I thought about not talking about a demo or a full game this week, but I was drinking and playing Overwatch 2 when I realized that I most certainly can in fact talk about a few games this week. Now, I waited far too long to play a spooky game for this Friday but we will all live. This week I play a Doom mod that is apparently a full game. Rise from a mass grave and eviscerate the cult that threw you into the death pit. This week is the Cultic Demo.

Cultic is an FPS from Jasozz Games and 3D Realms. The game was released in October for the PC and retails for $10.

I don’t know much about the story and the demo doesn’t let the player know anything else. There seems to be a cult, they “kill you” and you wake up in a mass grave and it is time to end the cult with fucking LEAD.

Game play really feels like a sped-up Doom mod. I am fine with that because the style of the game really makes up for it. You get to slide, which, when you find out that there is a speed boost attached to that slide then the game becomes insanely fun. I can finally see why the game got accepted into AGDQ.

The shooting is also really good. Enemies throw axes, shoot guns and sometimes throw molotovs, so being quick and accurate is key to winning fights. Lots of enemies are out and about and it is easy to get caught up and die, and firefights can get quite intense which makes for a really good feeling when you come out just barely alive. The sound of a headshot in Cultic is top tier and looking at the ground to see that their eyeballs are looking right at me is just blissfully horrifying.

Cultic has a really unique look to it. It really takes from those old-school video games like Duke Nukem and Doom. The animations are actually really good and it is really satisfying when guns are reloaded. The game is pixelated enough so that it can look like a retro game and it looks good enough so that environmental storytelling is legible.

I didn’t pay attention to the music, but it apparently got nominated for the best soundtrack from the Steam Awards this year, so there’s that.

Cultic is a sweet game. I had loads of fun when I found out that sliding gives a boost of speed. Sliding past enemies is really fun, and shooting is really fun. That head-exploding sound when you get a headshot is the most satisfying thing in a video game. The demo is a good length and it really shows off the gameplay and gunplay really efficiently.

When I get paid I will buy the hell out of this game. It is pretty fun and $10 is really cheap for what looks like to be a pretty good game.