Wanna get into a new, hot business venture? I hear there is a lot of money in running a cult!
And you can do just that in the aptly named game Honey, I joined a Cult. This game takes inspiration from Prison Architect — even mimicking the same visual style. However, Instead of building and managing a prison you are building and managing a community for your cult!
Before you create your own community, you get to pick your cult leader, name your cult, and pick out a wardrobe for everyone. Once you are happy with what people are going to call your followers and what you all are going to look like, you are brought into a square of land in the town.
There, you can place down rooms, assign them, and then add the required decorations or furniture so that they work. There are a variety of rooms for you to create from a lobby to loads of legal departments and even brainwashing rooms. In the alpha prototype I played at Insomnia62, I started with a few cult members — but primarily played the leader of the cult.
You can switch to the first person view of the leader and manually control them — making them eat, sleep, or interact with townsfolk who walk by. There are some special characters who walk by the front of your community; reporters, police, and superstars. You can speak to these individuals — but depending on how big your community is — these characters will react differently to you. You can end up gaining publicity and even recruiting some wonderful people!
These new recruits will start off paying you for classes, so that they can gain skills within the community. Depending on how much money they have, that is — they will do classes until they run out. If they have done at least 3 classes, you can fully recruit them into your cult. If they haven’t then they will eventually leave or need to be kicked out.
Your goal is to make the most amount of money possible, so draining new members out of their cash via classes is just the way to do it. Honey, I Joined a Cult is a really wonderful concept — full of fun ideas and creativity. The most hilarious of the bunch are the skills that are currently implemented, as well as past jobs for your cult members. These range from ‘being an egg’ to ‘professional garbage’ — all of which made me laugh. This game, in concept, is absolutely wonderful. What the developers have produced so far is living up to this.
Honey, I Joined a Cult is a very ambitious first project for this development team. The amount of fun, humor, and gameplay that is planned is super exciting and I do hope they are able to complete it. If you’d like to follow development, feel free to check out their website or follow @solesurvivorgms on Twitter.
