Cult of the Yellow King

one of the most faithful lovecraftian games i have ever encountered...who woulda thought that it would come in the form an incremental/unfolding clicker. great music, better art, fantastic writing and implementation of "cult" mechanics and narrative.

Cult of the Yellow King is a game I absolutely adore for many reasons. First of all, the art style and general theme is really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cool. It's like eldtrich horror meets wendigoons yt channels art style, and I love it. The art itself is also between pretty and disturbing/uncanny (a lot of the shrines trigger uncanny valley for me, esp the first one. oh boy does that mouth freak me out.) The static effect is a nice touch and nicer still is you can turn off the visual noise if you want to. I especially love the little lore pages you're interspersed with when you're playing, it really helps the story flow and helps you understand what is actually going on. Without those pages I would be very very confused. There's art accompanying them which looks, in the best way possible, dirty and mouldy. Mwah. That's exactly what this game needs. A weird, almost humid art style and it does it so well. Also, everything is yellow. Very on theme. As for the writing in the game, I do really love the descriptions of each level/machine you go through. The writing is very gothic and descriptive (i felt a little sick reading the descriptions of peoples teeth falling out but ooh boy was it a good sick) and really makes you FEEL the rot and decay of what's happening to the people around you. The actual gameplay itself is pretty simple but immersive; like a lot of similar games, you have the prestiege which brings you to the next level, resetting your amenities but allowing you a quicker chance to get to what you need to get to on the next level. It slowly introduces more and more components so you understand this world of the Yellow King ascends earth and enters the stars, making the mould feel almost alien in nature. I will say that it is a clicking game, though you get autogenerators, so if that isn't for you you won't enjoy this. It's still really, really good. The loop is very satisfying especially early on and it doesn't take a LOT of time to get to the next prestiege. I've spent 13 hours so far on this game and I'm still really not bored of it. Intending to 100% it asap. Later on it can get a little draining, mostly due to the yellow mould as a currency. It slows production a bit too much and you can't speed it up enough to the point where it matters after a certain section of the game, and then it becomes 'wait 20 minutes for the number to be big enough', but this game is still in early acsess and so it's understandable they wouldn't have worked it all out yet. The music, is, of course, brilliant. Metal for an eldrich horror game is a match made in hell and it works beautifully. I also like that the music cuts out when lore appears to signal that this is not just another pop-up, but something important. I will say I ended up muting it later game because I had listened to the music so much, but I still put on the soundtrack when I feel like it. There's so much rich lore in here that it genuinely amazes me how well its conveyed through generator descriptions and gameplay loops that you would think might be tedious. So many mysterious entities to understand, so much of this game dedicated to expanding onto beings that are so fascinating. It really reminds me of fear and hunger 2's God lore with how it's vauge, but also you really understand it at the same time. I would like to know more about the Gods we dedicate shrines to, and more about the Yellow King himself, but obviously, we don't have the full game. I assume we will learn more later on. Overall, this game is a really well put together piece that I very much enjoyed existing in. You really get into the thoughts of 'okay, need to upgrade this and then that, need to work through these and then I can get this,' etc. and it also is pretty good at forcing you to think about how you spend the curriencies you have. The interface fix was also a wise choice, as I played the pre-fix version and it was a lot more confusing, but now makes sense. Excited for the next update! may the Yellow King watch over you :)

its like cookie clicker

Very nice clicker game. Played through 2 storylines so far and intend to keep going. Some feedback for the Early Access version: 1. Noise & Music The visual noise is simply too much as the default setting, it really puts the strain on the eyes. When it comes to the music, as much as I like to listen to harder stuff like black metal from time to time (like the Polish band Mgła with their amazing music and deep lyrics) I personally don't think it's a fitting choice for prolonged sessions of chill games like that (but that's just my totally subjective personal opinion). The first thing I did after launching the game was to disable noise entirely, mute the music and fire up some atmospheric cosmic horror and lovecraftian ambience music in the background and the experience was great like that. 2. Some minor UI flaws It would probably make sense to swap some menus at the top. sporeborne architectures <-> ritual altars prestige sigils <-> cosmic beings This would group production buildings on one side and extra stuff on the other so easier to navigate than if they're interspersed like that. When you purchase some upgrades your manual click displays how much insight you'll gain with accuracy up to 15 decimal places. This should probably be rounded to either 1-2 decimal places or up/down to integers. 3. Disable upgrade purchases When you start the game with some of the upgrades/buildings already unlocked they still show in the menu as available for purchase even though you can't do it. It's really confusing and would probably be better to mark those as "purchased" in the menus. 4. A gallery? It would be nice to be able to revisit the story beats for different paths. I really enjoyed the little tidbits of information and how the story unfolds and would love to be able to have some form of access to a journal or something where you could re-read those and watch the pretty pictures again (obviously only stuff you've already seen as to not spoil it). Overall a really good showing for an Early Access. Will definitely keep an eye on it and add it to my collection of Lovecraftian games.

One of the Lovecraftian stories I don't know much about, but progression has you unlock a lot of lore, which gives a feeling of working toward getting the story on top of just higher numbers. It isn't "Idling to Rule the Gods" level text dump, but gets fairly deep. Besides the Lovecraft draw and atmosphere, and really nice and creepy visual style, I think the big draw is it's approach to the prestige mechanic. Rather than starting from scratch and getting to a higher number, each prestige is it's own mission. You have to reach specific goals and unlock new tech trees after every restart, taking a different "path" each time as you learn more.

Super fun especially for people who like The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. I feel like when it comes to the horror of the original this game builds on it in the best way I think anyone could.

Beautiful game with an amazing soundtrack. However As Early Access its beatable in mere hours, also the game theory of it all is just bad. You wait to get upgrades that give you the resource to buy themselves and nothing else, prestigeing changes nothing aside from what you have access to; meaning: you are just playing the base game over and over again. The game has a solid foundation but it is clearly not finished and might be going in bad directions

Probably the strangest and most disturbing idle/clicker game I've played, in a good way.