Last updated on January 15th, 2026 at 04:10 am
Cultist Simulator – Card Game Review
Cultist Simulator is a Card/Books/Roleplaying game from Playdigious, first launched in 2nd April 2019.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 4,133+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Cultist Simulator Stand Out
SEIZE FORBIDDEN TREASURES. SUMMON ALIEN GODS. FEED ON YOUR DISCIPLES.
BE WARNED. This game has no tutorial – part of the challenge is figuring out how to play. It's hard, but keep trying, and you'll master it. Good luck!
In this infamous roguelike narrative card game, play as a seeker after unholy mysteries in a 1920s-themed setting of hidden gods and secret histories. Become a scholar of the unseen arts. Craft tools and summon spirits. Indoctrinate innocents. Seize your place as the herald of a new age.
Cultist Simulator was first released on PC and has more than 200,000 players all over the world. Now we’re bringing the cosmic mysteries of Cultist Simulator to mobile.
• Challenging roguelike gameplay – There is never only one history.
Cultist Simulator doesn’t hold your hand. Experiment, expire and transcend death with a story-driven legacy system. Over time you’ll learn enough to wrestle the game to its knees.
• Intense, immersive narrative – Combine cards to tell your own story.
A hefty novel’s worth of choice-based storytelling, from the creator of Fallen London and Sunless Sea. There are many paths through this game of ambition, appetite and abomination, and many ways your tale can end.
• A rich Lovecraftian world – Corrupt your friends and consume your enemies.
Search your dreams for sanity-twisting rituals. Translate grimoires and glean their lore. Penetrate the realm of the Hours and win a place in their service. Cultist Simulator brings the peripheral horror of Lovecraft’s tales to an entirely new setting.
Expand your knowledge with the DLCs: New Legacies, New Ascensions, New Mechanics…
• The Dancer – Join the Bacchanal
• The Priest – Knock, and Ye Shall Be Opened
• The Ghoul – Taste of the graveyard's fruit
• The Exile – Some there are who will not yield
If you encounter any issue with the game, please click on “Contact us” at the bottom of this page and give us as many details as possible regarding the issue and your device: https://playdigious.helpshift.com/hc/en/11-cultist-simulator/?p=ios
This Card game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Cultist Simulator is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 22nd December 2025
Recent improvements include:
- Adding localization in Spanish and French
- Updating the localization for all languages and fixing some typos
- Few technical updates
Download & Availability
Cultist Simulator is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Cultist Simulator on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This game is unique and the things that are good are so good that if you have remote interest or think you might then you should absolutely play it. We would rank this among our favorite games even though Ive never finished a single game. And there is a the catch: we think it is deeply flawed as a game. The core mechanics are those of a plate spinner w/ exploration (of card interactions). But the games are looooong. This means that even though losing doesnt feel too bad (as it works well attractively) that you have to slog through the plate spinning elements but without the exploration and while, eventually, already being familiar with the narrative. Combined with the game being quite long and the plate spinning nature making it easy to just miss some debt you have to pay or lose that game well, ai can almost not imagine playing a game to completion despite loving it. – But whats good in the game is excellent, so even just a fraction of the completed game still makes it rank among our favorites. (This is, imo, typical of this author btw great atmosphere, great text, good use of mechanics to enhance narrative but the mechanics arent good enough for us to finish any of their games. Theyre like half-complete masterpieces. Which sort of works in its own way. :).
This game has no tutorial, so be prepared to put in some time to figure stuff out. Once you get the hang of it, its difficult to put down. Pro tip for beginners, USE THE PAUSE BUTTON.
Unlike any common game. Its just new and really cool.
Games can sometimes get away with an absence of a tutorial. Learning how to play can be a thrilling experience however in Cultist Simulator the only feeling you achieve from playing is nausea. The music repeats in the background as you play and struggle to accomplish anything meaningful. When a game is meant to be learnt through trial and error this process should feel rewarding however when playing Cultist Simulator you simply feel sluggish and exhausted. Cultist Simulator is a great experience with incredible gameplay, that is if you can make it past the monotonous and exhausting gameplay which is required in order to reach a point in which enjoyment is possible. Overall its up a potentially great game held back by poor design decisions and a lack of clarity, 2/5.
We have this game on our ipad, phone, and on steam on our labtop. It's a bit complicated and we suggest playing it on a big screen but it is very fun for individuals who enjoy strategy and mystery.
There is no tutorial for this game and we think that makes it extra appealing. Life has no tutorial and we often have to seek out things wed like to know. Thank you game devs and past generations who have paved a path :).
We have played so many mobile games Its hard to keep track and we cannot emphasize enough that this is the most intriguing and difficult but addictive game Ive ever played. This game does not hold your hand, but instead allows you to make mistakes and retries until you finally figure it out. If you like to play any kind of strategy game this is a must have in your app collection.
Love this game. Its like a workout for you brain and the lore is amazing. Perfect for any occultist or anyone who loves puzzles. Pro tip is to read the text boxes. Love love love it.
This game makes no sense, fuels our paranoia, and inexplicably reminds us of spinning plates. 10/10.
This game has sucked us in and refuses to let us feee.
Thank you so much for this wonderful game! It was very intriguing but we faced some potential bugs during the play if they are not intentional: 1. After our minor Forge victory and restart as the Apostle legacy, it seems to give us the wrong mentor name; we heard it should be the name from our previous round but it turns out to be a random name from a failing round where we were pursuing for a Grail victory. 2. When we paint using Restlessness as the inspiration, it will be gone after the work. However, when we use other stuff as the inspiration, it will still remain in the deck. We are playing the Chinese version so hope these explanations are accurate! Overall, great game and it would be even better if those could be fixed (plssss we really care about the name :,(((.
At heart, its a time management game, but theres so much atmosphere and mysticism that you will be drawn in utterly. Some tips – play slowly, read everything! You have one life. ONE. Very old school. Every decision counts. Theres no redo button or take back a move. The games saves your progress, but if you plan poorly, you have to live with the consequences. Theres danger every second, but once you figure out the game mechanics and discover how the cards interact, youll be able to foresee most dangers and prepare accordingly. Again, play SLOWLY or you will be rapidly overwhelmed! Pay attention to what you read, the cards offer clear tips within the prose. You can easily have over a hundred cards on the table so be organized and use the pause button liberally. Enjoy your new obsession.
Intriguing, well-written, atmospheric card game that requires experimentation and guesswork. A real labor of love that continues to deliver.
Deep, philosophical, and terrifying. This guy writes like nobody else in gaming. Absolute master of his craft.
Go in blind. Read everything. Take risks. You will achieve your dreams. It says something that one of the only ways to get good mobile games is to port them from PC, but here we are.
This game is perplexing, and we dont have the hang of it, but thats part of the fun and intrigue. We think you should let yourself die in the game a few times (instead of restarting fi things are going badly) before deciding about purchasing the DLCs, because dying might unlock some of those routes anyway.
Dont know why we suddenly lost all our progress last time when we tried to play the game. Pretty sure we saved. Frustrated. But this is really a good game and it has great descriptions and text.
Espaol para cuando? Ya hasta parece odio.
Ive never been a big fan of board/card games, but we do love games that immerse the player in their world. This game has an H.P. Lovecraft feel, a mixture of reality and fantasy. As a card game it relies heavily on art, writing, and music to give the player an immersive experience and fortunately these are all first rate. At the start the game can be frustrating as their are no instructions. However it is well designed to reward the player for experimenting. You begin with only one action available: Work. Then Study and Dream become possible. Try different actions using different cards. Reading and enjoying the tone as your story unfolds is a big part of the game.
(Actually, don't! It's a game over!) we had many false starts with this game, and we relied a lot on the wiki, particularly when it came to accessing and navigating the Mansus. But the other reviews are right: once you figure out how to play this, it's addictive, with really dark, complex, and interesting lore. Some tips starting out would have been welcome. One is to pause a lot (read everything and try to take note of the different symbols on cards, almost all of which have tooltips if you click them): you will probably pause every 10-30 seconds of active game time. Another is that you don't necessarily need to drag and drop: if you have a verb open, you can double tap a card to send it to the verb, and as long as you can put it in that slot, it will go (we had something like 60 hours in the game before we noticed this, and noticing earlier would have saved us some arm strain). A third is that if you don't know what goes into a slot, you can tap the slot, and the associated cards will glow. None of these amount to spoilers, but they are very helpful quality of life concepts. Really hoping for a Book of Hours release on iOS! But we understand that any kind of port has to come after the PC release is smoothed out.
We have come back to this game over and over again for years. Anytime we cant quite figure out what game we feel like playing, the answer is typically this one. It scratches an it h unlike any other game.
Most iOS games are garbage pay-to-win games aimed at a casual audience. Mobile developers have zero respect for players as they use so-called dark patterns to make you effectively gamble online, just in the context of a game. Alexis Kennedy and weather factory are a rare exception. This game is fantastic. And its a one-time-purchase with entirely optional and reasonably-priced DLCs that actually add quality content. This game is very slow paced and heavy on the reading. So it is not for everybody. But if you like games that make you think, youre gonna love this one.
This game feels like getting dropped into the middle of a magic the gathering tournament and you don't know how to play magic the gathering. You may have no clue what anything does but by god are you having fun.
It looks like a fun game, but it doesnt fit the iPad Pro 11 inch fourth generation screen. You cant fully read the numbers across the top, theyre squished together.
We enjoy this game very much and bought the DLC, but on mobile theres a constant chance of you sinking 20-30+ hours into a run, really learning and getting a flow going, then the next time you come back your save file is just gone, along with all your work with no way to recover it. It happened once long ago and we just tried to give it another shot, got 25+ hours in, lost all progress again. Just get it on steam or don't buy it at all on ios.
We spend a lot of time working and trying not to starve. It takes away from the exploration of the uknown because Im always either working furiously or starving to death.
4 hours in and still have no idea what Im doing. Our spread is a mess and way too many things are happening. We did some stuff that we have no clue what they did, and theres things that giving us things that we dont know where they go, so we just random things in places where we assume they go and somehow its doing something. Its a very confusing game.
We played for three days and lost make the game easier or give us a refund.
Phenomenal, love it on pc love it mobile for trips or slow days at work. Delightfully strange and written beautifully.
The blend of strategy, roleplaying, Lovecraftian horror, noir sleuthing, and fantasy mystery is delightful. Death isnt a setback- its motivating.
Fun and addicting, but we found a bug, the achievement icon got disappeared weeks ago and never recover. And right now we cant find who and where should we ask for the issue.
This game is amazing. You will fail multiple times. But each one teaches you more and more of this game, weaving stories and characters across an immense landscape. Somehow so expertly played with cards. Writing. Intense creativity. To wrap up. GET. THIS. GAME.
Read the instructions and then play. It will come to you and youll be amazed.
Perfect strategy and very addictive.
It took us a while to get into this game but lately Ive been obsessed. We love how it is designed to be good for experimenting and trying new things and sort of like a rogue like in that way. Ive been playing it in our computer in steam and it works really well. Unfortunately on our phone it quits every few minutes minutes. Is there a fix for that.
Simple mechanics create almost infinite complexity, and the game has a dreamlike intensity thats hard to pin down. Ill put it down for a while, then need to play again. No pay to win, no extra anything to buy – just play your cards and keep dreaming.
Wonderful, patience-nurturing gameplay. Stellar writing. Solid UI. (Im just nitpicking the title Cultist Simulator, which seems flatly descriptive given how poetic, inventive, and very in-genre all its bits and pieces are.).
Whether desires are innocent and pure, mysterious and dark, or points between, find the means to fund your dreams and keep your health, for the life one travels may be long or short. Everything matters, yet nothing is foretold. To learn is to make choices and glean from those outcomes what may aid in your adventure. This game is more an experience ever-changing through each play through. It weaves the complications of lifes choices and consequences in a very mature manner, though never really making the adventurer feel like a failure. The writing is brilliant, the art wonderful, the music helps set the noir atmosphere. Its all a fascinating ride.
The high rating and reviews dont lie – this is an intelligent, complex card game with a Lovecraft theme but without a lot of hand-holding and a bit of a learning curve that requires a lot of patience and experimentation (but with great context sensitive clues to help you along). If all of this sounds appealing, you will love this game. The atmosphere, music, graphics and writing are all some of the best you will find in an iOS game. There is horror, there is humor, there is dread, there is epiphany. The devs cant get enough credit for building a deep and complex world for you to get sucked into. Just bring some patience, as you will need it to learn Cultist Simulator on its terms and avoid the wikis if you can. The key here is to be open to experimentation, to experiencing a lot of in-game deaths in typical rogue-like fashion, and to knowing that if you stick with it and read every clue the game has to offer, things will start to click, and when you do, you will have a wonderful trove of content to play – both in the included in-game characters and in the expansion pack characters, all with different goals and play styles. Kudos to the devs as nobody is out there making games like this.
We did not enjoy playing this game on pc. But as an app, we find it much more fitting. Excellent all around. The one negative we have is that when cards are taken for a tile, sometimes other cards fill their location. This is just an annoyance when it comes to keeping things organized.
We love this game and have played it extensively on the Switch and quite a bit on iPad and iPhone. On iPhone Ive never had any evidence of Game Center working, but did unlock a few achievements we later learned. On iPad it used to show that we were logged in through Game Center and there was an Achievements button on the main menu, but that has suddenly changed.
We play games so we dont have to think critically every waking moment thanks.
This is an interesting game so far, but a half-speed option would put it to five stars for us. As others have said, cards dont always appear in your field of view, and when youre a new player, you may not have time to read everything you need to, even if youre a fast reader. If you dont enjoy the experience of time pressure, youre not going to enjoy this. If you can tolerate that youre under intense time pressure even on your first play-through, this is a clever and interesting game. But 30 seconds is not enough.
Ok, this is not a scathingly bad review, nor is it one where we say buy this now! This game has a high learning curve. Played first time for a few hours before we died. Then again once we kinda knew what was going on. This game doesnt hold your hand, and is difficult to master. But it is fun once you learn it. Look into some non spoiler reviews to see if its your kind of game. So far, we like it. Worth a few bucks if you like the genre.
Lot of plate spinning, Ill stick with it for a while longer, but so far the depth is hidden.
While we can appreciate the attention to detail and effort that went into the game its pace is so intense from the very beginning that it ruins the game for us.
Cool idea. Game didnt explain well. Confusing and complicated rules. Wording of some cards is just odd and kind of dramatic.
Project management for cultists.
Not sure if this is even a game. There are no instructions, no explanation on the mechanics of how it works, not even anything stating what the goal is. There are random cards that you put on random pedestals that produce other random cards until the game is randomly over for whatever random reason. It is completely unplayable without explanation as to what is going on, how it works, and what youre trying to accomplish.
Game has far too many ways to lose. Doesnt tell you enough information to make informed decisions. You have to die over and over to understand how to make progress. This means hours upon hours with 0 chance of victory or even meaningful progress.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 3.7
- Size: 323.79 MB
- iOS: 12.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, JA, RU, ZH, ES
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Cartoon or Fantasy Violence, Infrequent/Mild Alcohol, Tobacco, or Drug Use or References, Infrequent/Mild Medical/Treatment Information
- Developer: Playdigious
Last updated: 22nd December 2025 | Genre: Card, Books | Developer: Playdigious