PM - 6 Jun 2018

The dungeon is becoming dangerously overcrowded.

(Yes, this is probably overkill, but I really don't know how many prisoners I need. So I'll just keep farming them until I don't need any more.)

7:15 PM - 6 Jun 2018

This is getting a little ridiculous! But at long last I've got Red Hook coming up next, so I'll find out if I need to keep feeding it prisoners.

7:19 PM - 6 Jun 2018

Answer: yes and no. It's taken a prisoner, and kept me at the Sixth Mark.

I will need to look elsewhere for the way to progress from here.

Which means more "use every inventory item with every other inventory item" fun! Yay! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! 😢

Actually no: first it's time for a savegame backup! I'm going to try the lesser endings here, to see how they play out. Then pick up again where I left off.

7:28 PM - 6 Jun 2018

Oh, whoops, I accidentally discovered the way to the Seventh Mark instead 😂

7:39 PM - 6 Jun 2018

Standard Enlightenment Victory achieved! Now to restore the old save and continue digging further.

7:41 PM - 6 Jun 2018

I hadn't really noticed before that Cultist Simulator renamed the high quality graphics setting!

8:09 PM - 6 Jun 2018

I lie below. You float above. … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJAlFyKHp_M

8:24 PM - 6 Jun 2018

Oh wait, this Seventh Mark is just the same standard enlightenment ending again, but with one of the ordinary rites. I don't get it

8:59 AM - 7 Jun 2018

A few final (probably) thoughts on Cultist Simulator:

One of the strangest design choices in Cultist Simulator is that everything with permanent destructive effects also has a renewable alternative. There are only one or two exceptions.

Take followers, for example: there is a limited number of followers that you can recruit. After you hit that limit, attempts to recruit will always result in "a case of mistaken identity". Followers have much needed skills and abilities, of course.

Most of the actions that you can get a follower to do—going on expeditions, looking for victims to abduct, going out to get money—come with moderate to high risk of the follower not coming back. Once you lose a follower, they're gone for good.

But instead of sending followers, you can recruit hirelings: it takes longer; costs money; no guarantee of getting a hireling you want (you have to commit the time to find them, but not the money if they don't have the skills you want).

And hirelings only hang around for two minutes if you don't put them to work: but there's always more hirelings, and time and money (once you get your economy bootstrapped) are unlimited in the game.

Why risk losing your followers permanently instead of sending a hireling?

It's a little more complicated than that, because there are followers with skills that hirelings don't have. But except for expeditions, I never felt the lack of those skills: the risks I needed to take were taking prisoners, ambushing hunters, and destroying evidence. And hirelings have all the skills needed for those activities.

Expeditions carry greater risk, and in the early game you basically have no choice except to risk followers on them. But as soon as you discover a little lore and summoning rites, you can send demons—another renewable resource—on expeditions instead.

Which brings me nicely to summoning: another case where there's a permanent loss, except when there isn't.

There are numerous rites for summoning: I've found nine. To the best of my ability to tell, they are all equivalent in what you can do with them.

What you get out of a summoning (or passionreason conversion, or decrepitude decrementing) only depends on the Aspects you put in, and the strengths of those aspects.

Every rite needs Lore, and each needs two other things: an assistant/victim, or a tool, or an ingredient, or an Influence. Each rite consumes one specific type of the things that it needs.

So in the early game, you may only have found one rite that, for example, needs and consumes an assistant. Which is a problem, because followers are limited, and hirelings may not have the Aspect you need.

Similarly there is permanent loss if you use the rite that consumes Lore (you can get duplicates of Lore, but it's very time-consuming and they're also limited), or Tools (ditto).

But then there's two rites which consume Influence. And Influence cards are a fully renewable resource (you just have to dream past the appropriate Door to get them), and they expire in a minute if you don't use them anyway! (Sometimes expiry has negative side effects too)

So basically, once you find one of these two rites—and there's duplicate copies of the rites to be found—you now have an infinite supply of demons at your call. You probably won't have more than five at any one time, but they're easily replaceable.

Another really weird case of the game seeming unwilling to risk permanent loss is when a summoning goes wrong. It's quite rare for it to happen, but when it does you get a choice: cancel the summoning (no harm done, but you've lost your Influence card or whatever), or try to bring the demon under control again. If that fails, then the demon is loose, and grabs a card to consume it. Depending on the type of demon, it could grab a follower, or a Health card, or—well, those are the only two I've encountered. (Because while I've summoned literally dozens of demons during this one game, I've had about half a dozen failures, and only three actual escapes. I still have no idea what the odds of escape are, but it's oddly low.)

The first time a demon escaped, I was panicked: here it was, grabbing my follower, and devouring them (at least, the demon was labelled a "Devourer"). But then sixty seconds later, the demon vanished and there was my follower again, safe and sound. Like, what?

The same happened for Health: the demon grabbed one of my Health cards, chewed on it for a minute, then spat it back out (but dimmed, which takes another minute to refresh). I suppose if I only had the one Health this would be a risk, but I had three at the time, so no worries.

Anyway, this is getting way too long, so I'm going to sum it up:

It's weird in Cultist Simulator, a game about seeking occult enlightenment at all costs, that your risks go down as you progress in the game instead of escalating.

9:38 AM - 7 Jun 2018

Ending thoughts: one of my problems with the long featureless grind that this seventy-hour-long game of Cultist Simulator has become is that it's directionless. I have no idea what I'm aiming for, let alone how to achieve it.

Yes, I found one the lesser endings. The "standard Enlightenment" one, as the game calls it. But it's evident there's a true enlightment ending hiding away somewhere.

Now, one of the things that Sunless Sea did much better was it started you off with an ending goal, an Ambition: finding your father's bones, or retiring wealthy to a mansion, or making an incredible artwork. And there were Ambitions you could find as you went.

But in Sunless Sea, the immediate requirements to complete every Ambition were clear, even if you had no idea how to go about them initially (such as it requiring an item that you've never heard of).

Moreover, given the variety of different Ambitions, if you found yourself unable or uninterested in pursuing one of them further, you could quite easily pick a different one to aim for instead.

But in Cultist Simulator, the ending(s) are obscure, and how to find them is obscure, and how to achieve them is obscure. I only found a single hint at the ending I've done (in a Lore item I no longer have, so I can't quote it here).

And the Rite dialog also described "an ending" when I was experimenting with different cards in the slots, which lead to me discovering the requirements for that ending.

So it's not so much that it's impossible to find an ending. But I didn't know about it until late mid-game (I think it was). I was never working towards it. In fact, I was never really working towards anything.

I think that, more than anything else, is what makes the endless grind so tedious.

9:48 AM - 7 Jun 2018

Anyway, I'm finished with the game now. Someone else will have to get the true ending. There are two curiosities which I think may relate to it, but who knows how:

The first is a book that I found ~60 hours in, "The Geminiad". Unlike all the other books, this one took 90 seconds to study instead of 60. It yielded a new rite (Sea's Marriage) and three Lore cards. And the book itself remained afterwards as a Tool (Knock 2).

The second is the Rite Intercalate. I was only able to get the same "standard Enlightment" ending with this that I could get with any of the other rites. But this one is quite different.

While most rites take three cards (consuming one) plus a Desire to get the ending, this rite takes five cards plus a Desire: one Lore, one Assistant, one Influence, one Tool, and one Ingredient. And it consumes them all permanently.

It's so much different that I figure it's got to be related to the true ending. But I'm well past caring now.

So this is me officially done with Cultist Simulator. I don't really regret buying it; I got about 10 hours of fun from it, but should have stopped then. I definitely sunk way too much time into it.

Here's the state of my first and only game after 70 hours of grinding. If anyone wants the save file to try finding the true ending without doing that grind themselves, it's here: https://hastebin.com/diwibicika.txt

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Cultist Simulator, Day 5

Continued from Day 4.

5:31 PM - 5 Jun 2018

Help me, I'm going back into it. I'm not expecting to enjoy it anymore. That fizzled out quite a while ago. I just want to see this damn thing finished.

5:43 PM - 5 Jun 2018

Interesting, perhaps helpful bug: on the rare occasion you get two good, timed cards in a stack (like two Erudition in this case), the timer on the bottom card doesn't start until you break the stack or the top card has gone.

6:12 PM - 5 Jun 2018

So I have six Erudition on the table right now. What are the odds I'll be able to get another two before they expire, so I can upgrade my Reason again?

Pretty low, I reckon.

Feels a shame that they'll all go to waste :-/

6:22 PM - 5 Jun 2018

Whoof! There they go up in smoke.

6:34 PM - 5 Jun 2018

What the fuck? I had the Fourth mark, and it's gone and reverted back to the Third mark!

So maybe did the detective prisoner work after all, only I didn't register the difference in the Ascension card? And next time the red hook came around again it just downgraded me?

Fuck.

6:52 PM - 5 Jun 2018

My review of Cultist Simulator:

1:31 AM - 6 Jun 2018

Okay, so the detective prisoner does work, and the problem is that I need to keep feeding this thing prisoners or I keep getting silently downgraded to Third Mark. What a shitty piece of grindy design.

I guess I should have come into this game expecting a whole lot of grind, because both Fallen London and Sunless Sea had their fair share. And both kinda left me to figure out how to progress on my own too.

But the context was different:

Fallen London I played on my phone in short snippets of otherwise dead time. It filled up minutes here and minutes there, and so I was never at the grindstone for very long. As for progress: well I eventually stopped playing when I couldn't figure out how to progress any more.

While in Sunless Sea the grind was actually pleasant and engaging: sailing around, navigating around coastlines and between buoys to slow the rise of Terror, carefully keeping my distance from sea monsters—or attacking them if I felt strong enough. Much more than watching timers.

And progression in Sunless Sea was much better balanced: not only were there always dozens of islands you could go to explore, but I could see—inherently from the fog of war on the map—the places I had yet to explore. So instead of being stuck unable to figure out how to get any further, I only had to look at the map and pick a fogged area to visit next.

These may seem like small differences, but they make a huge impact on my experience of the grind and ability to make progress.

1:49 AM - 6 Jun 2018

Um okay. So this Health upgrade—Steely Physique plus eight Vitality—just finished, and out the other dropped out Steely Physique again (of course), and a new Health (yay), but also all eight Vitality too 😳

I guess… I guess I'm upgrading my health again!

Vital statistics looking healthy:

2:48 AM - 6 Jun 2018

So the big question is: if I feed the red hook thing two prisoners in a row, will that get me to the Fifth Mark? And if so, will it just degrade again, or what?

Anyway, I haven't been even able to get two prisoners in a row yet :-(

In the meantime, I'm very slowly collecting Forgotten Chronicles and the rare Forbidden Epic from the Stag Door, and even more slowly collecting Unresolved Ambiguities and the rare next one from the Peacock's Door (stupid things need repairing each time) with the goal being to keep exploring level 14 locations until they run out. And occasionally exploring lower-level locations, because they're still drip-feeding me a few books and tools.

I'm running pretty low on Spintriae though—except for the Iron ones, they just pile up cause I have no use for them.

I'd sell them at the auction house, except my Explore oven is always busy with expeditions, or with getting locations from Secret Histories.

2:57 AM - 6 Jun 2018

Whoa! This book I just read must be special: it took 90 seconds instead of the usual 60, and has served up five cards!! I'm almost afraid to turn them over.

Three Lore, one Tool, and a hitherto unknown Rite. Interesting.

3:23 AM - 6 Jun 2018

Ridiculous gameplay when you end up summoning a demon just to avoid an Influence decaying into Dread.

3:27 AM - 6 Jun 2018

Still trying to get prisoners. It's not easy at all. Basically I have to wait until a Hunter appears (many, many minutes apart), then send a demon after them, and hope that instead of killing them, the demon merely captures them (quite rare).

Given that, how the hell am I supposed to get hold of two prisoners in a row for the red hook?

Wait, forget two in a row! Just checked the forums and apparently all four of the next marks need prisoners, and just degrade again without them? What the actual fuck?

3:30 AM - 6 Jun 2018

Just remembered there's a way to turn my followers into prisoners, which I guess is probably reliable—but definitely not dependable, cause I can't get any more followers anymore. 😨

Although I can't remember exactly what that method is :-/

Had to look it up, cause all my ovens are busy so I can't even throw cards into them (without starting) to jog by memory.

But good thing I did, because apparently I can convert hirelings into prisoners this way too: and hirelings are a renewable resource!

However I can't go off getting hirelings just yet, because my Explore oven is continually busy with expeditions! 😅

I'll have to shift gears at some point and stop doing expeditions. But I don't want to while there's still books to be found—and these demons are good at them!

5:26 AM - 6 Jun 2018

Managed by pure fluke to capture two Hunters in short order. Had to put one in the fridge to preserve him for longer than the usual 10 minutes, but now I've fed two subsequent prisoners to the Red Hook.

Probably worthwhile to suspend the next expedition and farm more prisoners.

Meanwhile, I got a Visions stuck with an unlucky Fascination (an Influence that I thought decayed into nothing actually decayed into Fascination).

Normally I'm pretty safe from Visions and Despair, as none of my usual actions generate Fascination or Dread.

The only exception being reading new books, which sometimes produces one or the other.

I was talking with @electrondance the other day about Visions, and he'd said he'd been killed by it after three Fascination came, barely noticeable from paintings.

I thought that was odd, because I've been doing dozens and dozens and dozens of paintings and not getting Fascination out of them at all—but I've been sticking to a strict formula of only putting Notoriety in, and the subject is always the same Pawn. It seemed perfectly safe.

Until now: one of my four-notoriety paintings just produced three Mystique, one Contentment, and a Fascination. So now my Visions is even more stuck, and actively hazardous now.

Oops.

5:33 AM - 6 Jun 2018

Visions is a ridiculously bad bit of design though (and Despair is similar, but only a smidgen less bad). So many actions can generate Fascination pretty much at random. Once Visions has got its hands on a Fascination, it never goes away, until you feed it a Dread.

And unfortunately, Dread is pretty hard to generate reliably. What makes this ridiculously bad is that many of the actions that will generate Dread also have a chance of generating Fascination instead. And the Visions will eat that shit up.

And that means you now have to find another Dread to counteract the second Fascination also. And if the Visions gets its hands on three Fascination, you've got sixty seconds to feed it a Dread or it's game over.

And Visions comes into play pretty regular: about once every eight rounds (minutes of game time) or thereabouts.

Despair works similarly, but eats Dread and needs to be fed Contentment—which is a bit easier and safer to generate, hence why Despair's not quite as bad.

To sum up: Visions is a recurring event that has a high risk of killing you, and most of the actions you can take to respond to it are equally likely to make it worse.

It's not an interesting hazard. There's no risk vs. reward decisions involved. It's just a recurring hazard.

5:41 AM - 6 Jun 2018

I've only survived 60+ hours in this single game because (a) I was lucky in the early game while I was still learning this stuff, and (b) because I now exercise caution and hygiene when dealing with Dread and Fascination.

When I get a Dread card, I immediately prioritise generating a Contentment so I can get rid of it before Despair comes up.

Similarly, when I get a Fascination card, I prioritise generating a Dread (through one of two actions that I believe to be reliable—but very inconvenient).

And also by this point in the game I have a generally good idea of which actions are likely to produce Dread and/or Fascination, and simply postpone those actions whenever Despair or Visions (or both!) are in play or coming up in the next round.

Which is boring as hell.

5:45 AM - 6 Jun 2018

The Hunter hazard isn't quite as bad as those: Hunters actually turn up less frequently, and can also be captured, killed, or driven to insanity to get rid of them before they become a threat.

But even when they do become a threat by creating evidence, there are ways to destroy the evidence before it leads to your arrest. So it's a lot less of a threat of instant death.

And more importantly, Hunters arriving, then generating evidence, then arresting you happens over three (or maybe four?) individual Suspicion rounds. So almost every time there's several or many rounds between each escalation of the hazard, giving you time to deal.

Not that Hunters are a threat to me at all anymore—I have a pet demon that goes and dispatches them within seconds of them arriving—but at least in the early game they're a threat to be reckoned with, that can also be countered in several different ways.

Things draw to a close in Day 6.

[backslashn]

Cultist Simulator, Day 4

Continued from Day 3.

1:47 PM - 4 Jun 2018

Hmmm. I am talking to a Weary Detective (trying to demoralise him), and another Weary Detective has appeared. I immediately turn the conversation to him. Since there can be only one Hunter at a time, I wonder what they will make of each other?

I hope it's a matter+antimatter mutual annihilation scenario.

In the meantime, I have found someone—or rather some_thing_—to teach me Deep Mandaic. I think this is the last of the languages in the game to learn.

1:51 PM - 4 Jun 2018

So, when the conversation finishes, it turns out I can drag the two Hunters out of the Talk window in whichever order I please. And it appears the second one I drag out will remove the first one?

2:09 PM - 4 Jun 2018

Indeed it does. I wonder what would happen if the other Hunters weren't exhausted and you tried this—would you end up with two Hunters after you? 😱

In my case, this let me get rid of my Grim, Idealistic, Mystic detective who was becoming a nuisance. Feels a bit cheap though.

3:08 PM - 4 Jun 2018

I still have no clue how to proceed from this plateau I find myself on.

And I just discovered an additional level of things to grind for 😵

5:29 PM - 4 Jun 2018

Just rearranged all my ingredients, items, and lore cards to make room for yet another tier of lore D:

(slight spoilers I suppose)

6:45 PM - 4 Jun 2018

49 hours into my first game of Cultist Simulator and I only just discovered I can send some of my followers out into the town to earn money. 😲

8:31 PM - 4 Jun 2018

Well, I've been at this all day and I'm still stuck exactly where I was last night.

I'm running out of places to send expeditions to. I've found nearly every book in the game. I've advanced almost every aspect of lore to the maximum.

Nothing threatens me anymore. I'm summoning the highest level, uniquely-named minions. None of this is getting me anywhere cause there's something I'm missing that I just can't figure out.

I've seen devs point to Steam reviews with dozens or hundreds of hours in a game, and wonder how they can be negative after the player got that much enjoyment out of them?

Well for starters, maybe it wasn't all enjoyment? And worse: it doesn't take a huge amount of un-fun time in a game to overwhelm all memory of the parts that were enjoyable.

That's where I have reached now: I am loathing this game.

At this point I just want it over and done with, and I give up trying to figure out what I need to do by playing the game itself. So I'm off to google for the thing I've missed.

2:27 AM - 5 Jun 2018

Googling, and searching the steam forums and the subreddit was all surprisingly unhelpful :-/

Anyway, I'm finishing off the last little bits of grinding here.

I think people think of me as a mild eccentric.

2:50 AM - 5 Jun 2018

Okay, by re-reading labels I first read days ago, I have discovered something else that I am lacking:

So I already know I want to get to the Tricuspid Gate, but I can't find any way to do so from the Peacock Door.

But also any Rite's fifth slot is for Desire. The label says I should use it when I have the Sixth Mark. But I only have the Third Mark, so I guess I need 4th and 5th.

This knowledge doesn't help me in the slightest, of course! Except maybe as additional keywords to google.

I can't find any way to do anything else right now. I've run out of books. I've advanced all the lore to max. I've explored the hidden secrets exhaustively at each level until they started repeating—except the max level, which is really hard for me to get, but I've explored once.

3:01 AM - 5 Jun 2018

You might call this overkill, but when you're on a hazardous expedition sometimes you just want to be really, really sure.

3:18 AM - 5 Jun 2018

Well, here I am. Stuck forever in this limbo, I guess.

Steam says I've played 55 hours of this one bloody game of #cultistsimulator. I should probably just give up, since I can't find even the slightest hint of how to progress any further.

☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️

4:02 AM - 5 Jun 2018

Found a forum post about this same damn point and learnt the answer. The damn red hook card that has come up hundreds of times on this plateau has to be fed a prisoner. And no, not the half-dozen captured Hunters it had got in that time. For no particular reason, they don't work.

And it doesn't tell you they don't work.

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT

I COULD HAVE GOT PAST THIS POINT FIFTEEN HOURS AGO

THIS IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT

Fuck this game.

Fuck this game!

FUCK THIS GAME!

I have recovered my composure by Day 5

[backslashn]

Cultist Simulator, Day 3

Continued from Day 2

12:26 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Got my complaints about Cultist Simulator's user experience, but I'll say this: it hasn't crashed once in 25 hours of play.

12:57 PM - 3 Jun 2018

RIP Elridge. The Lanterns will guide you beyond the Mansus.

Elridge, skilled in the Edge aspect, had seen us past countless enemies on expeditions, and captured or dispatched at least half a dozen Hunters who imperiled us. But this time he never returned, and the Hunter remains.

1:08 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Oh no, we're fucked. After Elridge failed, I sent Victor after the Weary Detective too.

Victor has not returned.

Fuck.

1:16 PM - 3 Jun 2018

I am hiring Professional Muscle now to deal with this tenacious Hunter. I ought never to have risked my Disciples on such mundane errands.

I have learnt this harsh lesson now, but too late.

1:37 PM - 3 Jun 2018

And now the Professional Muscle also has failed to return! Has the Weary Detective defeated him too, or merely bribed him? Does it matter?

I, too, am Weary: of this Hunter and his seeming imperviousness. But I have no more earthly forces to send after him.

And so I shall have to use Unearthly force.

I have summoned a demon of Edge and Winter. This detective will not survive. Of this I am certain.

3:05 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Did the demon seek to twist my words and subvert my commands? The detective still lives. But captured, now. I shall leave him sweltering in my dungeons.

3:07 PM - 3 Jun 2018

While one weary detective lies shuddering and forgotten in a blind cell, another has arisen to trouble us.

What ardour drives these fellows? Why do they recklessly ignore the fate of their forebears? With a sigh, I send my demon out on the errand again.

This one did not survive. My demon returned grinning, matched by the rictus of the detective's corpse.

3:33 PM - 3 Jun 2018

I have rearranged my cards so I can see what Lore I am missing, and what Lore I can upgrade or subvert. And also to align the many Tools and Ingredients I have with the Lore of the same Aspect.

And only now do I realise that they are colour-coded by their Aspects.

Another thing I've learned recently: send demons away on expeditions, they're really good at dealing with obstacles 😅

3:44 PM - 3 Jun 2018

But not quite good enough.

O my arch-demon of Edge and Winter! O slayer of Hunters and devourer of shins! O ice-cold eyes and frozen heart! You have vanished in the forest, and gone wherever lost demons go.

3:58 PM - 3 Jun 2018

And what became of the detective I imprisoned? I woke one night whelmed in exotic cravings. An urgent need to speak with the prisoner. All through the night we talked: debating, reasoning, arguing. When dawn came my mind was once more at rest—and the prisoner no more to be seen.

4:06 PM - 3 Jun 2018

And the second demon I sent on the expedition? It also failed to return. These vertiginous blundering diaboli are as useless as my feeble craving disciples. If they had not already perished, I would vent my wrath upon them now!

The funniest thing about that is I only sent them on the expedition because it was there, and because I could. I didn't have any need compelling me to. 😂

4:10 PM - 3 Jun 2018

I have now learnt a fifth dead language: Phrygian. Three books written in it are awaiting translation.

Meanwhile I dream through the Stag's Door in search of powerful Influences; and continue my slow and painful exegesis of the lesser Lores in search of the key to the next door.

4:43 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Another weary detective is dogging my steps, somehow tirelessly. I hired a hulking fellow to go bother him, but without much hope of success.

Yet the fellow returned, bearing a body.

4:45 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Now I begin a newly-learned rite: I am calling on the Cartographer of Scars to animate the thing into shambling half-life. Perhaps it will be useful for odd jobs around the house.

4:53 PM - 3 Jun 2018

The rite failed. The corpse arose, but could not be controlled. Not allowing myself to panic, I used my intellect to banish it.

The rite was a failure, but nothing of value was lost. Perhaps my next attempt will succeed better.

5:09 PM - 3 Jun 2018

I tried to summon another Maid-in-the-Mirror to take on dangerous tasks. The ritual wavered; I continued the invocation more passionately, but to no avail. The creature is loose. It seeks something mortal to devour. I may have only seconds left.

5:13 PM - 3 Jun 2018

I am spared! It whispered past me, fluttering through the air in search of sustenance. Of all the disciples it could have taken in its jaws, it has chosen the most powerful, who was deepest initiated into our mysteries. It has taken Cat Caro, my Seer, and is devouring her.

I shall have to get the health and safety inspectors in to see if there's a better way of containing these demons. I can't afford to lose disciples like this: what would become of my cult without followers?

(This is actually a very significant loss: there are very few followers who are able to be promoted to Seer. Cat Caro was one; another perished in an expedition before I had discovered the ceremonies to uplift Seers. There is one more: my last Seer. I hope he lives.

5:21 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Wait, what is this? The demon has been entrammelled again, and banished. And Cat Caro lives! What occulted power does she wield?

And here I was thinking "Seer" was not much more than a ceremonial title.

6:12 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Grinding, grinding, grinding.

Upgrading and subverting lore to try to find the one I need.

Passing the time by summoning more demons and hiring more thugs, and sending them on expeditions.

It's all quite tedious.

Who'd have thought being a cult leader would be so unglamorous?

6:22 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Have I said much about the writing in Cultist Simulator? It's rich and intense, even though it's not drenched in words as Sunless Sea was. Not a full buffet, but a platter of delectable treats.

6:48 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Cultist Simulator protip: if you ever feel stuck and don't know what to do next, do the ritual to summon one of these:

It won't actually give you any clues, but maybe the summoning will go wrong and you'll end up with a different problem to distract you 😈

7:36 PM - 3 Jun 2018

I have uncovered a new source of vitality that had hitherto been hidden. It's of uncertain reliability and takes a somnolent quantity of time to pursue, but may be of value if utilised on top of the usual fresh air and exercise.

At around the same time, I chanced upon a marvelous, delicate technique that can preserve a little vitality far beyond its normal duration!

Using all these things in concert, I have succeeded in increasing my health to a robust five. I fancy I can increase it at will in future.

Even more vital than that, I have—after long and arduous research and cross-referencing���discovered the entrance to the Spider Door. I wonder what biquadrupedal revelations are preserved beyond it?

9:23 PM - 3 Jun 2018

I have found my way from the Spider Door to the Peacock's Door. "The Peacock's Door does not open, exactly." What, exactly does it do?

I am afraid to find out.

9:47 PM - 3 Jun 2018

I've encountered a bug in Cultist Simulator about five times: if autosave happens to kick in while a window is being opened or closed (it was Talk this time, but happened with many), then the game stops responding to mouse clicks. Have to save then reload to fix.

In more detail: when the bug happens, the window (if it was opening) disappears. And the game doesn't stop responding to mouse clicks entirely: it just thinks every mouse click is for info on something in the window, so just shows an info window.

So I can't click on any cards, or pan around the desk, or anything like that.

The HUD still works, so I can save & quit. Then when I reload the game, it loads with the window in question visible, and everything's back to normal.

9:56 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Anyway, bugs aside…

I've got a pretty strong team for this expedition, although it seems they forgot to bring matches.

10:07 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Odd. My hireling and my demons came back from that expedition with their timers rounded up to the nearest minute: two of them were back to their full 180s timers, one at 120s, and one (that had been close to expiry) at 60s.

10:20 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Oh no. I'm fucked, aren't I?

10:30 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Maybe… maybe not? "I Am Seeing Things" finishes collecting the third Fascination in 3.6s. Meanwhile my desperate dreams of Reason have led me into nightmares, which will deliver a Dread in 6s. Will that be what I need?

And right this instant the Moth principle has served up a Restlessness for old unhappy far-off things: which in another 60s will decay into Dread too.

Maybe, just maybe, I can survive the Visions? I am about to unpause and find out.

10:33 PM - 3 Jun 2018

In 1.9 seconds my Dream will end, delivering the Dread I need just in time. I'm not dead yet, thank the Hours.

I will still need to find at least one more dread. Time for more reasonable dreams—and hope they don't end in Fascination. It was one such not very long ago that supplied the second Fascination for those visions, in fact! 😱

10:41 PM - 3 Jun 2018

The crisis is over, but the danger is not yet abated.

Even as I dream, I continue my translations from Fucine (the sixth dead language I learned, the language of witches) as my minions pursue their expedition in The Rending Mountains (three thousand mile—or was it years?—away).

I guess I should count myself lucky that this was the first time my Visions had encompassed three Fascinations.

And even more lucky that the Moth principle turned up (I'm not sure where from) with that Restlessness while the Visions were rising, and that my Dreams rolled the Dread I needed.

All in all, that's the closest I've come to death in about 35 hours of play (yes, this is still my first game of Cultist Simulator).

From what others have told me of their games, death usually comes much more often, and much sooner.

10:59 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Well, I'm still trying to get more Dread, and meanwhile another Fascination has turned up. So I'm back to two! 😢

11:01 PM - 3 Jun 2018

And another Moth has flown by, delivering another Restlessness. There is something more than chance at work here, I am sure of it.

11:06 PM - 3 Jun 2018

While I was working on the Visions crisis, yet another Hunter turned up on my tail. I ignored him for a while, since my minions were busy and I had more important things to worry about.

But he's still there now, and I was about to send a nasty demon after him—but first I looked up other ways to get Dread [yes, 35 hours in I'm okay with looking up the odd tip], and turns out—I'd even done this earlier in the game but forgotten!—that talking to a Hunter about Winter lore has a chance to terrify them. And doing so will always produce Dread. Bingo!

11:14 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Oh dear. I was so caught up with the Visions, that I failed to pay attention to my Affliction getting worse. It has now matured into Decrepitude, decreasing my health.

Fortunately I know of a ritual that can help here…

11:15 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Haha, my latest dream of Reason has also descended into a nightmare which will produce Dread. I'm going to have too much of it 😅

At least the odd Dread is easy enough for an artist to deal with.

Right, that's enough talking specifics of the game. Back to vagaries!

11:34 PM - 3 Jun 2018

So I managed to dispel those Visions, but more have arisen. And the rite to defeat my decrepitude is feeding them.

Whoops.

Maybe that excess of Despair I have is also lucky! 😂

11:35 PM - 3 Jun 2018

Oh wait…

These new Visions are of a different sort. Something I've never encountered before. Something I don't begin to understand.

1:03 AM - 4 Jun 2018

I have passed the Peacock's Door. I have seen the Worm Museum and the Red Church. I have learnt a sixth dead language, although perhaps one that does not die: "Before gods arose from blood, before ever ape stood upright, this was the language heard in the House of the Sun."

1:10 AM - 4 Jun 2018

The slowest and painfullest grind in Cultist Simulator is the Lore upgrade. Six 30-second stages, three of which demand a perishable resource—Erudition or Glimmering—or Reason. If you can't meet the demands of each stage as it arises, you usually fail and must start over.

It's definitely easier to obtain Lore from books, if you can find them, and if you can read them. But high level Lore is rare even from books.

And it's never been clear to me which Lore I'm actually going to need: so I'm trying to get the highest level of each. Perhaps overkill.

2:43 AM - 4 Jun 2018

Whoa whoa whoa! I have just discovered that you can PREDICT when things like Despair and Visions are coming up in the next minute.

Click on the Time tile and the next thing due is shown on the right hand side! My mind is blown.

And it only took me 40 hours of playing to notice!

5:12 AM - 4 Jun 2018

I just summoned my first Percussigant, and its description made me laugh aloud.

I'm not telling you what it was: you're going to have the joy of discovering it for yourself. 😄

5:22 AM - 4 Jun 2018

I've hit another huge plateau. For I-don't-know-how-long I've been pretty stuck. I've passed the time with expeditions and upgrading Lore as much as I can, but I'm not making forward progress towards anything.

I want to try to find the Tricuspid Gate, but haven't a clue how to get there. The Peacock Door doesn't seem to lead there, cause the only cards I can use with the Peacock Door just take me to the Mansus.

There's two other hints of something I'm missing: I have discovered just one book in yet another dead language, but no idea where to learn how to translate it.

And I found a Gold Spintria, but have no possible use for it. Oh, except as a mediocre ritual ingredient I guess.

I can't believe this is still going on in Day 4

[backslashn]

Cultist Simulator, Day 2

Continued from Day 1.

4:17 PM - 2 Jun 2018

The single most annoying thing right now about Cultist Simulator is trying to arrange cards in the play field. Here's my current setup: you can see how I try to arrange related cards close together.

But when you drag a card just a fraction too close to another card—and while dragging, the card under your mouse is rotated slightly, so you can't get a pixel-accurate understanding of where it'll drop—then something incredibly annoying happens:

The game shoves the card that was on the table already—sometimes more than one card too!—out of the way, seemingly randomly to one side or the other. So trying to lay cards down to use space efficiently tends to muck up the layout :(

This is even more frustrating when the game reads the mouse input wrongly during a drag, so it thinks you dragged the wrong card, or dropped too soon. Which happens quite regularly during the game's lag spikes. (Why a card game has big lag spikes I don't know! But it does.)

4:39 PM - 2 Jun 2018

I seem to have mastered the art of making intriguing-but-not-quite-suspicious paintings. So while I have this annoying investigator on my tail, I am keeping my Notoriety locked up in a continual series of portraits of this one random hanger-on.

I keep generating Mystique, so the investigator isn't going away, but between paintings I get somewhere between 10 and 50 seconds worth of safe time where the Notoriety can expire just a little bit. It takes a very long time to expire it this way, but it works.

I don't know any other way of dealing with Notoriety, so as tedious as this is, I'm going to keep doing it. Should only take a dozen or so more paintings to get rid of most of it. And in the meantime I'm generating absolute shitloads of funds. 😅

Of course while I'm making all these paintings, I'm not doing anything else of much use. I seem to have reached an enormous plateau that I can't actually advance from.

Well, I have one Rite to try at some point, but since the things to use in rites always seem to last only 60 seconds, and I can't (yet?) predict when I'll get one of the aspect that works for this rite, I can't think about trying the Rite until my Work slot is reliably open.

(Reaching vast plateaus from where advancement seems impossible was also my experience with Fallen London)

8:31 PM - 2 Jun 2018

Well, I've figured out how to learn new Rites now, but haven't been able to do any yet.

9:30 PM - 2 Jun 2018

Haaaaah. So of the four Notoriety I was slowly (but safely) expiring through paintings, two had expired, and the other two were down to 38 and 29 seconds respectively: almost done.

Then I accidentally went on another expedition, so got another one :(

So I guess I've got seventeen billion more paintings to do.

I don't know any other way to deal with Notoriety, and I'm not leaving it out in the open for five minutes for this cop to find and create evidence from, because evidence is even harder to get rid of.

10:30 PM - 2 Jun 2018

Oops, mistimed a pause, and the investigator got that last Notoriety after all :(

10:32 PM - 2 Jun 2018

So, a thing about the design of Cultist Simulator is it doesn't explain much to you. You have to experiment to learn how to do pretty much anything in the game. It's a design principle very suited to the fiction of the game, where you're digging in occult mysteries.

And in the early game, this principle works really well, because there's so much to discover! How to recruit followers; how to obtain lore; how to translate books; how to earn more Health, Reason, and Passion; how to deal with investigators… and so on.

But in the mid (late?) game this principle becomes a burden as you exhaust avenues of opportunity available to you. Because you only discover ways to do things by trying them, there will be ways you don't find because you didn't try every thing on every other thing.

(That's a small exaggeration, because every card has an "aspect" trait that must match a slot to go into it. But there are many slots that accept numerous aspects, and a few that accept all aspects.)

In this game, having almost lost earlier at the hands of a hunter who turned my Notoriety into evidence which I only resolved with great difficulty, I was definitely not going to allow this new hunter a chance to get new evidence (until I made a mistake, but never mind that).

The only way I have discovered to keep Notoriety out of the hands of a hunter is to keep it locked away being used for something else. And the only way to lock it away that I have discovered is to use it in a painting.

There might be other ways to deal with Notoriety besides letting it time out (which takes five whole minutes—and its clock won't tick down at all while it's in use on a painting!), but with this Hunter actively and continually on my trail, I have no way to discover them.

But also I don't really have any kind of clue what it might be. Maybe talking to my followers about it might have some effect? Who knows.

In the meantime, while I've been spending hours and hours making paintings, keeping this Notoriety locked away except for 10-second periods between paintings (the 10 seconds is because a painting takes slightly less time to make than the hunter does to investigate one harmless Mystique), I've had a lot of time to poke at other things, but still found very few new avenues of new things to do.

I've bought almost every book from both shops. I've recruited more than twenty followers. I've learned four dead languages. I've amassed a motley collection of lore, and an assortment of tools and ingredients.

There are different levels of lore in each of the different aspects—but I don't know how to upgrade lore except by combining duplicates of a lower level lore, and there are so few duplicates! So I can't really advance any of my lore at all, and most of it feels useless.

Anyway, the mistake I made by accidentally letting the Hunter get the Notoriety at least has freed me from being stuck in the make-paintings rut for another hour or two! Which means my Work oven will at last become free for other things.

So the only avenues I know of to poke at that I haven't exhausted yet are: - Try performing some rites (to what end? I don't know) with the Work slot. - Study the remaining books (slow, and not of great help) - Do a few more expeditions (very slow, risky, but gives a few items)

Does that mean I'm nearing the end of the game? At this point I hope so, because otherwise I think I'm going to end up pretty frustrated by it.

Oh, and there's a few commissions I could do for some patrons too: but they also need the work slot, and the one I already did doesn't suggest those will lead to anything new.

11:08 PM - 2 Jun 2018

Okay, so now I have a few Rites and a free Work oven, I have found that actually getting a Rite to work requires very specific combinations of things that I either don't have, or will take a lot of dragging cards around to discover :-/

I don't even know what the Rites will do!

11:13 PM - 2 Jun 2018

Okay, I've found a combination that at least lets me press the Start button! Apparently I'm going to be summoning the mysterious Name known as the Baldomerian.

So I summoned this person or thing, and now what? They have a three minute timer on them, and I don't appear to be able to do anything with them. :-/

I don't want to have to resort to googling for the answers, but the opacity here really tempts me to, especially combined with the apparent scarcity of things to experiment with. 😕

Well, I guess I'm painting a picture of this thing I summoned then 😅

12:15 AM - 3 Jun 2018

Then I summoned one of the Voiceless Dead, and couldn't find anything to do with them. So then I used them as the sacrifice in another Rite—which turned out to be for removing Decrepitude, which I didn't have anyway.

This is all quite frustrating. Then there's the Rites which permanently destroy some of the things used in them, which is a fucking huge problem if you have to experiment to figure them out. And if it takes 16 hours of the game to get to the point of being able to do so.

So for the moment I've given up on Rites, because I just don't know what they're for or why. Instead I'm studying the remaining books and sending expeditions to the remaining locations, because I don't know what else to do. 😩

12:37 AM - 3 Jun 2018

No clue what to do: the books are only yielding low-level lore; the commissions yielding little of value; the expeditions bearing little fruit.

There are no more potential recruits to be found; no more books to buy; no more patrons to engage; few if any new locations to find.

A long, slow, bitter, drawn-out end to the game—is that really it? What did I miss? ☹️

1:42 AM - 3 Jun 2018

Turns out there was one specific pairing of cards I needed to use. One of the two was reasonably obvious, but the other one needed to be one specific Lore card: not a lower-level one, nor a higher-level one, nor one of the same level from a different Aspect.

I'd already tried a bunch of different lore cards, including a level 6 and a level 10 of this very same Aspect. Is this the only place where a higher-level Lore card won't substitute for a lower-level one? Only one I've encountered, at any rate.

I had twenty-three different Lore cards (but not a full set). I'd tried about eight or nine different ones in this recipe, and they all failed. You can probably see how I thought I was on the wrong track entirely, rather than thinking to keep brute force trying every single one.

Exasperated.

The thing I was missing wasn't even connected to the Rites at all! So although there were still obviously open possibilities there, all the experimentation I could do with them would've been futile.

1:51 AM - 3 Jun 2018

It's interesting to note that when you have a partially correct, or not quite strong enough combination of cards in a Rite (so that you can't actually begin it), the flavour text hints at what else you might need. This is good.

But the Way cards: there was no hint that I needed to find more of them, except the existence of other portals than "The Wood" on this map. In fact, I'd heard no mention of these other portals at all—except the Stag Gate, which is mentioned on my Dedication (i.e. objective) card.

There was no hint as to how I would find the Stag Gate at all, which is why I had concluded the rituals and summoning would be a part of it (but no: they're not).

I'd actually concluded quite incorrectly that the other gates shown were just different early portals or different objectives that other playthroughs would have instead of The Wood and the Stag Door.

I'd have been quitting the game soon in fact—if @electrondance hadn't pointed out that he had found The White Door (though he couldn't recall how), and it was probably the thing I was missing. And it was indeed.

The grind persists in Day 3

[backslashn]

Cultist Simulator, Day 1

6:51 PM - 1 Jun 2018

Trying out Cultist Simulator.

First impressions: - mysterious and obscure, which is exactly what I hoped for - font size is way too small ☹️ — can zoom, but it zooms the whole playfield - music is great and eerie - no fan of timers, but waiting to see if they're important

Also very much not a fan of Unity's default config dialog (it's always been bad). I want to remap some keys, but have to quit and restart the game to do so 😑

Oh, these aren't actually the controls for the game 😟

Okay, seems key remapping will come later: https://steamcommunity.com/app/718670/discussions/0/1697174779850943755/

Right, back to the game then. I guess for now I'll have to manage as best I can with the interface issues. (At least, unlike The Final Station, the text size isn't preventing me from playing the game)

Oh, and the other first impression of Cultist Simulator: - the writing is sinister and delicious, of course!

7:31 PM - 1 Jun 2018

Further impressions: - icon overload! I have to keep clicking on everything to remember what all these icons mean! Labels—or mouseover text if you must—would help me a lot here. - lots and lots of waiting for timers. There's no auto-pause when a timer finishes :-/ - terribly confused why a bunch of timers finish up and then start all over again.

Amusingly the tiny cards have labels, just these big things don't.

Having zoomed in—in order to be able to read the text— various UIs now pop up with their buttons clipped off the bottom of the screen 😐 Also there's a horrible shadowy vignette hanging over the top part of the window, so I can't pan down to use the whole window area 😑

7:37 PM - 1 Jun 2018

I like the freeform UI in general, but it's got rather a lot of fiddly bits. Like tentacles.

As the number of cards multiplies, I keep moving them around to try and keep things in an order that makes sense to me.

But then the game snaps them off elsewhere according to its own labyrinthine logic, often panning the camera away as it does so. Infuriating.

I have dealt with the vignette for the moment by placing my two Dread cards beneath it. There they wait, enshadowed, as their own counters tick down to an obscure, ominous ending…

8:11 PM - 1 Jun 2018

There are seventeen different timers on my screen right now. Only twelve of them are indicated unless I mouseover some of the cards. But even those twelve are overwhelming: I can't keep track of which ones are where and how far down they are.

The font for the numeric counters: extreme differences in stress render the figures a little indistinct; the spacing is odd. The figures are constantly animating too. I can't read the counters at a glance, but have to pause the game and fixate briefly on each one.

Only five of the seventeen timers have a graphical indication: a line slowly encircles the icon. Its radius is too large to glimpse out of the corner of my eye; nor does it change in appearance as the timers nears its end:

Again I have to fixate on each, on its top left corner, to see if it's nearly done. This continuous scanning and fixation is tiring.

8:31 PM - 1 Jun 2018

My cult has abducted its first prisoner. Only time will tell if they will end up as a new follower, or a new victim.

8:35 PM - 1 Jun 2018

One aspect (pun!) of the self-restarting timers now makes sense to me: if the thing opened up an empty slot, then the current timer is how long I have to fill the slot; the subsequent timer is it using whatever I put into it.

Interestingly, if the card that you slot in has its own timer, it is paused while it is in the slot. If the time-to-fill-the-slot is long, you could use this to prolong a card's life, taking it back out for some other use before the time-to-fill expires.

8:54 PM - 1 Jun 2018

Something's shadow has passed over my desk… was it the moon?

8:57 PM - 1 Jun 2018

Few people in the city attract so much interest without a clear cause. Perhaps it's the way you style your hair?

9:00 PM - 1 Jun 2018

I have sent my disciple on an expedition. Perhaps she can uncover useful secrets.

9:05 PM - 1 Jun 2018

Something strange and glorious has just occurred!

10:56 PM - 1 Jun 2018

I now have four followers and two minions. I've sent one of the latter, a hulking fellow, after the investigator that has been dogging my steps and amassing evidence. Let's hope he can capture or subdue them.

But I struggle with the mysteries of my cult; I want to deepen the faith of my followers, yet I still haven't found the right rituals…

Back to the timers: yeah, I think they mostly work. I'd still prefer turn-based, but now that I kinda get how they function, it makes sense. I'd still prefer them to be more at-a-glance parseable, but you can't have everything.

11:03 PM - 1 Jun 2018

Cultist Simulator is in essence a cooking game: I have five ovens, titled Work, Dream, Study, Explore, and Talk. Then there's numerous customers: Time demands money, and other customers demanding more exotic recipes come and go.

If I put the right ingredients into the Work oven, I get money out the other side. So I repeat the same few recipes continuously to feed Time. I put varying recipes into the other ovens to generate new ingredients or discover new recipes.

My primary ingredients are money, health, passion, and reason. Passion and Reason are herbs whose leaves enhance recipes, but take time to grow back. Funds I can spend as long as I have them. Health is key to many things, but always comes with a risk of hurting myself.

11:17 PM - 1 Jun 2018

We have captured the Hunter that dogged our trail, but another has arisen to take her place. I would send my minion after him, but he's busy on another errand. And I'll have to pay him again, before long.

Meanwhile my Work alternates between a day job and my real passion: painting. My wild imagination and notoriety means my paintings earn me quite a lot of money! But I barely have time to squeeze them in between leaving the office and arriving the next morning.

Literally: I have 0.3 seconds left on the day job's timer to put it into the Work box again, or I'll get demoted and end up with less money and some negative side-effects.

11:22 PM - 1 Jun 2018

Whoa: my latest painting sold for six funds. SIX FUNDS! That's the Cultist Simulator equivalent of like ten million pounds!

Meanwhile the day job pays a measly two, and takes twice as long to do so! I should quit and devote my working hours to the brush and palette.

12:17 AM - 2 Jun 2018

My first expedition ended ignominiously: my followers searched and searched for a hidden door, but couldn't find it. I didn't understand how expeditions worked, so kept throwing funds at it thinking that would help.

It didn't: turns out I was just paying for my followers to have a lovely long holiday at a swanky hotel. Well, that's my guess anyway: nobody keeps receipts in this cult. It's financial madness.

My second expedition ended in tragedy: one of the two followers sent on it was killed by the guardians of whatever-the-place-was. Oops.

1:40 AM - 2 Jun 2018

My latest expedition was technically successful: we reached the treasure. We just also happened to collect a small curse as we went by. Ahem.

2:25 AM - 2 Jun 2018

By far the most annoying bit of Cultist Simulator is how obstacles to an expedition are completely random.

That expedition I failed cause we didn't find a hidden door? I went back there again with the right team for finding a hidden door: but it's a different obstacle now 😠

And because failing expeditions tends to cause followers to die and/or curses to spring up, guess what's going to happen!

And skills that followers have also appear to be random, so basically need strong skills across the board to do any expeditions. Or dumb luck. Frustrating.

I'm also getting a billion short-lived cards that say they can be helpful in rituals for summoning minions—but how do you learn new rituals? Absolutely no clue, after many hours of play. Weird cliffs difficulty due to obscured knowledge.

I'm surviving just fine. Pouring my followers into the expedition grindstone. But not really making any headway on advancement. Don't know how to learn new rituals. Don't know how to advance my followers beyond Believer status. (Not asking for hints—just expressing frustration)

Oh wait, I'm wrong about the expedition obstacles being randomised: I was getting two different locations mixed up. 😔

5:47 AM - 2 Jun 2018

Well, I've now figured out how to advance my followers. Also how to compensate for shortcomings in their skills in the meantime. I've learnt how to approach an unknown expedition with minimal risk. I've learnt how to translate books in dead languages.

Overall I'm doing a whole lot better now than I was a few hours ago. But I've been playing all night, so I certainly ought to be doing better! I think Cultist Simulator is the first game that I've done an all-nighter on since Civilization IV.

The story continues in Day 2.