The Shrouded Isle

[h3]Sacrifice the virtuous, hail the sinners ![/h3] A fun and challenging cult simulator with a cool Lovecraftian vibe. The different choice of colors might be difficult for some but the mechanic of the game is quite interresting. And simply playing as the evil guy is pretty fun by itself. Here, you hunt the nicest members of tour community while trying not to anger too much their families. The loop gets harder as the game progresses, as your possible candidates for sacrifice diminish. With gritty hand-drawn visuals and dramatic orchestral music, it is well worth a try. It also gets super cheap during sales so don't pass on this opportunity to please the mighty [b]Chernobog[/b] !

A wonderful little indie gem with strong Lovecraftian vibes. The bleak visual style emphasises the dark and cold atmosphere of the game. As a high priest, you take religious control of a small fishing village with a doomsday cult. The game is mainly a mixture of simulation and detective game, as it is your task to find the sinners among the villagers and sacrifice them to a rising, bloodthirsty god in the sea. But without upsetting the noble houses in the village too much or neglecting the virtues. The game would be really great in my eyes if it didn't have some poorly designed mechanics and sometimes harsh RNG elements. I would rate the game neutral. So it's a thumbs up as for the intriguing concept alone a thumbs down would be inappropriate in my opinion.

Its so so so close to be being good, but simply relies too much on RNG for it to be actually engaging to play.

Great game with an interesting premise, cool design, and fun lore. Only downside for me is that I don't feel it has much replay value once you've achieved all the end scenarios.

I'd give it a mixed review. Conceptually it is interesting enough, and it highlights disturbing aspects of religions that doesn't get discussed often enough. Gameplay-wise it is rather limited in it's offering, both in depth and play hours. Visually, I like it's resemblance to "Darkest Dungeon", though it does feel bare-bones in its overall presentation, particularly the lackluster animation. Like Chernobog it can be both forgiving and harsh. Forgiving in that you can run resources points and relationship points down to it's absolute minimum, and you don't lose immediately, you're given another season (round) to bring them up to threshold; which is usually doable, unless the deity (RNGesus) feels like being a dick and increasing the threshold of the particular resource you're at rock bottom of. Harshness mostly comes from RNG, especially at the start when most virtues and vices are unknown, and there are too few revelations provided to make actual strategic decisions - you inevitably gamble by sending a bunch of unknowns into the council. By mid-game though, most virtues and vices are known, and you shift to repeatedly do the chore of sending the requested individual to your god. By end-game you run out of actual big sinners to sacrifice, and now are doing a different chore, which is mostly keeping relationship points up with houses because they get angry that you sacrificed minor sinners. 4 seasons in 5 years make for 20 rounds; the game isn't really long, but it does get dull from mid-to-end-game when you are not so much making interesting decisions, but simply reacting to who the deity commands to sacrifice, and to what resource/relationship points is low and needs boosting.

You would need a paper and pen to track all the stats the game is not tracking for you. It goes too slow and repetitive.

Good.