— Mervyn Bunter, Clouds of Witness (1926)

Facts are the bricks of life, but they need a few licks of paint before you want to look at them. Mr Gradgrind of Hard Times said: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” And he turned out to be the villain of the piece! So today I am giving you facts, but coated in glorious technicolour.

HOUSE OF LIGHT

You all know that HOUSE OF LIGHT is launching on Steam and GOG on Thursday 26th September at 6PM BST. I can now confirm that it will cost $14.99 / £12.99 / €13.99 with a 10% launch discount in the first week of sale (except if you’re a Perpetual Edition owner, in which case it’s free). We’ll also be adding a new BOOK OF HOURS: Anthology Edition bundle, just like Cultist Simulator, which includes the base game, the soundtrack and HOUSE OF LIGHT with a 15%-off-everything discount (making it about $43.32 / £35.67 / €41.21 in total). This should make it easy for first-time buyers to get the definitive edition of the game with one click, and for existing fans to force gentle occult librarianship on all their friends by buying it as a gift for someone else.

AK has already mentioned this in a few places, but it’s worth reiterating that HOUSE OF LIGHT is roughly comparable in size to all Cultist‘s DLCs wrapped up in one. Cultist had lots of smaller expansions, but we tried something different with BOOK OF HOURS and spent much longer making one really chunky expansion rather than lots of little pieces. So just in case anyone was worried about the value of Perpetual Edition dropping, it hasn’t! It’s all just coming at once this time.

Depending on how HOUSE OF LIGHT goes, and how pre-production on our Mysterious Game Three goes, we’ll make a decision in the first half of 2025 about whether we come back to BOOK OF HOURS and release additional expansions like HOUSE OF HUES. More on that as/when we have updates.

Now, for some long-awaited news…

The Lucid Tarot

It finally has a release date! That release date is:

🎴🎃🦇 HALLOWEEN 🦇🎃🎴

(Thursday 31st October 2024)

We’ll be releasing it on our Etsy shop at 6PM GMT, it’ll cost £70 + shipping, and we’ll be starting with 500 signed, limited edition copies. Every deck comes with a velvet tarot bag and quick start guide, but the first 500 decks will also contain a certificate of authenticity, signed and numbered by ‘the artist’. Once these are gone, they’re gone – so if the Tarot of the Hours and the Lady Afterwards launches are anything to go by, I’d suggest camping out on the Etsy shop at this time on Halloween and grabbing a copy while they’re still there.

If you miss out on the first 500, don’t worry. Like we did with the Tarot of the Hours – to make sure everyone in all time zones had a fair chance of getting a deck – we’ll release another 500 Lucid Tarots over November / December. If we sell out, we’ll restock for 2025. So everyone who wants a deck will be able to get one – we just have to take it slow so I (and my mum and dad, who have been unceremoniously roped in for packing duty) can manage demand.

Right. See you on the other side of Simplified Chinese and Russian release, which is happening next week on Thursday 29th August. Wish us luck!

• Grand prize: August MK
• Runners-up: Kristen B, Christopher G, Anthony H, Cat, Jason M
• Wildcards: Will E, Paul H, Elegiant, Andrew H, Julián, Matthew L, Sebastian-Benjamin T, Marco I, Agahnim, Matt F

All winners have been emailed. Thanks to all who entered, and if you didn’t win, better luck next time! At least Cthulhu hasn’t woken up. We think.

H. P. Lovecraft was the godfather of ‘weird fiction’ and a major influence on Cultist Simulator. He was also born on 20th August 1890, so we’re running a Lovecraftian giveaway from today until his birthday on 20th August 2024 when you can win some suitably eldritch prizes! Enter (as many times as you like) below…

The Prizes

GRAND PRIZE: The Lady Afterwards TRPG

“You’ve been summoned to Alexandria, a city of coloured lights and curious histories. An old friend needs you to track down a woman. She’s probably in trouble. Probably trouble herself. Plus ça change…”

The Lady Afterwards is a Cultist Simulator TRPG for 2-8 players set in 1920s Alexandria. It takes place in the world of the Secret Histories, where hidden gods watch over a world of apocalypse, yearning and forbidden arts. It’s a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express. Everything you need is included: gamebooks, clues, character sheets, dice sets and more. More info and images available here.

5 x RUNNERS-UP: The Tarot of the Hours

“Do the Hours speak? If they do, this may be the language they use.”

Five runners-up will get one of our bestselling Tarot of the Hours decks. Based off the traditional Rider-Waite tarot, the Tarot of the Hours uses the esoteric full-colour art of Cultist Simulator on every card and packages it up in a matt laminated tuck box. You can see more of the deck here.

10 x WILDCARDS: Cultist Simulator (Steam or GOG)

“Seize forbidden treasures. Summon alien gods. Feed on your disciples.”

You like Lovecraft? Then you’ll probably like Cultist Simulator. Described as the single best video game at evincing Lovecraftian horror, Cultist Sim is a double BAFTA-nominated roguelike narrative card game where you start your own cult, glean snippets of the occult from the House Without Walls, and try your best not to die. 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

FAQ

When do entries close?

At noon on Tuesday 20th August 2024.

When will the winners be announced?

On the afternoon of Tuesday 20th August 2024. You’ll be contacted directly if you win, and we’ll announce winners on all our social channels too.

Can I enter multiple times?

Yes! There are a maximum of five ways to enter: following us on our Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, and/or sharing the giveaway on Twitter and Facebook. Each one of those actions counts as separate entries, so you could just do one of them and give yourself one chance of winning a prize, or you could do all five of them and give yourself five chances of winning something. Simples!

I don’t have social media! Can I enter some other way?

We added YouTube to the list this year to help with this! But I’m afraid if you don’t have any social media OR a YouTube account, we can’t add you in to the giveaway. 🙁 You can always check out our merch shop instead, though!

Please tell me legal stuff so you don’t get sued

We’re running this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, but it’s not sponsored, endorsed, administered by or associated with any of those companies.

Still have questions?

Just email us. 🙂

OK, this quote from Cultist Simulator is possibly one of the grimmest things AK ever wrote in the game (the ‘Marinette ending’ from The Dancer DLC. IYKYK). But I am repurposing it to herald to a good thing and that good thing is some secret Cultist Simulator news! Namely:

Cultist Simulator… on console?!

Screenshots from the PlayStation dev kit

This is not a drill! Cultist Simulator is coming to Xbox and Playstation on 8th August 2024.  We partnered with Polish publishers Klabater because a) they clearly know what’s what and b) we love the Poles. (I used to date one and AK used to live there. One winter’s day his hair literally froze into icicles.)

Cultist Simulator‘s console UI is heavily based on Playdigious’s excellent rework for the Nintendo Switch, which we think is the best way to transform a fundamentally clicky PC-first game to a controller-friendly game. So here are the key details to know:

• Launch date: Thursday 8th August 2024
• Platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
• Versions and prices:
  • Initiate Edition (game plus mini DLC: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest and Ghoul DLC) – $24.99 / €24.99
  • The Exile DLC – $9.99 / €9.99
  • Anthology Edition (everything together: Cultist Simulator + Dancer, Priest, Ghoul and Exile DLC) – $29.99 / €29.99

Wishlist the game today if you’re interested! Click to wishlist on….

Perhaps some people reading this have had enough of being nice and homey in BOOK OF HOURS and want to start a new run of hubristic Lovecraftian fun. Maybe you want to go through the game to find something AK wrote that’s even more upsetting than Marinette’s story. Perhaps you just want the colours beneath the skin of the world. Whatever your motivation, I hope you pick Cultist Simulator up on your platform of choice next month. It’s the first time we’ve ever released any game on console (including any of our work on Fallen London or Sunless Sea) so we are excited! Excite alongside us, if you like.

Where in a month of Sundays is the Lucid Tarot?

Click for larger versions.

It has taken a preposterously long time to make this a reality. I’ll spare you the tedious details, but some highlights include £44,000 quotes from local suppliers, another supplier running off with our money, and having to come up with an entirely new production process for printing double-sided opaque-but-also-transparent tarot cards. I literally couldn’t find anyone who’d made cards like this before, anywhere in the world. I even tried to contact the people who made the Gloom deck – one of the key inspirations – but no dice. Fortunately, I found a wonderful factory producer and we’re now on our sixth or seventh iteration of the deck. To give you an idea of the problems encountered, here’s a comparison of the first prototype we produced (which I loved) with the first production-ready deck:

The production-ready deck is smooth and scratch resistant and gorgeously made. But the production process significantly darkened the deck from the prototype (which was a manual, not production-viable first pass).

You might think the difference isn’t terribly significant – you might actually prefer the darker version – but problems became particularly apparent when you held the cards up to the light:

Bearing in mind the whole point of the deck is for them to be actually usable as tarot cards – so you can place them face down and then reveal them – this really wasn’t cricket. But thanks to brilliant work from Emma, my contact at the factory, we’ve now come up with a totally new method which involves printing multiple middle-levels of white ink and then splicing those layers with a layer of iridescent ink. This necessitates using specialist ink and materials I hadn’t heard of, but now we have nice opaque cards which also have gently silvered iridescent edges (this is the version featured in the gallery at the top of this section). I love them! There are some minor imperfections – I think they add charm, Emma thinks they can be improved upon – so we’re trying one last improvement before greenlighting full production. As a result, I still can’t confirm a specific release date yet, but I can at least tell you we are very close, and have an MVP (minimum viable product) as a beautiful worst-case fallback.

I appreciate that from the outside it all probably looks like this:

BUT TRUST ME! People are excited about the deck, it’s been a much more complex physical production process than expected, and I don’t want to sell anything I can’t enthusastically and truthfully endorse. Here’s what I can confirm at this stage:

• The Lucid Tarot is almost certainly launching on our Etsy shop this year
• We’ll offer an initial, limited run of 500 signed and numbered decks which will come with a signed certificate of authenticity
• We’ll then move to staggered runs of 100 (or so!) of unnumbered decks, so people in different time zones have a fair chance or getting them when they go on sale
• Every deck – both the 500 limited edition and the unnumbered version – comes swaddled in a rich velvet tarot bag and ‘quick read’ summary of each card’s meaning, so you can get strated tout suite.

BOOK OF HOURS

[MAJOR HOUSE OF LIGHT SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT]

AK is away currently on a mysterious writing trip – his last before HOUSE OF LIGHT launches – to finish up the Lighthouse Institute. You’ve probably noticed that our teasers up until this point about the Lighthouse Institute have been, er, here is a lighthouse! Here are some aspects! Be excited! Well, soon we will have some more specifics to share. People in the HOUSE OF LIGHT beta seem to really enjoy the interactions between visitors – for example, surprising revelations about the hobbies of well-known occultists:

“Douglas and Serena discuss a shared, concealed, but evidently profound passion for knitting. Douglas: ‘If you tell anyone outside this room, I’ll have you locked up.’ Serena: ‘If you tell anyone outside this room, I’ll give King Crucible your address.'”

Or subtle yet pivotal decisions in other occultists’ lives:

“Morgen and Arun return to their conversation about the Obliviates, who once were called the House of Lethe. She playfully accuses him of being a member, and asks him where he keeps his three chains. He parries by asking her where she keeps her notorious key of black sapphire. Morgen crosses her legs and asks Arun silkily if he would like to search her. After a moment, he says very definitely that no, he would not.”

AK is writing even more to cover the most likely potential outcomes of the Lighthouse board. As there are six positions available and 1-3 people (I think!) who are eligible for that position, there’re a lot of different possibilities here. It’s actually a great illustration of the danger of hidden multipliers in game development. To take an art pipeline example: ‘I will add two vases of flowers to each room in Hush House, which will take 5 minutes each. That’s quick! OK, so there are 107 rooms, multiplied by 10 minutes, which gives me a task list that will take… realistically three full days’ work to complete. Maybe I won’t add those flowers then.’ This is why AK has to basically rent a room and lock himself inside it when it comes to these big writing tasks in BOOK OF HOURS. It’s on us for making such a complicated, baroque game, but hey!

What I can share at this stage is that AK is doing a lot of work on endings, making them truly reflective of your choices and your specific Lighthouse Board. Here’s our new Lighthouse-specific ending page, for example (please note this is a mock-up, and may change before we launch):

You’ll be able to click on each of the Lighthouse Institute roles (‘Secretary Vigilant’, etc) to see what that specific person did in that specific role, or whether they’re still sulking because the Institute decided to be friends with the bug people instead of the year wranglers. So you should have a really good sense at the end of a HOUSE OF LIGHT playthrough of the effect your choices had on the world, and what the personalities you put in power went on to achieve. Hopefully that will feel crunchy and rewarding, like a fresh slice of Amber Pumpkin Pie. But more news on this soon, when AK returns!

“Celebrating the completion of the Further Visitor Stories in HOUSE OF LIGHT. That means we’re at 80% done, which means in turn that I should be sending out a handful of beta keys to the lucky few end of next week (sorry, if you haven’t already heard, you didn’t get your name drawn from the Clutches). HOUSE OF LIGHT is a chonker: already the same word count that the whole of Cultist Simulator was at launch.”

So that means we hope you’ll really like HOUSE OF LIGHT, and we should have a suitably chonky blog post with updates for you soon!

In the meantime, we’re also trying something new. We’ve just uploaded the first episode of what we hope will become a fortnightly communal attempt to predict the future! This is the Weather Forecast. This is the Weather Forecast. We love games – you love games too, probably. We talk about games all the time – you have actual lives, and maybe only talk about games a bit. So we thought it would be fun to pull back the curtain on professional game development and take a look at the week’s top ten most popular upcoming games on Steam. Using publicly accessible data and a bit of Google-fu, we then each try to estimate that game’s Week 1 review score, which is a general indicator of a game’s ‘success’ at launch. One developer’s success criterion is different from another’s, of course – a first-time solo dev could be rightfully delighted by 50 reviews in the first week, but 50 reviews in the first week for an Electronic Arts launch would probably cause heads to roll. So this isn’t about judging games as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ – it’s about seeing whether we can reliably predict the fortunes of a game just before launch, because that would be really useful for all our future Weather Factory games. And we happen to think it’s pretty interesting, too.

So take a look at the first episode, join in with a YouTube comment if you like, and come back in a fortnight for us to see if we got any of the numbers right!

A few things to note:

1. 1. All data we’re using is publicly available. We don’t have any insider knowledge, other than experience making games ourselves!
   2. The ‘Popular Upcoming’ list on Steam is region-specific, so if you’re not in the UK you may see a different list. There are loads of games in ‘Popular Upcoming’ that are never mentioned by traditional games press or streamers. Hopefully you’ll discover some games you’ve never heard of that you actually quite fancy playing.
   3. We’d love you to join in if you’d like to. If you want to guess any Week 1 review numbers, just leave a comment on the video. You can be smug in the next video when we recap what actually happened against our predicted numbers.
   4. This isn’t a value judgement on any of the featured games. We’re just looking at data and talking about what it might mean.

Good luck to all games mentioned! We hope your launches – which are by far the scariest part of game dev – go brilliantly.

Now, I leave you with news that Cultist Simulator is today’s Daily Deal on Steam, at a deepest-ever (and frankly insane) 75% off. Check it out, and watch the ever-marvellous Systemchalk Broadcasting live on the store page now. Oh! And all our merch is 25% off for the weekend, to celebrate Cultist being culty and the Weather Forecast probably being embarrassingly wrong. Happy Friday, everyone!

“I am not sure whether the game is still being supported,” said a recent help ticket about Cultist Simulator. It is, and in fact we keep Chelnoque (who also helped with BOOK OF HOURS code) on retainer specifically to fix issues with CS. After six years it’s pretty stable… but that sometimes means that where bugs still exist, they’re weird. Fortunately Chel is a dogged pursuer. Here’s his recent after-action report on one particularly stubborn blemish, as a guest post.

==

You may remember a CS issue that still gets reported occasionally, with followers losing follower aspect in Apostles after being injured by an enemy Long – I was finally able to track it down (almost two years since the first report). The root cause for this one is localization (of course it is), so might be somewhat relevant for BoH.

tl;dr version (spoils some revelations): if you have more than 1 mutation in an internal recipe, any loc will break it unless you apply my fix||

Actual repro steps turned out to be simple – on any language other than English, the recipe long.executestrategy.injurefollower.defencefailed doesn’t mutate follower_wound correctly. (wanted to brag that by now I am able to write this recipe’s id by memory but apparenty I still can’t)

Normally, it does two mutations – follower_wound: 1, follower: -1. But with loc, follower_wound mutation id gets replaced with follower in this specific recipe. Why?

Mutations property is an array. UniqueIdBuilder, when making unique ids  (which, in turn, are responsible for making associations between core and loc content) doesn’t care whether something is in array, and gives sub-ids like mutations.filter – as if “filter” was mutation’s own property, but, of course, it’s a sub-property of a mutation object that mutations array contains. So both mutations’ filters in this recipe had an id like (simplified) >long.executestrategy.injurefollower.defencefailed.mutations.filter, making them essentially the same thing as far as locs are concerned.

But, “Chelnoque”, you will say (more eloquently probs), “Chelnoque, I distinctively remember having more than one mutation in other recipes too. Why don’t they bug out? And why only in localizations? And mutations isn’t a localizable property, how come loc even affects it?”

“Why only in localizations” is fairly easy to answer. Unique id plays no role in core content load as the loaded data there is stored in a list, while loc stores all data in a dict (so it can be later found and applied to loaded core data) by unique id. Thus, same unique ids overwrite each other.

But why only this specific recipe? Well, because it’s internal. The only internal recipe in the game that uses mutations.
Why it is important that it’s internal?
In short, “because localizable sub-entities are localized without a regard to their own localizable properties”.

For example, recipes have slots. Slots have localizable properties – label, description. But recipes don’t care about that. If there’s a slot defined in a loc, all of its properties will be seen as eligible for localization. Why? Giving the floor back to AK, in comments:

//Note: this doesn’t work quite in the way I intended it. Label and Description on Slots are marked as Localise, but
//the attribute is inspected only for the top level entity. Because the top level entity also has Label and Description marked as localise,
//the slot properties are added to the localisable keys, but this will break if the names are different. Consider explicitly inspecting subproperty attributes
//to see if they’re also subentities, when loading the data
//note: “explicitly inspecting subproperty attributes” won’t work in cases like “a normal Recipe defined inside “linked”
//LinkedRecipeDetails has no explicit properties like Label/Description, so they can’t be marked as localizable, so they won’t be included here

And:

//There’s another bug here that approximately cancels out the bug described above when scanning for localisable keys.
//We only check the top-level property, not its sub-properties. So if we’re registering loc data for ‘linked’ (localisable=true)
//we also register loc data for all its sub properties – eg both ‘startdescription’ (hurray) and ID (minor perf pain)

Okay, to sum it up.

• Mutations aren’t localized normally
• But links are localized, because they may contain internal recipes that may contain text data
• Being sub-entities, they are localized in their entirety, loader not knowing what properties in them are localizable or not localizable
• And knowing would do shit all, in fact, because we’re actually defining an entirely different entity here – a recipe, not a link
• So we have no other way but to localize everything which means we accidentally localize non-text gameplay data which means it needs to be synced across locs
• And also means the array stuff I started with becomes relevant because it means mutations become mixed in translation of internal recipes
• But actually NOT EXACTLY, because there are set of clever traps and checks to prevent redundant localization – for example, only string properties’ locs are applied (meaning that, say, slot reqs won’t be localized; and "greedy": true won’t be applied; but "greedy": "true" will be)

BUT !!! filter and mutate properties are strings, which means they are eligible for localization again (and, consecutively, for a mix-up)

Phew. As you can see, the Devil had to work really hard to make this one happen. Loc pipeline is a minefield (not for us – for bugs) and it got passed with a commendable grace.

Well now. The most immediate way to fix that is to just to make id builder to index array entries (which I did), but that still doesn’t address all other stuff that surfaced during this investigation. So

1) I took the liberty of slightly rewriting the loc pipeline so it actually knows and respects sub-entities’ localizable properties. Works like that – instead of a single list with all localizable properties for entity, there’s now a dict; firstly, it contains a string-key equal to the current top-level entity’s tag (“elements”, “recipes”) with an associated list that contains all entity’s localizable properties. Then it contains other keys-property names and their respective localizable properties (ie “slot” -> label, description, “slots” -> label, description). When checking whether a property is localizable or not, it also checks whether it’s a sub-entity property and if it is, it iterates thought all of sub-entities’ properties, checking again, and possibly again, etc.

The dict flattens the nesting – ie if there’s a structure like “entity type A contains a localizable sub-entity B that contains a localizable sub-entity C” all A, B and C will be in the dict on the same level.This theoretically will cause problems in case, say, an entity has a property “slot” and that slot has a property “slot” too, and the latter property contains another type of entity that has different localizable property. Sounds fairly unrealistic, but give it a few years.

2) That still doesn’t solve the awkward thing about links that they don’t have labels/descriptions and thus can’t really be localized this way (unless again we localize them entirely which again opens us to a possibility of all kinds of insidious things). The best I can think of for now is to add unused pseudo-properties to them (like label/description/slots) so they are localized, and then flush them manually into the recipe.

“…There are, however, exceptions.” It’s Cultist Simulator‘s sixth birthday today, so let’s make an exception for her. This quote is from a high-level Secret Histories fragment called ‘Unresolved Ambiguity’, and it could absolutely be a metaphor for game development in general. Cultist could have been a hundred different games, but it ended up consolidated in the one it became (and the one it evolved into, after years of post-lauch DLC and updates). You may remember that we made Cultist Simulator in 11 months, with a budget of around £150,000. It’s now reached somewhere between 850,000 to a million people, making some serious allowances for chaotic data like Humble Bundles and Amazon Prime. So in honour of her birthday here’s a whirlwind tour of just under a year’s game development, starting with the most important part of all: the What Even Is This Javascript Greybox Prototype. (Click for larger images!)

People who’ve played Cultist Simulator will recognise a surprising amount in these early prototypes. The art direction isn’t there – AK is definitely theme and mechanics first, ‘colours’ second – but the game’s Cookie Clicker influence is particularly apparent, as are important other factes of the final game like verbs (Study, Dream, Work…), timers (45s countdown for ‘The body has its needs…’) and resource-based storytelling (Secret Histories 1 + Occult Scrap 1 = Recruit an Aficionado of Conspiracies). I’ve worked with AK since 2015, when we met at his previous studio, and he always has a weirdly clear idea of what the game will be at the start. It’s just difficult for him to explain it and for anyone else to see inside his head. I’m now well-versed in the two to six months of trust where I have no idea what this game is that we’re apparently making, before it all falls into place. That moment for Cultist was this updated prototype, where you could first see the basic card interface:

I get it now! I see what all those grey buttons on their grey backgrounds represented! This gives me a lot to work with – I can now see what needs to be artified – while being flexible enough for AK to still be able to play with basic mechanics and the all-important recipes at the heart of the final game. Looks recognisable now, right? But where it really comes to life is when AK and Catherine Unger, our brilliant freelance artist, settled on a suitable art style:

It now looks so much like the real Cultist Simulator, but with enough difference, to trigger a bit of sense of the uncanny valley. I still mourn those stick-timers on the verb tokens, for instance! But this was where people really started to sit up and take notice of the game we were about four months out from completing. So with a bunch of hard game dev, which looks in real terms like this…

…Cultist Simulator, as we know and love her, was born. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GAME ABOUT PEELING BACK THE SKIN OF THE WORLD! We really love you.

Over to AK, and the expansion he’s been focused on.

HOUSE OF LIGHT melds with the existing game like the Witch-Twin or half a diphthong. So we’re taking the unusual step of adding actual meta information to the menu when you buy it:

Squint and you might notice an incongruous presence behind the window. The HOUSE OF LIGHT menu icon won’t actually be a tiny photo of the Tourlitis lighthouse – that was just a reference I gave Lottie for art. Similarly, any and all of the text in this window might change. But this is roughly how the expansion is shaping up, and you can see now some more of what I meant by ‘the foot bone’s connected to the leg bone’.

There are probably just two bullet points yet unilluminated: FURTHER STORIES and LIGHTHOUSE INSTITUTE. These are at least 30% of the expansion, though. FURTHER STORIES is ‘what happens in each of the non-Numa visitor stories’ . Why just the non-Numa stories? Because Numa visitors were really hard to fit into the other points (FOOD, SALONS, etc) above. Does Coseley have an address? Is Bancroft actually alive? Can you invite Aunt Mopsy to dinner? I know that when I say ‘no’ to that last one there’ll be a chorus of AW NO FUN, but I’m saving you from yourselves. Anyway there are a couple of dozen of even the non-Numa stories, so adding even a modest bit of variant-outcome (‘branching’ if you want to use That Word) to each of them is quite a lot of work.

BOOK OF HOURS is 100%* backwards-compatible with existing saves. That * means ‘it’s a bug if it’s not’. This also means that to some limited extent your choices about who you helped and who you didn’t will carry over – for example, if you helped Coquille or Zachary with the Messenger’s Casket then its occupant is loose, if you helped Dagmar then its occupant is locked up tight, and if you helped both sides then the seals are cracking. Again, the branching variant-outcome effect is quite gentle, not least because I calibrated most of the original visitor stories so that you could conceivably help several people and never know the difference. But just this once I had the foresight to track effects for the future. So that’ll make a difference, at least for the 3% of players who both buy HOUSE OF LIGHT and don’t immediately begin a new run.

The Further Stories work is most of what’s left to do on House of Light, along with the coda which the Lighthouse Institute provides. Once I’ve completed three or  four of the Furthers, we’ll begin the closed beta… which you might have heard about on the grapevine… to which we’ve already invited about twenty players randomly selected from people who’ve been noticeably helpful with bug reporting. We have another randomly-selected twenty ready to go on the final beta before launch, so if you’ve been both helpful and lucky you might hear from us. I’m talking about this here mainly so we don’t get plaintive request emails – sorry folks, this one’s quite small – and I guess also to make the point that being helpful with bug reports gives you a small notional chance of being invited to future betas. If they happen. If we decide not to stop making games and turn Weather Factory into an artisanal custard distillery. I won’t promise we won’t. Hey Lottie, is this marketing? Am I helping?

Back to Lottie.

I actually don’t have A Marketing to bark at you, for once – though I thought you might be interested in the weirdness of translation that I’ve been working on recently. BOOK OF HOURS had a great launch (in large part to you, the people reading this blog post – so thank you extremely much if you were one of our early adopters, especially if you left a nice review). But it also highlighted one of our real weaknesses as a team: with just the two of us, cramming as much game into the game as we can before launching in a sensible indie-budget timeframe, we simply can’t localise the game in time for launch.

I remember some of the other games that launched at the same time as us – Shadow Gambit: the Cursed Crew, for example – came ready packaged with thirteen languages. THIRTEEN. We initially kept up with them until our plucky lil game (4Chan nominated us for ‘Best Game Nobody Played’, you know 💅) slowly but surely fell behind while translated games kept up their momentum. Loc really isn’t the sexiest part of post-launch development – that’s starygazy pie, obviously – but it can profoundly affect a studio’s fortunes, as well as bringing a world you’ve laboured over for years to a new audience, who may love it!

ANYWAY, all this is to say that Simplified Chinese and Russian is coming this August, so I’ve spent several days producing translated assets for several hundred books. This highlights some interesting challenges, like ‘how do pictographic languages deal with initials as short-hand for the full title’? (You try and fit In The Mountains As Upon The Plain There May Not Be A Path Where None Has Passed on a 194px spine. Initials are my friends.) But there are other, weirder challenges too, especially when they enter the ‘does it look like a bum’ area of art direction. What I mean by this is every time an artist draws something, there is always the chance that people look at it and do not see the gorgeously-realised impressionistic image of two mountains at dawn, they see ladyboobs, and you have to redraw them so they are definitely not light-soaked erotic mountain breasts anymore. This becomes important with initials on books, because every so often AK will create a book called something like Semi-Esoeteric Xenophon Youths and we have to rename it. In loc terms, you get to Debate of Seven Cups: ‘DoSC’ in English, no problem, and in Russian of course it’s

…………………………Well. Does this matter? Will it be noticeable to Russian players, playing in Russian? Will it keep me awake at night knowing that there is a book in my serious, beautiful game about life and history and magic with a big rude word down the spine? Yes and yes, I think. So of course I have cunningly changed it to incorporate Roman numerals for ‘seven’, and await the Russian beta with interest.

On a more positive note, loc also makes our books look really cool in other languages. Check out this Chinese selection, for instance –

Points if you can identify them without cheating! Assuming you don’t actually speak Chinese, which is, in this instance, also cheating.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I’ll leave you with a loreful snippet from HOUSE OF LIGHT to infect you with Fascination while you’re waiting for it to actually come out. Are the gods-from-stone ever gentle? The Wheel, perhaps – but Flint? The Seven-Coils? Darest thou trust…. the Egg???

“Yvette and Ehsan speak wistfully of what they have read of the lost Hour called Tide. Yvette recalls that when the Sister withdraws, other Hours sometimes fill the space left by her withdrawal, and wonders whether the Tide is gentle enough to remain afterwards… but Ehsan politely insists that the gods-who-were-stone are never gentle.”

— ‘Ulysses’, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Tennyson knows what’s what. It’s hard to sit still with art: it jiggles around like a catnipped kitten or a goose on a Roomba or a kid who needs the loo. We’ve been updating BOOK OF HOURS a lot, and it’s put new wind in our sails as a studio – but we have mountains of ideas, and we’ve been working on other things as well.

Tennyson also says that you are a part of all that you have met – so if you’re here, reading this, you’re part of the Secret Histories, too. Here’s a round-up of all the things that have just launched or that you and we both can look forward to in 2024.

BOOK OF HOURS content expansion

“Only twins drown twice.”

Europe, 1937. The War in the World is coming, and worse yet, the War in the Sun. In this gathering gloom, the notables of the occult underworld consider new weapons; new alliances; new paths. Who can they turn to for help, if not the Librarian of Hush House?

Explore visitors and their stories in much greater depth. Host exotic feasts and sophisticated soirées. And in your own quiet way, shape the genesis of the controversial Lighthouse Institute.

The big ticket item is the HOUSE OF LIGHT content expansion, coming to BOOK OF HOURS in 2024. It’ll be more like the Exile DLC in size than The Dancer, and will be a paid DLC (though free to anyone with Perpetual Edition).

It’s one of several content expansions planned for BOOK OF HOURS, which we’re hoping to release next year alongside with the QoL / general improvement patches you’ve been seeing already. So buckle up, librarians! Or more appropriately, get yourself nice and comfy under that charming wool blanket. Brancrug calls.

BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack

Featuring twenty-five remastered tracks from the game, arranged by the composer, Maribeth Solomon, herself. It’s available now, costs $10.99 / £8.99 / €9.99 and you can get it on (deep breath): Steam, GOG, Spotify, iTunes, YouTube Music, Amazon, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Medianet, Pandora AND EVEN MORE go see if you can find a place we aren’t listed. Who ever said baiting the internet was a bad idea?

BOOK OF HOURS localisation

A small but significant confirmation that we are now working on official Simplified Chinese, Russian and Japanese translations of BOOK OF HOURS. These will almost certainly come out next year!

Depending on how these languages do at launch, we may add more localisation in future. Fingers crossed.

Secret Histories merch

The Church o’ Merch has been in need of a bit of a revamp for a while, but I was too busy with BOOK OF HOURS to give it the love it deserved. December was a great time to right this wrong, so we now have a variety of new items coming to the shop next year:

Tarot colouring book

An A5 wiro-bound colouring book with all 78 Lucid Tarot cards in glorious black and white for you to bring to life. Pages are thick so they’ll carry everything from crayon to felt-tip pens. Colour in while listening to your favourite piece of music, sipping your favourite beverage, and generally having a jolly chill time.

Wisdom Tree necklace

The first piece of jewellery we’ve ever made! Keep your Wisdoms close with this gold pendant chain with embossing, coloured enamel and cut-out detailing.

Hours notebooks

Hardback French-creased notebooks with cloth covers, foiled detailing and page-marker ribbons! Inside, the Magician has lined paper, the Hermit plain and the Wheel of Fortune dotted. They’ll be available individually or as a beautiful threefold set. These should look classy and occult at the same time – more photos when I get them from the printers.

Lucid Tarot

Just an update on the long-awaited Lucid Tarot deck, which is currently in production at two different factories for a test deck. Hoping to have two test decks early in the new year, and be able to move into the first production run. More on that when I have more news! It’s taking a while because what I’m trying to do is, frankly, so weird. But it’s wonderful making weird, and bearing in mind this project began here…

…I’m pretty happy how it’s turning out.

(The scholars of the House watched the courses of the stars to determine their pasts and understand their future. You just need to be on the mailing list if you want to know when these items come out. They’ll all be limited runs initially, so get in quick!)

Reverend Timothy’s gifts

A number of small gifts appeared by Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree in BOOK OF HOURS. They’re still there if you haven’t collected them, and they’ll remain until midnight on 31st December 2023. If you’d like your in-game advent calendar gifts, load up BOOK OF HOURS some time between now and the end of the year, wait until in-game winter rolls around and find your horde by the Rectory. For those of you who don’t like surprises, you can see exactly what awaits by clicking below.

Cultist Simulator on Steam Deck

It’s been a long-time coming (h/t our long-time coder-collaborator, Chelnoque), but Cultist Simulator is now Verified on Steam Deck! We’re testing it out on a beta before rolling it out to the main branch. Deck-owners who’d like to check it out just need to opt in to beta (Steam Library > Cultist Simulator > Properties > Betas > ‘gateofhorn’ in the dropdown menu). As ever, if you run into any issues, please let us know at support@weatherfactory.biz.

Everything else

Finally, we updated user flairs on the subreddit (tag yourself with any of the nine starting Legacies, from Archaeologist to Twice-Born), released a new Skeleton Songs all about how much we love Susanna Clarke, and there’s a wintry HD Hush House wallpaper for PC and mobile at the bottom of our freebie On the House page, in case you’d like to festive-up your backgrounds.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Kiss your beloveds, hug your loved ones. If you’ve had a good year, long may that continue. If a bad one, remember: though much is taken, much abides. Love from AK, myself and the House Without Walls. See you in 2024. ♥

🎁🎄 …a 25-day advent calendar of Hush House! 🎄🎁

Each day we’ll open a door containing treats in BOOK OF HOURS or the ‘real’ world (you’ll see it on all of our socials [ Twitter / Facebook / Instagram ], and we’ll update this blog daily with What’s Behind Today’s Door).

Most are tasty amuses-bouches. Some are pretty major reveals. A few real world treats will only last for 24hrs, but you’ll never miss anything in-game. Playing BOOK OF HOURS any time in December will give you everything the calendar’s revealed to date whenever in-game winter rolls around. So there’s no stress if you’re ‘out’ having ‘fun’ with ‘friends’. Except, you know. Have a think about your life choices there.

Door 1: Seasonal art in BOOK OF HOURS

The next time you’re playing BOOK OF HOURS and winter comes around, you’ll notice some festive cheer sprinkled throughout Brancrug Village and Hush House. For anyone who wants to be left alone like the Weary Detective and his Illustrated London News, there’s an option to turn off seasonal art in the Settings menu. For everyone else, take careful note of Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree next to the Rectory…

Door 2: something smooth as an egg and frosted like a winter window

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 3: 24% off The Lady Afterwards for 24hrs

Both the boxed and digital version of The Lady Afterwards are 24% off for 24hrs. Seek the occult in 1920s Alexandria, in a luxury Call of Cthulhu-esque TRPG based in the world of Cultist Simulator!

Door 4: something fiendishly simple and wretchedly fragile

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 5: new Reddit user flairs

By popular demand, we’ve added BOOK OF HOURS-specific user flairs to the subreddit. Mark yourself as your favourite starting character, from the Archaeologist to the Twice-Born!

Door 6: something hard for mortal men to dig

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 7: new colouring book

This is another item people have been asking about for a while. We’re launching a tarot-based adult colouring book in 2024, featuring the stained glass tarot art from the Lucid Tarot!

Door 8: something salty and savoury

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 9: 24% off the Tarot of the Hours for 24hrs

Our best-selling item, the Tarot of the Hours, is 24% off for 24hrs.

Door 10: something healthful and slippery

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 11: “Only twins drown twice.”

Europe, 1937. The War in the World is coming, and worse yet, the War in the Sun. In this gathering gloom, the notables of the occult underworld consider new weapons; new alliances; new paths. Who can they turn to for help, if not the Librarian of Hush House?

Explore visitors and their stories in much greater depth. Host exotic feasts and sophisticated soirées. And in your own quiet way, shape the genesis of the controversial Lighthouse Institute. The HOUSE OF LIGHT content expansion comes to BOOK OF HOURS next year!

Door 12: something ‘musky’

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 13: 24% off the Mansus for 24hrs

Our fine art Mansus poster is 24% off for 24hrs. Decorate your walls with the House Without Walls!

Door 14: something from the shores of Brancrug

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 15: BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack out now!

At long last, the BOOK OF HOURS soundtrack is now available on Steam, GOG, Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and many other places! Featuring remastered versions of music from the game, customised and ordered by Maribeth Solomon and Mickymar Productions. Sublime.

Door 16: new Wisdom Tree necklace

This is something we’ve never made before! Look out for our new gold and enamel Wisdom Tree pendant necklace, coming to the merch shop in 2024.

Door 17: something alive to every draught and spark

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 18: The Wood Between the Worlds

Lord of the Rings + Narnia + Jane Austen = ? Listen to a brand new episode of Skeleton Songs, all about the beautiful world of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Piranesi, and a very ‘English’ magic system.

Door 19: something not alive (or not very)

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 20: new notebooks

We retired our Cultist Simulator journal a few years ago, and are finally back with revamped notebooks inspired by BOOK OF HOURS. Coming 2024!

Door 21: something that can only strike Now

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 22: Cultist Simulator on Steam Deck

Cultist Simulator’s Verified on Steam Deck! The new version’s available on beta and should work smooth as butter. (But please send bug reports to support@weatherfactory.biz, if you find any.)

Door 23: something that will not, will not, will not stop dancing

Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

Door 24: HD Christmas wallpapers

Two new HD wallpapers for desktop and mobile to download On the House. Featuring Hush House in the snow and the Wisdom Tree.

Door 25: something whose brightness lingers for a little while, even in the dark

Merry Christmas! Collect today’s gift in-game from Reverend Timothy’s Christmas tree.

And that’s it! Warmth, good cheer and a glass of Chateau Raveline to you and yours. Merry Christmas, friend.

;

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but: BOOK OF HOURS is OUT NOW on Steam and GOG! 😱😱😱😱

If you like what you see, leave us a review. Our games tend towards the weird and inexplicable, and it’s incredibly helpful to let other gamers know that we’ve not just, like, knitted a sock and drawn a face on it or something. Help unweird and explicate us! As much as is possible. ♥

After Cultist Simulator, we wanted to set our next game in the same universe – but AK felt bad that he’d made another game about eating people and bringing the apocalypse, and he wanted to write something kinder. Fast forward four years and here we are, in the soft golden glow of a deep auburn game about managing an occult library, of organising things carefully and thoughtfully, of being left alone in a beautiful Gormenghastian abbey to light candles and read books and walk the parapets, where every so often someone drops by to ask you something or give you a book – and then they go away again. BOOK OF HOURS: the introvert’s dream!

I thought you might be interested in some fragments of development history. You might recognise some things that evolved into the game we’ve just released, and others that (rightly) were left by the wayside because for the love of god how was that UI ever going to work? Here’s a little sample:

Early sketches for our hero art:

Some of the earliest design notes:

The first draft layout of Hush House:

Early Hush House design:

Some early prototypes of what BoH‘s art might look like:

Our ‘porthole’ phase:

We wanted to build something that had the crunchy recipe-based mechanics of Cultist Sim but was a welcoming place, somewhere you could go just to be on your own even if you weren’t working to achieve anything: a sun-dappled hammock; a candle-lit nook; a secret walled garden whose only key is yours. BOOK OF HOURS will not be for everyone, but I hope everyone can feel the love we poured in radiating from the worn stones of Hush House, the wave-weathered rocks around Crowcross Sands, the lamp-lit leaded-glass windows of the Sweet Bones, and the purr of the well-fed cat you brought in from the cold.

The mellifluous Systemchalk is broadcasting BOOK OF HOURS live on the Steam page, if you’d like to see the game in action. Alternatively, join us at 8PM BST / 12PM PDT for an AMA on r/Gaming (live here!), or in a live interview on GOG’s Twitch stream tomorrow at 7PM BST / 11AM PDT. Thank you so much for reading, and if you decide to pick up BOOK OF HOURS this week, may the Hours look kindly on your deeds.

Love, Lottie & Alexis

I updated our Steam page at the end of last year. Check it out if you haven’t seen the new screenies!

“There was a storm. It smashed the ship like an egg. But I seized this book as the sea seized me… then the sea brought me here to Brancrug.”

BOOK OF HOURS looks like it’ll end up five times the size of Cultist Sim. The whole game is set in a single location (see below), but there’s a hell of a lot to dig into with the story, nine different origins to choose from which direct your initial interests, and that’s before you get into the lore in all those books or the nine Wisdoms. We wouldn’t normally attempt a game as large of this – it’s just the two of us + friendly freelancers – but we’ve a big leg-up from Cultist Simulator. It provides the basic code framework (things nobody thinks of but you have to do before launch, like saving and loading systems, or Steam achievement integration) and the core mechanic (card + card = new things + new story).  This means we can focus on improving things from CS while building out a new world for BOOK OF HOURS. It’s not a roguelike, which makes us a bit nervous because we’d love people to replay the game as much as people replay Cultist Simulator. But it is big, deep and visually charming, like Chi at the bottom of a well.

We’ve been really hustling these last two weeks to get a first-look demo of BOOK OF HOURS in Steam Next Fest at the start of February. We’re on track for that – just! – so look out for more info in our newsletter, going out next week. It’ll be pretty rough around the edges, but it should give you a good understanding of where we’re going with the final game. You’ll crawl your way out of the freezing sea to the door of an old friend, charm some suspicious rustics who just want to be left alone with their pints of bitter, and eventually cross the Cucurbit Bridge all the way to Hush House, where you’ll unlock the first room of the library. Until I played an earlier build this week, I hadn’t realised how large this game world is.

In the meantime, this means I have a great many other things to update you on. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Firstly, we confirmed the final look and feel of the overall game world – goodbye old cliffs, hello turquoise sea. It’s still WIP (don’t look too hard at the beach) but the vibe is there. We’ve also revamped the misty effect that the game opens with, which form the fog of war you spend the first part of the game unlocking. I’ve a lot of work ahead of me representing the different seasons (including Numa), and animating various parts of it to bring it alive. But I like where it’s going, finally.

More importantly, Alexis has finally been writing content! He’s focused on the first half hour of the game, with our upcoming demo in mind – which is why he has been reading up on Cornish hospitality in the ’30s, and why he left a card on my desk which just says ‘YARG’.

“At last, the light of a hurricane lamp bobbing in the dark. As it approaches, a face looms out of the night.”

A face! Quite a rugged face, but not a rock, or a vengeful sea-bird, or a poisonous snail. This face helps you to the nearby village (banishing Brancrug’s misty fog of war), where you end up dripping interesting patterns into the well-worn wooden floor of The Sweet-Bones. But it’s not exactly an overwhelming welcome:

“After the Restoration of 1930, the New King’s agents came looking for his enemies in these parts… and they weren’t gentle about it. Since those days, the locals are suspicious of foreigners. No-one in the Sweet Bones will talk to me.”

Using your character’s chosen skills, an old friend and your own actual brain, you must convince the villagers to aid you. Once you have, it’s on to Hush House, to unlock the first of very many unusual rooms…

Now, books. You’d expect a game christened ‘That Damn Library Game’ to have quite a lot of them. But how to represent them is a surprisingly thorny issue, because they have to fulfil lots of sometimes contradictory requirements. They must be small enough to fit reasonably in rooms designed for humans; they have to be large enough that players can click on them realiably; they have to be complex enough to tell you something meaningful about their contents just by looking at them; they must be simple enough that Lottie doesn’t lose her mind. Most importantly, they’re also the meeting point of our two different art styles – the vibrant, vector-style element art we’ve kept from the cards of Cultist Simulator, and the textured, illustrative style of the world of Hush House. Because books are now objects, not cards. They exist as real-world items you’ve carefully organised on a shelf in the library, but they can also be used within the UI as part of recipes with cards and other objects. So they need to straddle two quite different and demanding worlds. And you thought books were just opportunities for Hokobald of Pocsind to complain about the various iniquities perpetrated against him! #BIGHUFF

Anyway, we’ve come up with the following, which I think does all of the above very nicely. There are lots of different designs (in various sizes, so they look interesting together when you arrange them on a bookshelf), but you get the idea from the two examples below:

We can also use this style to differentiate the nine different starting roles you can choose for your Librarian. You start every playthrough freezing and storm-wrecked on a beach, your only possession a carefully-wrapped journal. These journals accompany you through the game, ‘evolving’ into different versions of themselves as your Librarian progresses.

“My journal – I’m sure of it. The storm scattered my thoughts, but each page I turn is familiar. I begin to recall now why I came here… and the knowledge I yearn for.”

While I’m futzing about with books and AK’s writing about cheese, Adrien continues his great work populating Hush House. The Curia-period rooms are now totally complete, so puzzle over what, exactly, needs so large a cage in an upper room of Gullscry Tower; settle select guests in the moony Severn Chamber; be grateful that the unseen servants of Hush House clean the morgue for you; and don’t set foot in the Hall of Division if you’ve ever insulted a Hint.

We’re also working with Clockwork Cuckoo for our card art, so perhaps you’d like to try and guess what skills are represented by their latest batch of sketches. We only pick one from each group to become the Final Icon, so look out for a number of polished versions of these in the final game.

If you’ve seen our latest screenies, we’ve also been revamping the UI. UI is the part of game dev that’s interesting to artists and lethally boring to anyone else, so I won’t go into too much detail. But there’s one new change you might find interesting:

Alexis still has nightmares about the tooltips from Fallen London. If you’ve ever played a Paradox game you’ll probably know what I’m talking about: hovering over something brings up some extra information about that thing, which is a really useful way of explicating deep and complex games without overcrowding the user’s basic experience. The downside is that you can often end up in a terrifying SCP-like tangle of tooltip after tooltip after tooltip, ending up more confused and distracted than you were before. So we’ve come up with the above approach for the deeper lore in BOOK OF HOURS: it’s optional (only displaying if you click on it), linked to other relevant parts of the game through aspects, and visualised separately from the main text. This is something Alexis wanted to do in Cultist Simulator, actually – we just never had the time.

Anyway, you’ll see all of the above and more if you choose to give the demo a go next month. So I leave you with news of a totally different project! I received a few enquiries about the Lucid Tarot over Christmas, so I just wanted to confirm that the deck is very much still going to happen, and it’s probably still going to happen this year. Here are a set of Swords cards I drew over the holidays to prove it’s still an active project – nice to see some familiar faces, eh?

More news on the demo next week! Get hype, Librarians.

Any time you run someone else’s code on your machine, there’s a risk. In theory, a modder could include malicious code in a DLL mod. The risk is very low – AV programs may notice it, Steam will block malicious modders – and the same applies to games anyway – there’s nothing in principle to stop a game developer from putting malicious functionality in their work.

But there was an incident earlier this year where a modder did include malicious code in a Cities: Skylines mod. It was trivial – it just interfered with other mods as part of some sort of community drama, it wasn’t ransomware or anything. It was spotted within days. And it only affected about fifty people. But it did happen. (A few months later we got an email from a security researcher pointing this out.)

So from the beginning of next year, we’re making it slightly harder to enable DLL mods. All you’ll need to do is install a gatekeeper mod, Ghirbi, and all Ghirbi does is show you a notice making you aware of the theoretical risk. This is basically the same as making the user tick a box to say ‘I am OK with this’ – but most people tick most checkboxes without reading the notice, especially when they’re playing games.

[You won’t need to download or install Ghirbi to use DLL mods until after our next patch, NEMESIA, but you can install him now to save hassle. If you don’t use Steam, you can download Ghirbi here.]

Honestly I think the risk here isn’t traffic-accident low, it’s hit-by-a-meteorite low. But if someone was hit by a meteorite because they’d installed our game, then even if it was a bizarre accident, we’d feel bad about it. So we’re adding a meteorite warning it’s impossible to ignore. Happy Christmas.

This week we have a crunchy BOOK OF HOURS progress report: AK’s been working on the start of the game, the end of the game, and the bit in between. Over to you, Alexis…

Most crafting systems are combinations of recipes. Rags + Thread = Bandages, Coal + Iron Ore in Furnace =  Iron Ingot. There’s limited room for creativity. In Cultist Simulator I wanted to allow more inventiveness – hence the aspect system. What do you get if you mix a lot of Forge with a little Winter and Knock?

One problem with this is it suggests everything works like a stewpot. You put a lot of Forge and a little Winter and Knock in a pot, you cry out ARISE MY BEAUTY and a Caligine comes out. It doesn’t matter if the Forge needs two followers or half a follower and eight lumps of coal. Except it does, because you need a Rite, which limits you to one follower and one lump of coal, or whatever. Rites are the unsung heroes of CS design. They make room for more elaborate and flavourful decisions about how to combine. Except except people quickly converge to the ‘best’ rites, the ones that don’t use up hard-to-obtain resources (like Tools) and do use up easy-to-obtain resources (like Influences). This is why we make experimental games, to figure out this stuff.

In BOOK OF HOURS, I wanted more ways through the narrative crafting maze. Originally I said Workstations (Kitchen Range, Garden Plot, Mirrors, Piano) were like Verbs in Cultist. They are, but they’re like verbs with pre-fitted Rites. Guest Beds accept a Visitor and a Beverage. Rest Beds accept an Ability that you want to recover more quickly, and a Beverage. A Piano accepts a Skill card, a Memory card, and up to three Ability cards, one of which has to be Chor. Mirrors accept a Skill, a Memory, an Ability, and a couple of Light Sources. If your Purifications & Exaltations Skill is really high, maybe you can make Inks of Power on the Kitchen Range or even at your Desk, but it’s easier to do with Alchemist’s Glassware given the limitations on what you can put in it. It’s easier to study Hushery at the Pale Desk than it is at Abbess Nonna’s Desk. And so on. I’m aiming for a system where resources keep being unexpectedly interesting in unexpected contexts as you unlock more of the game. As ever, we’ll see how it goes.

You can see a bit of AK’s design already in the room art Adrien and I are drawing. Lots of rooms have variations on basic furniture like shelves because, by last count, there’s some bananas number like 1,000 books we expect to have in-game. But some rooms also have a specific workstation that will open up new crafting options when you unlock that specific room, making it a strategic and rewarding (we hope!) choice which rooms you unlock in which order. Take the rather alarming gurney-looking thing in the third image – this is the Scrimshawry workstation in the rooms of Natan of Regensburg – which allows you to do all sorts of artisanal things with whalebone and netsuke and (if no authorities are around) bodyparts, too.

You couldn’t craft the same items – or use the same ingredients – with the giant secretary desk in the sixth image, because if you tried stuffing bodyparts into Thomas Dewulf’s desk you’d find yourself in an oubliette faster than you could say ‘I regret my previous life choices’.

From left to right, then, these rooms are: Solomon Husher’s study, the Chapel Ascite, Natan’s laboratory, the Watchman’s observatory, the Abbey Church nave, Thomas Dewulf’s study, the cloister, and the infirmary.

I can also share a first pass at Hush House itself, perched like a owl above sepulchral hills. Our whole art style is about leaning into the unreality of things, and into theatrical, dolls-house-like artifice. So we’re testing out effects like this night-time scene – have a look at a WIP version:

The dark rectangles are, of course, where all the rooms go, and you’ll unlock them sequentially by unlocking a room before them. Hush House has been gutted by a fire, so each room will need a specific set of resources to fix them up before you can use, furnish and capitalise on any resources contained within them. AK came up with the truly horrifying idea that in the later game, when you’ve worked your way through the building to Brancrug Gaol on the left, you could even unlock rooms with people (could they possibly be people?) still walled up inside…

But sunshine flowers kittens springtime this is a NICE GAME remember! Not like mean ol’ Cultist Simulator though come on that bit about putting people in the cupboard is still very funny.

Anyhoo, I leave you with a reminder that Cultist is 40% off in Steam’s Autumn Sale and GOG’s Black Friday Sale, and everything in the merch shop (including The Lady Afterwards boxes) are 20% off for Black Friday. Tune in next week for the Sixth History licence reveal, our subreddit AMA on Thursday, and more BoH work. This game is my favourite game I’ve ever worked on – I hope we do you proud next year. 🙂

✨🐫 The Mysterious Package Company x The Lady Afterwards edition is NOW AVAILABLE! 🐫✨

The MPC collaboration builds on our original edition by adding hand-aged clues, a silver cigarette case stuffed with calling cards, an antique magnifying glass and a hardwood “Taurus Express” travelling chest to keep it all in, as well as a few other additions. It’s TRULY MAGNIFICENT.

A full list of what’s included is:

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that each box contains a 10% off discount for Locksmith’s Dream tickets (which now have new 2022 and 2023 dates), but there’s also a chance to win a $2,000 “Golden Ticket” giving you and a friend a totally paid-for stay our Secret Histories scavenger hunt in Wales. Alternatively, if you can’t make it – or you inexplicably hate Wales – you can opt for a free Mysterious Package Company experience of your choice. Good luck to anyone who buys a box!

One final thing to share, because I love it. It’s a little known fact is that I am actually an accomplished trombonist – this sounds like a joke but I swear it isn’t. Anyway, here is not me but a 1920s London Symphony Orchestra musician called Freddie fighting off a cheetah in an example of how The Lady Afterwards’ combat mechanics work in The Secret Histories Rulebook. You’re welcome.

(Art creds to a talented MPC artist called George.)

There are loads more illustrations like this dotted about the place, but I can’t share any others without spoilers! Which the Suppression Bureau take a particularly dim view of. So let’s not pique the Suppression Bureau.

But speaking of the Bureau, we have a little announcement coming in the next few weeks which should please a number of creative Cultist Simulator fans. We’ll schedule an AMA with Alexis and myself to talk about it once we’ve revealed it, but watch this space…

Each item in the basket is individually sculpted. There are two hidden compartments. And see if you can count how many Secret Histories references Nicola has managed to work into the piece…

The Lucid Tarot

This is a project I started way back when AK was unwell, so work on BOOK OF HOURS was paused. Now he’s healthy again (woot!), this has turned into a personal project of mine – BOOK OF HOURS takes priority, so I complete the cards I can in my ‘spare’ work time. But today I’ve reached an important milestone: all the Major Arcana cards are complete! 🎉

Check out the Lucid Tarot page for a few larger versions of the below, or bask in the joy of seeing pockets of colour appear out of an inky blackness. I intend to go back and zhuz a few of these just before printing, but to give you an idea of the full set:

Each of these cards was designed, drawn and coloured from scratch, because obviously the Hours deserve as much love and attention as they can get. I wanted to put a more human spin on the Hours with this deck, as we already have a lot of gorgeous symbolism in the Tarot of the Hours. But what would you see in the chapel windows of the Church of the Bright Edge, for example? Or what would gaze semi-benevolently down upon the altar of the Temple Unceasing? I’d love for these to actually appear in the windows of Hush House in BOOK OF HOURS, but AK and I spent a lot of time talking production schedules this week and we have quite enough to get on with for that game already…

Minor Arcana cards are more numerous than Major Arcana (56 Minor, 22 Major) but they’ll deliberately harken back to cards you’ve mostly already seen in Cultist Simulator. You’ve seen the 10 of Swords already, for example:

The 10 of Swords represents martyrdom, victimhood and ‘bottoming out’ – so the Incursus seemed like a pretty good touchpoint for that. You can expect to see a Lucid Tarot reimagining of your Cultist cards in the next set of these cards you see – anyone want to guess who I’ve chosen for the Page, Knight, Queen and King of Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles…?

BOOK OF HOURS

Among many other things, AK’s been thinking about skills this week. When I turn around, I see the silhouette of his fabulous hair against a terrifying sheet of incomprehensible data, like an adorable kitten slightly obscuring your view of the sun exploding in the sky. It has tabs in it like this

And notes in it like this

AK alleges it is all very well organised and self-explanatory. The game has been through a hell of a lot of reworking and rethinking since we first announced it, so it needs a bit of a monster framework. For example, AK says –

The Illumination Wisdom: “Mystical exercises to purify and illuminate the self and its surroundings.” One of the skills in Illumination (and in Skolekosophy) started out life as the Four Regrets. This was an evocative name for a skill that deals with Edge and Winter. It referenced the ‘Four Regrets’ in an original CS tome, The Skeleton Songs (yes, like the podcast), and it was one of a list of skills (Three Exuberations, Nine Disciplines…) that sounded nicely esoteric. And it fitted into an elegant schema for crafting rarefied things about light and knowledge.

But when I went back to the skills list after some time away, I realised it’s hopelessly confusing to have Four Regrets at level 5, and Nine Disciplines at level 2. I didn’t want to change the whole scheme, so I tried out things like Crossroads Regret and Ninefold Practices. The numbers were still in there but less confusing.

But Secret Histories stuff balances rather carefully between the allusive and the incomprehensible. If I call a skill ‘Flame Enchantments’ that’s boringly on the nose and there’s no exploration to enjoy. But if I call it ‘Articulations of the Laminar Secret’ it sounds great, but it’s bloody hard to work out what the skill actually does. Especially when you’re crafting, like, a Wild Surmise into an Earthquake Intimation, or something.

So I went back again, and I worked it properly into our web of references. So Four Regrets has ended up as Ragged Crossroads (alongside Disciplines of the Scar and Meniscate Reflections). That would still be absurdly bewildering for anything game that isn’t about plumbing occult knowledge in a secret library. Even in BOOK OF HOURS, they’re the most obscurely named skills, compared to Drums & Dances or Lockworks & Clockworks. But anyone who’s dug into the lore – veteran, or newb ten hours in – will be able to guess which Hours they connect to, and once they see the items in the game, they’ll have enough to start figuring out what the hell they actually do.

We have a few other announcements in the wings – something Lady Afterwards related, for instance – and we’re moving towards monthly builds of BOOK OF HOURS like we did with Cultist Simulator. So expect more art, updates and LORE in the near future. For now, AK and I are going on a long-awaited holiday where we will curl up next to a roaring fire and wake up with sheep staring only slightly ominously at us through our rented cottage window. See you in a week!

Oriflamme’s is one of several sponsors who might take an interest in your attendance at the Locksmith’s Dream – others are the Endeavour Club, Kerisham Review, Lighthouse Institute and those ‘creepy Peruvian fungus wizards’ from the Haustorium. Choose your starter Pokemon, please.

The beta’s sold out but there are still tickets available in December if you’d like to join. If you’re coming, good luck! Wear your mask at night.

• Grand prize – Ky Brocker
• Tarot of the Hours – @jinxedwanderer, @gilnaure, @cyborgmas, kieranwiseman and Jérôme-Alexandre Soumastre
• Cultist Simulator keys – @LeTrolliteur, ryanmwagner, finnygoat, Ben Groenheide, Jess Meakin, Mitch Holland, Harry Taylor, Eric Schmeisser, @fey_lear, heelys_not_feelys

Ends in…

It’s BACK! H. P. Lovecraft, the godfather of weird fiction and literary influence on Cultist Simulator, was born on 20th August 1890. So we’re running a Lovecraftian giveaway until 20th August 2022 across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – with some suitably eldritch prizes up for grabs.

How to enter

To enter the giveaway on each site, you have to do two (really simple) things:

If you do everything in the table above, you have three chances to win one of our prizes. If you just choose one of these social channels, you’re still in with one shot of being picked as a winner! And because we have sixteen prizes in total to give out, you might well win something. Speaking of which…

The Prizes

The Grand Prize: The Lady Afterwards box

“You’ve been summoned to Alexandria, a city of coloured lights and curious histories. An old friend needs you to track down a woman. She’s probably in trouble. Probably trouble herself. Plus ça change…”

The Lady Afterwards is a Cultist Simulator TRPG for 2-8 players set in 1920s Alexandria. It takes place in the world of the Secret Histories, where hidden gods watch over a world of apocalypse, yearning and forbidden arts. It’s a non-linear, combat-light, story-centric tabletop RPG inspired by classics like Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express. Everything you need is included: gamebooks, clues, character sheets, dice sets and more. More info and images available here.

Runners-Up: the Tarot of the Hours

“Do the Hours speak? If they do, this may be the language they use.”

Five runners-up will get one of our bestselling Tarot of the Hours decks. Based off the traditional Rider-Waite tarot, the Tarot of the Hours uses the esoteric full-colour art of Cultist Simulator on every card and packages it up in a matt laminated tuck box. You can see more of the deck here.

Wildcards: Cultist Simulator

“Seize forbidden treasures. Summon alien gods. Feed on your disciples.”

You like Lovecraft? Then you’ll probably like Cultist Simulator. Described as the single best video game at evincing Lovecraftian horror, Cultist Sim is a double BAFTA-nominated roguelike narrative card game where you start your own cult, glean snippets of the occult from the House Without Walls, and try your best not to die. 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Sixteen people will be picked from entries across all social channels, and

FAQ

When do entries close?

At noon on Saturday 20th August 2022.

When will the winners be announced?

Early in the week beginning Monday 22nd August 2022. You’ll be contacted directly if you win, and we’ll announce winners on all our social channels too.

Can I enter multiple times?

Yes! You can enter once on each platform: one entry on Twitter, one entry on Facebook and one entry on Instagram. This means one person can enter this competition a maximum of three times.

I don’t have social media! Can I enter some other way?

I’m sorry, you can’t. 🙁 This is a specifically social-media-related giveaway. You can always check out our merch shop instead, though!

Please tell me legal stuff so you don’t get sued

We’re running this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, but it’s not sponsored, endorsed, administered by and/or associated with any of those companies.

Still have questions?

Just email us. 🙂