Cult Vacui

It lovely little game teeming with atmosphere. Its only about 1 to 1.5 hour long but for the price that, to me, is enough.

While it is a fairly short game, it is a very interesting take on the point & click genre. Every choice you make/location you visit uses up time, so it encourages you to replay it and make different decidions. As a life long fan of the P&C genre I enjoyed it imensely and cannot recommend it enough.

🔸 [b]EXPECTATIONS:[/b] a point and click adventure, with time management as a gimmick. 🔸 [b]REALITY:[/b] a P&C adventure that goes all in on the time management feature. 🔷 Cult Vacui is a traditional point and click adventure game (inventory slots, interrogate people, objects to combine...) with time management gameplay, just not in real time. Solving the story situations here is not the main point, but doing so in an optimal order is, as every time the player performs a significant action, it costs time (accounted as in-game minutes) which draws closer a looming deadline. 🔹 The puzzles/situations to solve (or what to do with 'this' and where goes 'that') are rather easy and don't require any moon logic, which is even appreciated as one will want to replay it to find the different endings. As mentioned, there is an optimal sequence in which to do all tasks, but that doesn't mean there's just one solution. Spending too much time on certain tasks will lead to different story situations and ultimately, to 1 of three possible endings. 🔹 The game is very short, too. It has 3 chapters (the 1st one is the demo) and it can take ~2h to finish for the 1st time, and about 2 more hours to get the other endings and achievements. It's a short experience, but it makes it more clear that the fun lies in optimising the tasks to waste the least amount of time, rather than bringing trinkets to their right place. 🔹 The (pixel) art is great, and the music and sound are good, too. The story has a dark theme that revolves around a cult, their goals and the people who's involved. 🔹 Sadly, during my time with it I found some bugs, that fortunately didn't impede my progress, and some story situations didn't make sense, mostly in chapter 2 (the longest), leaving me feeling like they don't account for the many possible decisions that the player can take. 💠 [b]IS IT FOR YOU?[/b] There are perfect games that aren't for everyone, and there are faulty games that one absolutely loves. Cult Vacui was the latter for me: it's very short and it seems to not care to account for all story situations in its narrative tree, but the time management was a breadth of fresh air for me, and I absolutely loved it. If you like narrative-driven games with 'choices matter' and don't have +20h to spend on a complete experience, I absolutely recommend it. If you are here for the P&C experience, then consider the pros/cons first. [b]POSITIVES:[/b] 🙂+ 😄+ art 😍+ time management is the actual game [b]NEGATIVES:[/b] 🙁- 😠- some story situations 😡- [quote] For more [b]puzzle games[/b] content, follow my [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/46251802/]Curator[/url] page and subscribe to my [url=https://www.youtube.com/@Mael_Duin]YouTube[/url] channel.[/quote]

Such a fantastic short experience!! The story was amazing and I actually loved the time management piece because it made you really thing about what order you needed to do certain things. 5 stars - seriously just love the music, atmosphere, puzzles and art style <3

I had a lot of fun playing this game. Similar to the Don't Escape franchise in terms of gameplay but a lot more supernatural.

A fun point and click game that reminds me of the dont escape flash games of my youth that I would play on the schools computer lab. While a little simple in plot and art, it posses a charming and forbidding soul. It may not reinvent the wheel but its short and sweet.

"Cult Vacui" is a valiant effort to present a point-and-click survival adventure with a time management system, but I must admit I was expecting more. All the puzzles are very straightforward, it’s obvious what you have to do to prepare yourself for an optimal defense against the attack of the cult, and it’s hard to miss anything important. Hard, but not impossible, because the fairly strict time restriction doesn’t allow for much leeway in your sequence of events. Thanks to the manual save system, though, you can easily go back a few steps and do things differently, resulting in a game that takes less time to finish than I took writing this review. It still lacks some polish, but the pixel art graphics are a joy to behold, the haunting music will keep you on the edge of your seat, and the story is suspenseful enough to keep you going. You’d think that defeating an evil cult might require a little more time and effort, but all in all, it’s a tidy bit of business for a couple hours of work. https://adventuregamehotspot.com/review/6550/cult-vacui

I just finished the game in 1h40 (with different endings). Overall I really liked the game. In the first 5 minutes I was immersed in the story. It reminds me greatly of Shadow of the Comet, a classic Lovecraftian Point & Click (you are in a small island, stucked with deadly cultists and you have to prevent them from achieving their ritual). The puzzles are not too hard, I did not need to look for a guide, but they were enough challenging. I like the aesthetic so much. The biggest issue I have is that the game is too short ! I would have liked a 2 hours more. I really hope the team will come up with other games like this :)