There are a lot of management sims out there. From food to factories, to prisons, there is something quite satisfying about creating a well-oiled machine. So, why not extend the genre to the spiritual side? Developed by Sole Survivor Games, and published by Team17, Honey, I Joined A Cult is a cult simulator (not to be confused with Cult Simulator, which is more of a card-based game). The title gives you the chance to start your own religion and make it influential, hopefully not getting arrested in the process.

Story

In Honey, I Joined A Cult, it’s the height of the 70s, you are the unscrupulous mastermind behind a dodgy religious movement. It’s simple as that. At the beginning, it seemed barely worth getting into, though as you get into the gameplay, it does reveal a lot more world-building and gets increasingly wacky. There are cursed mummies, pants-related scandals, and rival gods with apparent lightning powers. Occasionally your mission status bar will display rather ominous messages. It’s all good fun and adds to the general chaos of the game, but it was nice to see some flavour text scattered about.

All your cultists also have a background, with notes about their previous careers, and weird facts about them. All are decidedly unserious and are entertaining to flick through when things are slow.

Gameplay

The premise of Honey, I Joined A Cult is a simple one. You are in charge of raising a fanatical group of worshippers, growing their influence, and wringing big money out of the gullible public. Doing so requires designing and building a perfect cult compound, which balances out pricey therapies for visitors, and living space for your leader’s dedicated minions. 

When you start a game, you’ll be able to customize all kinds of things about your new religion. You can pick a name, a deity, a holy symbol, and even assign particular outfits for your followers. After that, your spiritual leader and a few loyal servants are thrown out into an empty compound.

Anyone who has played Prison Architect might immediately feel at home with the way Honey, I Joined A Cult handles construction. You plan out rooms, and buy the required equipment to make the room fulfill its purpose. Unlike Prison Architect, the process is slimmed down and you don’t really have to worry about the logistics of getting builders in or laying power lines. Things will just appear when you place them, maybe that’s the advantage of serving a higher power. 

The little people running around your screen are divided into 3 broad categories. First, there is your cult leader. They give sermons and will have some research tasks later on, but amusingly won’t chip in with any of the chores around the compound. Second are the cultists, a class that you can name as you see fit. I decided I wanted to make a reptile cult, so they were called Sneks. They do most of the actual work. They have needs that need to be fulfilled, levels, and different traits that can be beneficial or detrimental. Finally, you have followers, who are not fully recruited. They come during the day and spend money, providing an income.

Advancement is done through researching new upgrades, attracting followers with new and interesting ‘therapies’ which involve anything from fake ghosts to pools of maggots, and completing missions out in the town. Missions have cultists assigned to them and progress automatically. Sometimes you’ll be asked to participate in a short ‘choose your own adventure’ style challenge while the missions are ongoing, to get bonuses or avoid consequences.

Occasionally random events will happen, which are all suitably off-the-wall. One resulted in my cultists having a small chance of soiling themselves at any time, another gave everyone in the compound full beards, which they all loved. 

Audio and Visuals

The visuals for Honey, I Joined A Cult are simple and do a decent job of showing you what you need to see. The developers have obviously opted for something easy and fun to avoid the screen becoming too chaotic with the number of people on screen. It works well and the characters manage to hit the right notes of amusing and cute. 

There is an impressive array of customization options and decor objects available for players who want to perfect their cult aesthetic, and with object acquisition being one of the mission types available, I feel like I hardly scratched the surface of what was available there.

UI looks fun and holds together great aesthetically, though sometimes the number of windows and info presented to you on one screen can feel a little overwhelming. 

The music is primarily one track, the main theme on loop, though I didn’t find this too obtrusive. The tune is fun and doesn’t grate too much, whilst hitting the 70s mood perfectly. There are a few sound effects, and they all stand out well enough that it becomes easy to figure out what is going on just by the alert noise.

What It Could Have Done Better

While the game as a whole is very solid, there are one or two things that did get on my nerves. Firstly, the tutorial is very comprehensive, often too much for its own good. It makes you fulfill certain steps before you’re able to advance, which includes, zooming in and zooming out as separate steps, and two kinds of camera movement. It can be skipped in a playthrough, though that does involve selecting the option before you begin a new game.

Some of the balance could probably use some tweaks for the sake of speeding things up. The majority of the time I was playing on normal difficulty I found I wasn’t short of money, faith, or influence. The only thing that held up my expansion was waiting on research bars to slowly fill up. As you can only have one research desk in your compound, this was the bottleneck of my progress nearly all the time. Speeding that up a little while making other things a little harder to come by would probably make things a little tenser.

There are times that the UI can feel like a bit of an information overload and requires you to close multiple windows or sift through a lot of tabs.

Verdict

Honey, I Joined A Cult is the first title from Sole Survivor Games. It’s not perfect but it definitely sticks the landing and shows they have massive potential. The flaws in the game are minor enough that it’s still a fun experience, and it’s packaged with a sense of fun and humour that makes it hard not to like. For a way to unwind and waste some time, it’s definitely worth considering.

Honey, I Joined A Cult is currently available for PC via Steam.