But: mama didn’t raise no quitters. I push on. The next time I get paid, I hopefully won’t have an Injury to deal with, so I should be able to spend that Funds (those Funds? this is really causing me problems) on books instead. It works: another three Fundses roll in from Glover & Glover, I put aside two for expenses and with trembling hand drop the third into Morland’s cash register. I’m genuinely very excited to see what I’ll get. I’m hoping for the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, or at least something with rude engravings.

I get… Gildersleeve. Fucking Gildersleeve. At this point I just start laughing. There is no way this could possibly have been avoided, but unfortunately after an undergraduate degree in Classics, a doctorate in Classics, and spending the last three years as a university lecturer in Classics, there are few books in the world less redolent of dark mystery than Gildersleeve and bloody Lodge. All I need now is 1 x Stack of Unmarked Undergraduate Essays and my virtual career will be completely indistinguishable from my real one, except that in my real one I don’t have any Mystique, not even temporarily.

I Study Gildersleeve, which at least comes with the weary ease of an old soldier loading a rifle, and get the Scholar: Latin card. Okay, that’s quite gratifying. Why do things always look better when they’re written down on cards? I tuck Scholar: Latin at the top of the screen with Notion: Enlightenment and my Erudition, which I picked up a while back, can’t find a use for, but am weirdly proud of. (…Oh.) By now I have gained another spare Funds, so I hand it over to Morland with a stern injunction that if she finds an old copy of Austin on Aeneid 4, she should under no circumstances sell it to me.

What I get is a book called De Horis. Now, this sounds properly tomely. Better yet, it’s in Latin, so I can read it. I set to work on translating it, but I’m interrupted by another promotion (nice) and the realisation that I’ve reached a possible endgame. If I stack a Passion onto my job, along with the two Reason I’ve been using to rise up through the ranks, I can do an Achilles in Book 9, give up all this cultist nonsense, and settle down into a comfortable but staid existence.

This is alarmingly tempting. Being a cultist sucks. I never have any money. My Contentment never lasts for long. Mystique and Notoriety are lightly won but evanescent, and they don’t do me any good anyway. I have two friends, Dorothy and Victor, but I don’t much like Victor, who reminds me indefinably of Oscar Isaac’s turn as the creepy nightclub owner in Sucker Punch, so I only ever talk to Dorothy. I thought I was heading for the secrets of Creation and wild-eyed young women in revealing robes, whereas in fact my life is spent anxiously watching multiple clocks tick down and hoping nothing breaks.

But… if I quit now, I’ll never finish my translation of De Horis, and I really do want to see what it’s about. I pass up the opportunity. It takes ten full seconds for me to realise that this is the first genuinely cultist thing I’ve done so far.

My translation yields a Correspondence sigil [not, in fact, a Correspondence sigil – Ed.], which is enormously exciting, because the Correspondence is my favourite thing about FL and I’ve often pined for some way of learning and using it in-game. Throughout Cultist Simulator I’ve been trying to figure out how to exploit the icons that appear when you select certain actions – the Heart, the Moth, et al. – and this feels like I might be moving in the right direction. Hungry for knowledge, I divert another Funds towards Morland. This is a serious mistake. I get a book of poetry, useless without Glimmerings, which in my case I have not got; worse still, I somehow miscount my available resources and end up finishing a Time cycle with no Funds left in hand. This triggers the Starvation token. I form the impression that I’m supposed to get rid of this by spending Health, but in fact it eats my Health and leaves me with An Affliction, and Time is going to Pass again before my current shift at Glover & Glover ends. Things have gone completely pear-shaped, I’m suddenly staring down the barrel of ruination, and my wife has fallen asleep. With some regret, I quit the game. Next time I won’t mess around with manual labour and the risk of Injury, I’ll just get straight on the ladder at G&G, and I’ll be more careful about book-buying, and we’ll see how that goes…

The Witch-and-Sister unites what is at rest. She is sought at the water’s edge and beneath the moon. She cannot be touched; she cannot be separated; she is pearl, coral, amber.

The Hours are the secret gods of the Cultist Simulator setting. Their true nature is too primal to be depicted, so the game kindly provides an alternate Tarot card with the traditional symbols of each Hour.

If you’d like to see more of these, and if you’d like to lend your social media powers to the Kickstarter, please sign up below.

Last time: paraTactician fell into peril, and resolved to save himself with the life of the mind.]

…I pick up An Injury from work. Balls. I don’t have any Funds spare; this is all going a bit I, Daniel Blake.

I decide to find work with my Reason, which is currently sitting there doing bugger all, and conserve my one remaining Health. I can Dream of my Injury and hope to recover – but no, that needs Funds too. Why does everything need Fu – oh I see

There follows an unpleasant interval in which I become quite stressed: my work clock producing Funds is staggered about 1.5 seconds before my time clock consuming Funds, so if I tap the space bar too late and lose two seconds I’m fucked; my Injury is sitting there untreated; my Contentment arrives and fades with my dreams, never leaving me any better off; and Morland’s Bookshop, clearly my gateway to arcane knowledge, remains cool and distant at the bottom right of the screen. I can still talk to Dorothy, which produces either Mystique or Notoriety, but both Mystique and Notoriety are timed cards and soon go the way of Contentment, drifting away like autumn leaves something something Vallombrosa. I’ve set up two reliable resource generators, but I can’t work out how to use the resources they generate, and I can’t generate the only resource that actually seems to help. I don’t even have a nice reassuring stack of Mystique cards building up in a reservoir somewhere.

I pour my Reason into my work because I don’t have anything else to do with it. I keep Talking to Dorothy, because at least it doesn’t cost me anything. I cannot Dream of Dorothy.

Then I get a promotion! And, more importantly, three Funds! I am wild with joy. I’m not sure I was this happy when I got my actual job. I immediately stick one Funds (Fund?) into my Dreams along with my Injury, and I’m about to lob a second one merrily over the counter at Morland’s when I pause. My Work clock now takes considerably longer to clear than my Time clock. In 55 seconds, I’ll need to burn Funds. In another 60 seconds, I’ll need to burn another Funds, and I still won’t have finished Work. So my higher pay is still only just enough to keep me alive, and I still can’t actually afford to buy a book.

This is the only really frustrating moment of the game, and for a wobbly moment I contemplate giving up. There’s something tremendously dispiriting about thinking you’ve made progress and then doing the maths and realising you haven’t. I’m an easy sell on games about forbidden lore, but this is turning into a game about barely being able to pay the bills, which is a fine thing for a game to be about but not an experience I seek out in my spare time. It’s the same petulant ‘I know it’s true but it’s not fun’ reaction I sometimes have to combat games where getting hit once is fatal, or exploration games where you can’t enter the spooky ruin because you didn’t buy enough food in the previous town and you might starve. I wonder glumly if I’ll unlock the Buy A House token, but because I suffer the Oxford affliction it’ll require more Funds than I can ever mathematically possess, so it’ll just sit there reproaching me like in real life.

But: mama didn’t raise no quitters. I push on. The next time I get paid, I hopefully won’t have an Injury to deal with, so I should be able to spend that Funds (those Funds? this is really causing me problems) on books instead. It works: another three Fundses roll in from Glover & Glover, I put aside two for expenses and with trembling hand drop the third into Morland’s cash register. I’m genuinely very excited to see what I’ll get. I’m hoping for the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, or at least something with rude engravings –

[Next time: paraTactician encounters an enemy from the past]

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Dear diary,

I am sick with the mundane; I recoil from the quotidian. I long for oceans, and find puddles. My workaday existence of bus queues and Tesco rots the brilliant fabric of my soul. I have resolved to change all this. I will carve the marbled flesh of knowledge from the bones of the real. I will grope blindly down the back of eternity’s sofa for the pound coin of enlightenment. I will wring the truth between my hands until it cries out, oh Lor’, oh crikey, let go of me you rotter, don’t punish me. With the help of Alexis Kennedy’s Cultist Simulator, I will become a cultist. I am as confident of the wisdom of this decision as I was of my teenage career change into hospital management. The Greenpool Bloaty Head Disaster was overplayed in the popular press.

My first attempt at becoming a cultist is a complete failure. Cultist Simulator turns out to be a weather game, and I am so overwhelmed by trying to keep track of cards and icons that I don’t realise I’ve run out of money, after which death is just a formality. I restart, confident that now I at least know how to put cards in slots.

At the start of the game I have 2 Passion, 2 Reason, and 2 Health, and all I can do is Work or Dream. That’s already beautiful. I want to keep my Reason at all costs, and it seems like Passion may be essential for pursuing forbidden mysteries ect, so I decide to burn my Health on acquiring money. It doesn’t strike me until I’ve done it that this is unpleasantly revealing. Once I’ve dealt with the starting note I’m left with Reason or Passion for my dreams, and dreaming of Passion sounds both more fun and more promising, so I drop a Passion there and am rewarded with a calming animation of a ghostly moon. I still have 2 Reason untouched, so when my legacy arrives, I’m comfortably able to study it and have a Reason left over for the cryptic crossword. I feel good about all of this.

The only thing worrying me is that I’ve gained a Fleeting Memory, which I can’t do anything with and which is going to disappear in 4.8 seconds. Deep-seated video game instincts make my gut clench at the idea of letting a resource vanish, but there isn’t any way to use the bloody thing and I can’t sell it for Echoes as once I would have done, so I rather sadly watch it turn to ash and drift away. Maybe I’ll get more? My dreams of Passion yield me Contentment, which is nice, but Contentment is temporary (thanks Alexis) and soon enough it disappears too. Hmm. Am I doing this wrong? I feel a bit as if I’d spent five turns building a Spearman and then he’d turned into a cloud of small white butterflies; the elegiac rightness of the imagery is offset by a creeping mechanical unease that maybe I should have read the manual.

I press on, using my Health to generate Funds which immediately vanish into the maw of Time Passing, while putting my Passion into my Dreams, which turns out to be a reliable engine of Contentment. I’m still not sure if Contentment is helpful, but I’d rather have it than not have it, and it’s not like my Passion’s any good for anything else. My Legacy produces the Notion of Enlightenment and directions to a bookshop. I discover that I can Dream of Enlightenment to become fixated on Power instead, but I don’t like that, so I switch back. I cannot Dream of Contentment, or Health. (Or Funds.)

I take some time while the clocks are ticking to admire my surroundings. The music is great. I’m enjoying the scuffed tabletop and the haptic click of the cards. It’s a slow, lonely game; were I a sommelier at London’s most expensive video game restaurant, I’d murmur that it pairs perfectly with Pete Atkin’s ‘Get It Out Of Your Head’. And of course I’m comfortingly situated in that familiar Kennedian prose idiom, the Alexis lexis if you will, with its careful commas and its blandly terrifying warnings in square brackets. The first time I saw [The results of this may vary.] I felt right at home.

I make an Acquaintance! My Acquaintance is called Dorothy, and she seems nice. I can’t find anything to do with her but Talk, so we do that. Morland’s Bookshop is profoundly tempting, but I can’t explore it without Funds, and I only ever have enough Funds to keep myself alive at the end of the month. I mean, the abstract time unit. I’m grimly aware that the real haunted-mystic thing to do in this situation would be to spend my single Funds card in the bookshop and burn my Health instead, but in my first abortive game that turned out to be a very quick route to oblivion, so I’m determined to play as a solid, fiscally-responsible haunted mystic for as long as I can.

Then I pick up An Injury from work. Balls. I don’t have any Funds spare; this is all going a bit I, Daniel Blake – 

[Next time: paraTactician climbs the career ladder and prepares to open a Tome]

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