The funky 70’s style music and art style are immediately appealing in Honey I joined a Cult, which, if the title didn’t give it away, revolves around starting your own cult. You begin with an empty field and one follower and have complete freedom to design a cult to meet your own specific niche interests, thanks to a multitude of customisation options, including uniforms and decor.
There is a comprehensive tutorial, which I think is needed for any complicated management sim; it is so easy to miss a core mechanic with this type of game (you can of course turn this off and ignore the tutorial and muddle through on your own if that is more your style).
Buildings are constructed using a simple drag and drop, which keeps things nice and easy – once you have a building you can add rooms and assign functions. The key is covering the basics first; bathrooms, bedrooms and somewhere to eat. These will impact your cult members’ happiness, which is key to running a successful cult! Over time you unlock various upgrades to these basics to make them more effective and inviting.
You do have a load of resources to manage (Influence, PR, Faith, Criminal Heat to name but a few) and it can sometimes feel like you are trying to spin an awful lot of plates – assigning your cultists schedules to try and manage their needs and happiness can definitely help with this, but one of the key frustrations was that sometimes Cultists would be starving and dying for the loo and then choose to not avail themselves of the facilities when they were free to do so. There is also the ability to modify the difficulty in several ways to suit your play style or need for achievements.
In addition to managing your compound, your cultists can also go on missions in different parts of the city – you need to select the cultists with the most appropriate skill set and send them away to complete your bidding; this will then result in text-based multiple-choice events that can have an extremely wide array of possible effects. You do need to carefully manage this during the early stages of the game when you only have a few cultists as you can leave yourself dangerously understaffed.
I do feel that pacing is an issue – the number of full-time cultists you can recruit is the really limiting factor, and it feels like while a lot of the rooms can be unlocked rapidly, you never really have enough staff available to run them effectively. You must entice new cult members in as day visitors, and then show them a good time on multiple days before you can recruit them as full-time members that you can put to work, but there is also a hard limit on how many recruits you can have, which does slow the game down a lot.
It has a generally satisfying gameplay loop, and the developers appear committed to adding more content and polishing. Honey, I Joined a Cult is enjoyable as is and is likely to improve further now it is out of Early Access, so definitely worth your time if you enjoy a good old-fashioned management sim and/or the idea of lording it over some gullible idiots.
