Cult Vacui review

• Reviews by Johnny Nys
• Published:

Short pixel art survival adventure provides plenty of suspense but comes up largely empty on challenge

Once upon a time I played a real-life horror game. We had to infiltrate a seemingly abandoned shunting yard where a cult of strange train worshippers wearing welding masks were going to perform an initiation ceremony of their new leader. It didn’t so much rely on horror as on the tension of things that might happen, and we had to hide constantly. I had a similar feeling playing solo developer LBRTY Games’ first commercial release, the beautiful pixel art adventure Cult Vacui, though here it’s not only a matter of hiding away from a cult, but actively defending yourself against it as well.

Cult Vacui has very basic escape-the-room type puzzles, but its objective is actually the opposite. Instead of escaping, you have to gather a group of allies and weapons, barricade yourself and set traps to defend your shelter for a night. You only have a limited amount of time to make these preparations, and every wrong move might mean the difference between life or death. Constantly keeping that time limit in mind, it’s a very unsettling game in which failure is very much an option. But easy puzzles ensure it’s also very short, and its helpful – perhaps too helpful (or at least, too tempting) – save system means you should never have to replay much to improve your fate.

The game consists of three distinct parts. The intro has you playing as Henry Gladstone. His body is about to be completely taken over by a demon who is already slowly invading his mind. With his last reserve of free will, Henry prepares a ritual to self-exorcise the demon. He’s staying at an inn where you need to gather the necessary tools to perform this ritual. After an unsettling conversation between the two, with Henry facing the mirror talking to his diabolical reflection, you only have twenty-five minutes before the demon takes control.

The inn has two guest rooms, an upstairs hallway, and the downstairs bar. These are the sorts of scenes you would normally expect to see your character moving around in. Instead, here you have a first-person point of view, though you always seem to be standing at a bit of a distance, as if the camera is equipped with a wide-angle lens, making it seem like you are looking into the rooms from the outside. In one location later in the game, you even have an aerial view, as if you are floating mid-air. You can change screens either by clicking on available doors, or on white arrows indicating exits.

But moving from one place to another costs time. Only a couple of minutes with each relocation (exactly how many is shown when you hover your cursor over the exits), but the clock is counting down whenever you go back and forth to catch a rat, paint symbols on a mysterious set of stones, or try to convince the bartender and other guests to hand over necessary materials.

Within a given room, you can spend as much real time as you want as the in-game clock won’t advance, giving you lots of time to look around and examine the few hotspots present. It always stresses me out when a game states it has time limits, but there’s no need to be really worried about that, moment to moment, in Cult Vacui. Which is good, because the clock icon in the top right corner of the screen doesn’t show the actual time. You have to click on it for a pop-up to show you how much time you have left.

Whether or not you succeed in successfully performing the ritual in time, a pop-up will ask if you want to move ahead to the next part of the game. I didn’t continue when I failed, but rather retried this part three more times until I discovered the perfect, most efficient run and the demon was indeed cast out. Even so, it only took me half an hour to start the second and biggest part of Cult Vacui.

This section takes you to the Scottish island of Barra. You no longer play as Henry, but instead are the nameless caretaker of Gladstone Manor, situated in the middle of the island. A visitor knocks on your door and falls dead on your floor after informing you that a cult is killing everyone on the island to prepare for a ritual through which they hope to bring the god Marduk down to Earth. This time you have four hundred minutes to prepare for their attack.

Next to the manor, there are five other locations on the island: the main village, a mill, a lighthouse, a church, and some ruins. Travelling between them takes ten to thirty minutes each way, depending on your starting point. It’s the same gameplay as the first part, only with a larger setting, and once more it’s up to you to solve puzzles and find the most ideal path.

There are some locked doors you need to get past if you hope to reach the best ending, but the puzzles mostly involve preparing the manor with the necessary defenses and traps. You need to investigate the grounds and look for places where you could put one, then scavenge the island for the correct items to use. It’s all very intuitive: you must find planks to board something up, and fuel or oil if you want to burn either torches or enemies, for example. The manor’s terrace is very exposed, so you’ll have to block it off somehow. And you can install traps in the ground if you can find and camouflage them. It’s somewhat similar to Don’t Escape: 4 Days to Survive, except here it’s only one night you have to stay alive, and the puzzles are far easier.

Most inhabitants of the island have already been murdered, but there are three survivors you can persuade to help you: Sister Dorothy, a nun held captive in the church; Diarmuid, a villager who has lost hope after his wife and son were killed, but who will join you if you can bring something precious to him; and Edward, a former cult member who is now rebelling against the group but needs some final convincing by providing him with a fancy new weapon.

Cult Vacui

Genre:	Horror
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Slideshow
Theme:	Religion/Occult, Savior
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Pixel art
Gameplay:	Survival, Resource management
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low

Cult Vacui has lots of basic yet beautifully scenic pixel art depicting the sober, late 19th century state of Barra island and its austere buildings. But it’s the detailed character close-ups that stand out the most. These are all tortured people, and the use of light and shadow adds greatly to conveying their state of mind.

The characters aren’t voiced, but the writing is quite succinct and clear, pulling you through the story at a fast pace. It’s an engaging tale, and quite suspenseful due to the threat of death hanging over you. The atmosphere is amplified by a haunting and thrilling soundtrack featuring a variety of wind instruments – along with the constant fear of making mistakes, missing things and losing time by having to retrace your steps.

Putting up defenses and traps costs time as well, of course, so a pop-up informs you how much time a certain task will take and asks if you really want to go ahead with it. Once recruited, however, the three survivors will help you prepare for the attack of the cult members, and the more people are with you, the less time you need to make these preparations. When I first started setting up, I was still missing one survivor (you can check this by clicking an icon of a fist in the bottom left corner), and realizing I probably wouldn’t make it through the night being one member short, I reloaded a saved game and went looking for the last person.

Barricading yourself in means there eventually comes a point when you can’t revisit the rest of the island, so you better make sure you have everything (and everyone) you need before you lock the gates. There’s an option to fast-forward and start the attack if you think you’re all set and have time left over. That is no guarantee of success, however, as it’s possible to die if the cult members successfully infiltrate the manor and slaughter you and/or your peers. There is a slightly different end scene depending who in your group survives. But when you as the main character succumb to the attack as well, it’s more of a game-over. That happened to me, and then a pop-up asked if I wanted to continue and try to do better this time. For some reason, however, nothing happened when I clicked that button, and the screen remained empty. 

I also noticed another glitch while playing Cult Vacui. Even with such a short game, I had to exit out a couple of times (you know, life) but when I returned to pick up where I left off, immediately it started a new game instead of opening up on the main menu with the load option. This meant I had to click through the intro until I was able to access the menu and then manually load my saved game.

Once you have survived the attack on the manor, which is one long cutscene automatically ticking off all aspects of the attack and defense and their results, with no further action needed from the player, dawn will come and it’s on to the final part of the game. A strange light appears in the sky, and you have sixty minutes to stop the cult’s High Priest from bringing the god Marduk down to Earth by performing a counter-ritual. This part is even shorter than the first, and shouldn’t be a problem unless you forgot to pick up certain items in the second part. This is the one fairly notable exception to the otherwise very forgiving save system, because if you need to go back and collect the missing objects, time will run out no matter what, triggering the bad ending.

In this third part of the game you will also be confronted with the consequences of your actions in the first part – whether or not you succeeded in exorcising Henry Gladstone’s demon – which defines the type of ending you get, but both are acceptable and satisfying conclusions to the story. Of course, you still need to stop the High Priest’s final summoning ritual, as failure leads to a much bleaker ending. Even within the “good” outcomes there are slight variations possible, depending on who survived the attack on the manor.

The game took me only 100 minutes to finish, and that's including some reloads when I noticed things going sideways. Given its extremely short length, perhaps Cult Vacui was meant to be replayed from the beginning to try new approaches. But the game’s rigidly linear design would make that more of a punishment than an opportunity just to find or do a few things you missed the first time around, or in a different order. The generous manual save system prevents you from having to repeat most of the same tasks and dialogues, but the ability to record your own progress anywhere makes it too easy to save scum and undo your mistakes, which in my view doesn’t fit the philosophy of the game.

Reloading doesn’t always work out all that well, though. When I finished with the good ending, I wanted to go back and see what would happen if I screwed things up. However, as soon as the bad ending triggered, the cutscene seemed to run in fast-forward, as if the skip button got stuck, moving through the dialogue without a chance to read any of the lines, and finally even some images and dialogue text overlapping each other. None of the game’s glitches truly get in the way of a complete playthrough, but hopefully the developer will make it a priority of their own to fix them. 

Final Verdict

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. 

Johnny played Cult Vacui on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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