Honey, I Joined a Cult Is a Novel Take on a Tried & Tested Genre

The management sim genre has been around for years. Players have built and maintained their own hospitals, constructed outrageous rollercoasters, and ensured their theme parks remained as puke-free as possible. They’ve developed sprawling metropolises and even taken their management skills to the farthest reaches of space. It’s impressive, then, that developers are still capable of finding novel takes on the genre, and that’s exactly what Honey, I Joined a Cult manages to achieve.

As the title suggests, you’re tasked with managing a cult. You’re the architect of a new cult in the 1970s, tasked with designing everything from the ground up. That includes the grubby bathrooms, featuring buckets for toilets and troughs for sinks, at least initially. Your main objective is to turn your cult’s compound into a sprawling, money-making machine that, above all else, keeps your leader happy.

It’s a neat concept that features many of the standard management sim tropes. You need to recruit followers into cultists, and then use them to man different facilities, while ensuring they remain happy. This is done by keeping them well-fed, ensuring they don’t get too bored when they’re not working, and generally don’t give them any reason to question your cult and its leader. That requires you to improve your facilities to upgrade the aforementioned bucket toilets to the real deal or adding a kitchen onto your canteen so they don’t have to eat vending machine food all day.

The facilities are all appropriately quirky, too. An Energy Spa, Meditation Studio, and Spirit Chamber are just a handful of the Therapy Rooms you’ll unlock early on, allowing you to milk your followers for Influence and earn the cultist running the room some XP. This XP can then be used to level up a variety of skills, which improves their efficiency in different roles around the camp.

Of course, no cult is complete without daily sermons whereby cultists and followers all worship whichever wacky deity you’ve chosen for them at the beginning of the game, earning you Faith. Each of your Cultists has a daily Faith cost, in order to keep them content and working.

Not all followers and cultists are created equal, however. Initially, I was recruiting a ton of ‘very poor’ quality cultists, whose skills were very much lacking across the board. You’ll need to engage in recruitment drives to encourage more skillful members of the local community to join your cult, who, in turn, have higher Faith costs and demand better facilities, and so on the cycle goes.

Things don’t always go to plan, though. You might send a cultist out on a mission to a local radio station to try and improve your cult’s PR rating but fail miserably because your Atoms weren’t skilled enough in Social situations or Public Speaking.

Another time you may overwork a poor cultist to death, resulting in a skull and pile of bones being left around your compound, horrifying passers-by. All of this generates Heat with law enforcement, and the higher it gets, the more chance you’ve got of protests and police raids.

There’s a lot going on here, and things only get more overwhelming the more time you pour into it. That being said, Honey, I Joined a Cult does feel like a chore to begin with. While it is possible to speed up time, there’s still a slow sense of progress. Money was very limited and so improving the compound to keep my Atom cultists happy, and ensure quality followers could be recruited was a slow and often tough task to manage. It’s these slow early hours that really hinder the game.

I wanted to really get into the thick of it all, but for whatever reason, the whole process of getting started was just a drag. The in-game tutorial does a fairly decent job of teaching you the basics, but it’s not in-depth enough to help you with the many additional complexities the game soon dumps on you. It feels as though you’re constantly fighting an uphill battle, and not even a moderate incline at that. This is something that could be tweaked as part of the Early Access period, and arguably is the main thing that needs to be addressed.

All of this being said, Honey, I Joined a Cult is still a little rough around the edges. There are a few moments — especially in its tutorial sections — where the game simply wouldn’t let me place objects that I needed to in order to complete an objective. I was forced to back out to the main menu and load up again. It’s not a big deal, but it doesn’t give off the best first impression.

There are also some text issues in menus — my Atoms were called Elves in some menus — and I’m not entirely convinced assigning my cultists to different jobs or rooms was working entirely as it should, but these are to be expected in Early Access and hopefully come its full release, these will be resolved.

Honey, I Joined a Cult is available now via Steam Early Access.