What's Good About CULTIC Chapter One
Halloween has, in the last 12-15 years for me, become a time of year I really look forward to. A lot of this is because I like a lot of horror trappings but am a massive coward. I can watch horror movies (hell, I re-watch John Carpenter’s The Thing annually at this point), but I could never get into horror games. The interactivity was too much for me when I was younger, but I’ve gotten better at it with age, but I still scare easily. This weirdly brings us to CULTIC, an FPS by solo developer Jason Smith and published by 3D Realms, that provides an experience that takes a heaping helping of inspiration from Blood, but also the survival horror genre.
Taking place in the early 1960s, you play as an unnamed ex-cop who has been kicked off the force for digging too deep into a missing person case. After some more digging, your trail takes you to an abandoned factory where you get jumped by robed cultists and subsequently wake up in a mass grave. From there, you go on a revenge rampage as you solve this case. The story is told mainly by finding readable notes in the environment and the areas themselves. It tells a disturbing tale of the occult happenings in a fictional New England mining town. It’s all very creepy, and rather fitting for the Halloween season. It does a great job of highlighting that for as much of an homage to Blood as CULTIC is, it’s also a straight-up horror story as well.
And this is best exemplified by the enemy roster. While you do mainly shoot cultists of varying robe colours in the face, the rest of the enemies? All had me giving reactions of “Spoopy” to “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STAY AWAY FROM ME!” They all feel like something out of a horror game and it’s great. And this extends to other parts of CULTIC as well, in between moments of heart-pumping action, there are bits where it’s slowly and more methodically paced; all ramping up to the eventual reveal of whatever fucked up nightmare is gonna skin you alive. The fact that it can go from “cheesy action movie” to “creepy horror movie” at the drop of a hat is masterful pacing and I commend CULTIC for that. All of this wouldn’t be a thing without talking about the game’s aesthetic. Believe it or not, but CULTIC is entirely 2D sprite-based. The way lighting and colour filtering combine to create something that looks both stunning and disturbing at the same time.
But now for the meat and potatoes of CULTIC: the shooting. As an FPS, Cultic is actively making a homage to Monolith’s Blood and mixed with the aforementioned horror set pieces. It works super well, but there’s at least one thing worth talking about: the difficulty. Blood was a really fun shooter when I first played it last year, but on the higher difficulties, it was a motherfucker. That’s the best way I can describe it without descending into incoherent rage swearing. CULTIC…is nowhere near that brutal. I’ve played through the first two-thirds of its 10 chapters and I Think I’ve only died twice in the standard difficulty. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with a game being easier than expected, but it did throw me a bit; if you are looking for a challenge: crank it up a notch above Standard. There’s also the weapons; you got the obvious stuff like a damn fine double-barreled shotgun (which has both barrels being able to be fired individually) and bundles of TNT, which has a mercifully less steep learning curve compared to Blood. There’s also the period-appropriate Luger pistol and STEN submachine gun that are reliable workhorses, a break-action rifle that might be a little too good, a scoped rifle that is decent for longer ranges (but the break-action makes it redundant a bit), Molotov cocktails, a grenade launcher for some extra boom and throwable hatches to round out the arsenal.
They all feel great to use and are useful in the situations they were designed for. Combined with the more contemporary movement style of a short dash and a Baseball slide and you got one of the smoothest playing shooters of the year. And I’m saying this in a release period where Prodeus came out. All of the enemies from the cultists to the other stuff I don't want to mention because that stuff is spoiler territory play well with these weapons. You can use what you like and still be able to get through most if not all of these combat encounters. Lastly, CULTIC has hands down some of the most satisfying slow-motion headshots I've seen in a video game in a long time.
CULTIC, between its creepy atmosphere, great feeling gunplay, and terrifying menagerie of enemies, has stood up to become one of the best games I've played this year and between this, Elden Ring, and Power Wash Simulator, my game of the year list is shaping up to be a weird one. An interesting one, but a weird one.
