“40 barrels today
50 tomorrow
do good job, more friends”
There’s no sense in burying the lede here. I absolutely adore CULTIC.
Developed by Jasozz Games and published by 3D Realms in 2022, CULTIC hit the ground running with a tremendous first-person horror experience that hit all the right notes for me. It was brutal but rewarding to those who engage with it on its own terms. It was heavily inspired by not just Monolith’s Blood, but one of the single greatest action-oriented horror games ever made, Resident Evil 4. It even refused to remain stagnant, building upon a strong foundation with its own unique set of mechanics, weapons, and grotesque foes to battle.
Without spoiling anything, though, CULTIC’s blood-soaked romp through the early 1960s was far from over. An ambiguous ending left plenty of questions unanswered and plenty of devious, hatchet-wielding cultists roaming the countryside. But now it’s three years later. The long-awaited conclusion, CULTIC: Chapter Two, has finally debuted to the public.
I’m going to completely gush about how incredible CULTIC is. And, should you feel curious enough to hear me out, you’ll get to see for yourself how it may ultimately end up as my game of the year. Is it cheating to put it there despite originally coming out three years ago? Yes, absolutely. But it’s that good.
Chapter One Sets the Stage
CULTIC wastes no time getting started. A gloomy, atmospheric intro sequence gives you all the context you need for the ensuing chaos. You are a nameless detective, hereby dubbed the Outsider, and from the looks of your evidence board, you’ve certainly spiraled into the abyss. The latest in a spree of missing person cases has ultimately left you without a job or a purpose in life, with accusations of misconduct prematurely terminating both your investigation and your career. But like any grizzled detective with some slight psychotic tendencies, a night full of liquid courage leads to you taking matters into your own hands. All your leads point to the remnants of the New Grandewel Lunatic Asylum, and with your gun carefully tucked away in the backseat, you make an impromptu visit in the dead of night. But that’s where your journey ends. At least, at first.
Mysterious assailants belonging to a malevolent cult attack you, strip you of your valuables, and leave you for dead in a shallow grave already packed tight with the dead. Whether it’s your own dedication to finding the truth, or rage at their failed attempt at homicide, you awaken from the pile of death with a bloodthirsty vigor. You now know for sure that something foul is afoot. Doing things by the book is over. Now it’s time to kill anything and everything that gets in your way.
CULTIC is a first-person shooter, one styled after classic, fast-paced games like Doom and Quake. More specifically, especially in terms of its visuals, it borrows heavily from the “big three” that were made in Ken Silverman’s Build Engine — Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, and, in particular, Blood. Anyone who’s played Blood in their life can quickly see some of the similarities here:
- Flat 2D sprites make up the game’s enemies and your own hands and legs, whereas chunky, 3D voxels make up the environments, weapons, items, and other important assets.
- Hooded cultists, grotesque monsters made of dead flesh, and tributes to classic horror movies and horror games alike are found aplenty in both games.
- An at-times bone-crunching difficulty really forces you to play both conservatively and cautiously, using your scarce ammo wisely while saving more powerful weapons for foes that deserve it.
But it’s not as if CULTIC is just some carbon copy of what came before. CULTIC has some interesting art direction driven largely by a reliance on blues and oranges in its color palette, with deviations from this only becoming more apparent as you explore each decrepit map. Reds and greens stick out like sore thumbs, making distant blood spurts from foes and useful health items all the more visible when they’re not huffing and puffing in your face. It’s all fine stuff. Despite the deliberate homage to boomer shooters among other horror games, there’s a shocking amount of detail you can find in just about every nook and cranny of every map, let alone the detailed animations for the numerous enemies and weapons.
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Add to that the music, which was legitimately breathtaking at times. Composed by Jason Smith, the sole primary developer of CULTIC, you get quite the truckload of tracks that span the emotional spectrum. Things will mostly trend towards the spooky and the tense. “The Disgraced Detective” immediately sets the tone for the path going forward, “The Harvester” throws one of the game’s most intimidating and beefy foes at you with some appropriately upsetting ambiance, and “Bone Marrow” and “Crypts Shootout” effectively transition from unexpected terror to newfound confidence in a flash. That’s all just from the first chapter. 3D Realms was kind enough to throw the entire soundtrack for Chapter One up onto YouTube, so I highly encourage you to check it out for yourself.
How’s the story in CULTIC, though? Well, it’s there if you look hard enough. Action is the key focus here in CULTIC, though those with keen eyes can find some scraps of events unfolding in the background. The tale of a detective infiltrating the very same cult you’re tearing asunder has some juicy lore tidbits, notes from one of the cult’s own members explains how terrifying monsters are roaming around, and loose papers from all kinds of disconnected faces provide some decent worldbuilding as things slowly go to Hell in a handbasket. Chapter Two definitely feels a bit more interesting narratively, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
The game is split into three distinct sections, with individual levels being replayable on their own after you’ve successfully cleared them once. You have Chapter One, which is included with the base game, and it tells the journey of the Outsider as he first investigates the cult in the outskirts of New Grandewel. An Interlude chapter picks up sometime after the events of Chapter One, with a new character (The Rookie, a fresh-faced police officer) being exposed to the worst of the cult’s activity in New Grandewel. Finally, Chapter Two, the longest of the three sections, concludes the journey of the Outsider as he takes the fight to the cult across all kinds of colorful locations in New Grandewel. You also have a few survival maps you can play that are disconnected from the main journey. You’re dumped into an arena, forced to kill enemies in waves, yadda yadda. It’s pretty standard stuff, but it’s nice to have.
What’s not so nice is the game’s difficulty. In a good way, I mean. CULTIC is a game that you really can’t just breeze through. Even on its lower settings, you’ll still have to play cautiously and carefully with just enough of an itchy trigger finger to keep yourself going.
Chapter Two Brings the Pain
For the sake of reference, I played all of CULTIC on its highest difficulty, Extreme. Anything I have to say will apply to that difficulty for the most part.
There’s a marked difference here between both Chapter One and Chapter Two, not only in terms of scale and direction, but in terms of overall design and difficulty. Chapter One compared to Chapter Two feels like a proof-of-concept. Maps are thematically tied to each other, and their transitions feel fairly natural, slowly building to a more tense and oppressive atmosphere until you reach the explosive finale at a large cultist hideout. The mine town leads into the mines, which leads into the crypts, which transitions into the chapel, and so on and so forth. Enemy encounters are numerous and difficult, sure. But there’s never a point of feeling completely and utterly overwhelmed by what’s being thrown at you.
Maybe it was the three year gap between Chapter One and Chapter Two, but things have taken a drastic turn in Chapter Two. You’re no longer stuck in the sticks. Instead, you’re out and about in New Grandewel, roaming city streets, blowing through shopping centers and train stations, and occasionally taking detours through stinky swamps and farms. There are also some fun tributes to Resident Evil and Blood, but I’ll keep my lips sealed on that one. But the biggest difference found in Chapter Two has to be the sheer volume of monsters being thrown at you in every single level.
Multiple levels have monster counts in the hundreds, sometimes several hundreds. Shotgun cultists are tucked behind every corner, with snipers plunking away at you from a distance. Mind-melting ghosts are hidden behind debris in the environment while hulking Harvesters toss bear traps and chainsaws your way. But unlike, say, WRATH: Aeon of Ruin, I never felt like these monster counts were too high for their own good. They could be daunting at points, but even in the most dire of situations, you can quickly turn things around with some careful weapon usage.
CULTIC holds the rare distinction of being a game where you don’t really have any bad weapons, only bad ways to use them. And nowhere is this most evident than with the very first two weapons you can get: the hatchet and the pistol. The hatchet, at a glance, is your bog standard melee weapon. It’s the last-ditch means of putting down whatever’s trying to put you down. In theory, at least. The same goes for the pistol. It’s the starter weapon, the one you use until you find something to completely and totally supplant it. After all, when was the last time you ever willingly used the pistol in Doom when you had any other option available? But this is where CULTIC makes itself stand out.
For one thing, the hatchet is deceptively strong, being capable of taking out most cultists with one or two well-timed strikes to the head. Not only that, you can inflict that very same damage from a distance with a careful throw, with a total of ten hatchets being available to toss around in your inventory. You can even reclaim thrown hatchets before they vanish into nothingness, if you’re fast enough. The same idea applies to the pistol. It’s a pistol — why would you ever use it instead of the Sten gun you can find later that uses the same ammo pool? Two reasons why:
- The pistol in general is highly accurate, especially compared to the Sten gun, and the actual damage per shot is substantially higher.
- More accuracy means you can more reliably nail headshots, which are a key factor in reducing your overall ammo consumption.
Again, all weapons are viable in their respective use cases. Chapter Two even goes so far as to include multiple weapons that use the same ammunition pools for even more variety here. Do you want a deadly lever action rifle with a prolonged reload time? Or do you want a slightly less accurate revolver with a much faster reload time? Is a two-barreled shotgun enough for you? Or do you want something with three times that ready in the chamber?
Regardless of what weapon you want to use, you can make them even stronger with hidden weapon parts. These parts do it all. Increased damage? Sure. A visible throwing arc for your hatchet? Sure. The ability to fan the hammer on your revolver? Why not? You can even unlock the ability to slam fire your grenade launcher. There’s no real wrong thing to pick, though higher damage will usually be more efficient in the long run. You can even boost the Outsider’s health by finding imbued remains, though these are much rarer and are often deceptively hid within secrets.
Secret hunting will be your best friend all throughout CULTIC. Extra ammo, extra health, early access to powerful guns, additional lore, and even the occasional deathtrap can all be found in secrets, and their complexity ranges from just venturing off the beaten path to gathering keys needed for hidden doors and discovering secret switches. Do you need to find all the secrets? No. But you’ll be hurting quite a bit if you don’t bother to look for them. An accessibility option can allow the Outsider’s lighter to flicker when you’re in close proximity to a secret, if you need some extra encouragement in finding them.
You won’t need too much extra help with bosses, at least. There are only a handful spread across both chapters, and they’re all a giant spectacle bookended by tense fights, stockpiles of ammunition and weapon upgrades, and rare cutscenes. They’re always big, they’re always dangerous, and they’re more often than not accompanied by additional enemies that drain both your health and remaining ammo. But most of all, they’re fun — especially the final boss, a true test of your ability to act and react in a difficult duel. There’s also a helicopter. You’ll grow to hate the helicopter.
The game’s performance is thankfully consistent enough to be a non-issue. Plenty of graphical settings and accessibility options are on offer here, namely those you would expect for a first-person shooter (field of view, render scale, FPS limits, VSync, and so on), but with a handful of unexpected ones as well. Replacing a forward roll with a short dash to reduce motion sickness, useful indicators for those who need a few more visual aids, the ability to disable screen shake and screen tilt, and even your choice of several different color palettes to choose from all give you plenty of ways to customize your carnage.
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Should You Play CULTIC?
Did you really think I was going to say anything other than yes?
CULTIC is one of those rare games that I feel gets just about everything right. And I mean everything. The music, the atmosphere, the scope and scale, the escalation, the moment-to-moment gameplay, the gunplay, the sound design, the enemy design, the encounter design, it all coalesces into an incredible tribute to an era of games that only seems to become more and more revered with every passing month. The fact that it was all practically done by a single developer only makes CULTIC even more impressive.
Between its excellent performance, stunning production values, and its brutal but satisfying gameplay, CULTIC is easily up there as one of the best boomer shooters out there. And the best part? It’s not even finished yet. Sure, Chapter Two concludes the game’s narrative, but more patches coming in the near future promise even more features — including an automap, a must-have tool for those who get lost easily. I wholeheartedly recommend CULTIC if you’re at all interested in it, and I really can’t sing its praises enough.
CULTIC: Chapter One and CULTIC: Chapter Two are currently available exclusively on Steam. Support for GOG and other platforms is currently unavailable, though Jasozz Games has expressed interest in bringing CULTIC elsewhere in the future.
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