Consume your enemies and corrupt your friends in new Cultist Simulator trailer

Alexis Kennedy has been busy since he left Sunless Sea and Fallen London developer Failbetter Games last year, writing for the likes of Bioware, Paradox Interactive (on Stellaris) and Telltale Games. But he's also been working on his own project, an occult board game called Cultist Simulator in which your aim is to "rain blood down on the world"—so he told Joe in an interview earlier this month.

Well, yesterday Kennedy released a new trailer showing the game in action. The board itself is suitably dark and the abundance of threatening symbols fits right in. The cards also look to have a satisfying wobble when you pick them up and plonk them down, which I find always helps draw me in to PC card games. Anyway, here's the video:

Along with the trailer, Kennedy also revealed that a Kickstarter for the game will launch on September 1—the page is live here but currently all you can do is leave feedback. He aims to release the game next February.

In case you're wanting a little more detail on the game itself, the premise is that you're an aspiring cultist trying to dive as deep into the dark side as possible. To do that you have to work to raise money (which could mean selling a painting or two), and then buy occult books that help you learn rituals.

You amass followers to send on ancient vault raids, carry out blood sacrifices and generally cause as much chaos as possible. It looks interesting, and it's definitely one that I'll be keeping track of over the next few months.

There's a prototype version with a slice of the full game's content that you can download for free on itch.io, but beware of the janky UI of that build.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.