Though it admittedly doesn’t take much to get the twitchy, gameplay-centric caveman part of my brain firing, it only took a few seconds of watching a trailer for CULTIC to get me excited. Looking like a shooter that fell into a wormhole shortly after the release of Duke Nukem 3D and reemerged now, but sporting a tone that’s half revenge exploitation flick and half Resident Evil 4, a part of me felt like I was born to enjoy CULTIC. And while that’s mostly what ended up happening, it wasn’t the match made in heaven I was fully expecting it to be.
The setup is simple enough: you’re a guy with a gun (and later several), and there’s a murderous cult out there to be dealt with. Through notes in the world and a scant few cutscenes, you come to find out that you’re a detective and that this cult is attempting to summon some kind of supernatural force called “The Will.” To accomplish this, said cult is engaging in a lot of the standard activities you’d expect, such as sacrifices, reanimating flesh, and melding demons with destroyed tank machinery. You know, cult stuff.
CULTIC takes its lore and world more seriously than you’d probably expect, and I found it pretty compelling. In particular, I found myself genuinely impressed as you progress further into Chapter 2, where the game starts taking some pretty big swings in how it tells its story through level design and gameplay. While the overall story in CULTIC is telling nothing groundbreaking, it really is the way in which it tells its story that deserves a special mention.
But I imagine you’re reading this to find out more about how CULTIC plays than if it deserves an award for its writing. And the answer to that is a bit more complicated than you’re probably expecting given my description of it. The simple answer is that the moment-to-moment gunplay is fantastic. Though CULTIC looks like a game from out of time, it plays like some of the best modern offerings the genre has to offer. In particular, the stamina system that dictates your ability to dash and slide reminds me a lot of the breakneck pace of 2020’s Doom Eternal. One of many, many gameplay clips I saved on my PlayStation 5 culminates in about 12 seconds of me pumping two slugs of my sawed-off shotgun into the chest of a heavily armored enemy, dashing diagonally backwards around a corner to safely reload, swapping to my bolt-action rifle to quickly drop a couple headshots on some hatchet-wielding cult members that were approaching from another position, and then finishing the original armored enemy off by igniting a Molotov cocktail with my lighter and tossing it in his general direction. And that was from, like, the third level of the game.
It’s not all sweaty-palmed shootouts, either. CULTIC deals just as much in horror (both subtle and over the top) as it does action, and it’s all the better for it. One of the later levels of Chapter 1 is a nauseatingly cramped and dark dungeon crawler that dragged on just long enough to start making me feel anxious about my quickly dwindling ammo supplies, but not long enough for me to grow tired of the level’s structure and gimmick. In general, Chapter 1’s level design offered up some of my favorite shooter combat arenas I’ve played in recent memory and is worth the price of admission alone.
But here’s where the complicated part of my feelings towards CULTIC comes in. See, the game is divided up into Chapters 1 and 2, with an intermission set between them. My understanding is that CULTIC originally released on PC with just the Chapter 1 content, and everything else was added as DLC there and is now released on console as one complete package. My issue is that Chapter 2 feels like it’s completely buckling under the weight of its own ambition in trying to deliver a bigger and better followup to Chapter 1.
I mostly mean that literally, as most stages in Chapter 2 feel like they’re at least double the size of any level in Chapter 1, and that’s being conservative. Not only does this add to the complexity of the level design, as memorizing the space and finding different ways to progress are much more emphasized in this second half of the game, but much wider combat arenas inherently end up getting filled with more projectile-chucking and shooting enemies, which, given the speed and nature of CULTIC, means it’s suddenly much easier to start being hit and not even understand where the damage is coming from. It’s the classic Hotline Miami 2 dilemma, though it’s even more of a shame in CULTIC, because I absolutely loved the settings the levels took place in here. In particular was a seasonal Renaissance fair-inspired fairground, complete with a dungeon and wizard tower attractions, that was incredible to take in as a digital representation of low-budget cheesy theme parks but was downright annoying to actually try and play.
And all of the stages in Chapter 2 are like this, sacrificing playability and pacing for scale. Unfortunately, the enemy variety is largely the same as it was in Chapter 1, and with only a handful of new weapons, many of which are contextual as opposed to permanent, it just ends up feeling like butter spread over too much bread. So while Chapter 1 feels like it’s bordering on being an all-timer shooter for me, I straight up did not enjoy my time with Chapter 2, at least from a gameplay standpoint.
I want to stress that while Chapter 2 greatly disappointed me from a design standpoint, aesthetically it was still a joy to behold, and I haven’t used the screen capture feature on the PS5 this much in years. I just wish the entire package of Chapter 2 had been able to deliver for me on that level.
Rounding out the package is a survival mode, which is CULTIC’s answer to the various Mercenaries modes across the Resident Evil series. Basically, you’ll pick a stage to play and take on increasingly difficult waves of enemies, with the downtime between each wave being spent restocking on supplies at a shop. It’s simple arcade-y fun, and I think it has the potential to be a big time sink if it’s your kind of thing, but I personally tapped out after a handful of runs.
