Video Game / CULTIC

The Outsider is alive, and he won't stop until they're not.

CULTIC is a Retraux First-Person Shooter developed by Jasozz Games and published by 3D Realms. Touted by fans as a Spiritual Successor to the Blood series, creator Jason Smith has admitted that while Blood was indeed an inspiration for the game's thematic direction, the gameplay and design takes more after Resident Evil 4 and Dark Forces. The game features crunchy, pixelated graphics reminiscent of the PC FPS games of The '90s with some more modern touches added: fully 3D environments, enemies are 2D sprites, while most environmental objects are made of voxels.

It's late 1963, and the city of New Grandewel is in the grips of a county wide crime wave: people are being abducted, going missing, or outright murdered, with no apparent leads as to why. You play as the now-disgraced detective that was in charge of the investigation, removed due to false misconduct allegations. Deciding to take matters into his own hands, the detective decides to follow the last lead he has: the grounds of the old New Grandewel Lunatic Asylum. Not long after arriving, however, he gets jumped by unknown assailants and left in the woods for dead. He eventually wakes up in a shallow grave, surrounded by corpses, and into a nightmare.

The first part of the game, Chapter One, was released on PC through Steam on October 13, 2022. While a Chapter Two was initially announced for a mid-2023 release, it's since been delayed. However, an Interlude chapter bridging the two chapters was released during the 2023 Realms Deep presentation on September 30th.

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This game contains examples of:

• Advanced Movement Technique: Kicking in the air allows to jump significantly higher. It also allows much faster movement.
• Air-Vent Passageway: Air vents can be crawled through. Often, they lead to secret areas.
• Anachronism Stew: The game takes place in 1963 at most, but the grenade launcher is a China Lake, a prototype pump action launcher that wasn't developed until 1968.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: During Interlude, you follow the perspective of a police officer who is part of the city precinct that the Outsider was originally part of 2 months later. His fate at the end of the level is unknown.
• And the Adventure Continues: Chapter One ends with the detective trapped in the ritual room after slaying the Abomination. But a portal suddenly opens up where the monstrosity's heart was. The detective simply reloads his shotgun, ready to face whatever is beyond as it cuts to the credits.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Picking up healing item drops while at full health will add half of the total recovered (rounded down) to your field medic kit.
  • If you're down to your last hatchet, the alt-fire will be disabled until you collect more of them.
• Armor Meter: The game has two, one for ballistic armor (the gray meter) and one for blast armor (the orange meter). Ballistic armor reduces damage from gunfire and is double layered (dark gray for the first 100 points, light gray for the second 100), while blast armor reduces damage from explosions.
• Apocalyptic Log: You find numerous notes throughout the game that chronicle what's happened in the area surrounding the old asylum. The two major logs, however, are the field journals and research notes.
  • Field Journals are the notes of one Christopher Holloway, a private detective hired to look for a missing girl, but he eventually finds out that the weird "book club" ends up being an honest-to-God cult. Despite it being way above his pay grade, he's pretty much forced to join to stay alive after some of the other potential recruits that wanted out end up disappearing soon after.
  • Research Notes chronicle an unnamed cultist making observations over the "Imbuement" process that the cult practices. And is appropriately horrified at the Abomination that they awoke.
• Bear Trap: Many bear traps can be found at the end of the first level, but they make appearances in other levels as well. The Harvester will throw them with wild abandon.
• Bedlam House: It's implied that the New Grandewel Lunatic Asylum was one, albeit maybe a much nicer one than usual. By the time of the game, however, it's been shut down, bought by the cult, and converted into a makeshift fortress/compound.
• Body Horror: The Abomination is a giant partial skeleton with three arms, moving ribs, and some visible organs. It's buried/fused into the surrounding earth while blood vessels make up a Meat Moss around it.
• Boom, Headshot!: Oh, and how! Any headshot-based kill is guaranteed to shoot up a geyser of gibs. As Civvie put it, you can see the headshots in this game from space.
• Brick Joke: Early on you can interact with an intercom and are answered by a cultist, much later you find the other intercom and a note for said cultist confused about not getting an answer.
• Bullet Time: Killing an enemy with a headshot or killing multiple enemies within a short timespan can trigger a slowdown effect. Upgrading the Lever Action Rifle and using the alt-fire to pop a head will do it every time.
• Chainsaw Good: One of the enemies, the Harvester, wields one as it's melee weapon. And it can very well mulch you, no matter the difficulty level. It doesn't act like a standard melee attack, either; the game makes it very much known that your character is getting carved to shreds if it hits, and you can't survive it.
• Chairman of the Brawl: One of the environmental objects you can attack enemies with are chairs. There's even an achievement for killing an enemy with a chair from over 25 meters away (Prop Sniping).
• Charge Attack: There's a few instances of your equipment having some form of charged attacks. The primary attack of the hatchet can be charged to do more damage, while the secondary attack of the incinerator flamethrower can charge up a fireball. TNT, Molotov cocktails, hatchets, and improvised weapons like chairs and barrels can be charged to throw them farther.
• The Conspiracy:
  • Pretty much the only way to explain how the detective got taken off the case - the cult has enough influence in the community to make sure nobody can move against them.
  • This is outright confirmed in Interlude, where we learn that the chief of police is in with the cult and so are a sizable amount of officers. Any officer not part of it ends up gunned down by a cultist’s raid.
• Crate Expectations: From the first level, there are destructible wooden crates scattered around throughout the game.
• Cult: If the game's name wasn't enough, you find out that you're fighting against a cult really quick. While it isn't given an official name, there are notes talking of a previous "Willbound covenant". When he was investigating the missing girl, Holloway initially thought it was a Scam Religion or pyramid scheme. He eventually found out it was a full-blown Religion of Evil.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Every abomination that's not a zombie or a skeleton will take massive amounts of punishment to take down, capable of surviving multiple bundles of dynamite at point blank range. On the other hand, they're all glaringly weak to being set on fire.
  • The tank at the Chapel will absorb a lot of punishment before going down, appropriately.
• Dead All Along: You eventually find Holloway, dead in the walls of the asylum from a gunshot wound and blood loss, with his last journal entry beside him.
• Determinator: The Outsider, of course, who, on finding himself in a pile of bodies, picks up whatever weapons he can find and utterly massacres everything in his path with sheer grit and firepower. But also Christopher Halloway, who gets shot in the stomach at the truck stop (the beginning of the game) and makes it all the way to the Asylum (the end of the game) before succumbing to his wound.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Several techniques are powerful but can be difficult to achieve.
  • Shotgun Jump Kicking: If you kick almost at the same time as you jump, you'll get about a quarter higher than you normally would, allowing you to scale obstacles you wouldn't normally be able to climb over. Combined with the upgraded Shotgun for more backwards movement, you can jump twice as high as normal. This, however, requires looking up, jumping, kicking, then looking down and blasting both barrels of the shotgun. It's tricky at best, but massively increases your traversal options.
  • The Lever-Action Rifle is great at short range, but can reliably headshot enemies lethally from across the map...if you can see them, as the rifle doesn't have any kind of iron sights.
  • Molotovs and Dynamite have a lot of self-damage potential, so combining them is just asking for trouble and pain, but there is nothing better at clearing a room full of tough enemies, up to and including the tanky Abominations, than an explosion that also rains down fire.
• Dirty Cop: As of Interlude, it’s revealed that the Chief of Police is in cahoots with the cult and so are several of its officers. The non-Dirty Cops end up being massacred with only one surviving. Putting another spin to the term "Corrupt Cop", the cultist-aligned cops are one of the enemies for the chapter. They wear unbuttoned shirts showing off their Cultist marks and have eery black eyes.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Interlude begins with your journey through the portal unceremoniously interrupted and dropping you out of the sky to your death. The game picks up two months later with another character as the cultists try to recover the Outsider's body. The end of Interlude, however, implies that the cult is going to make the unsound decision of bringing the Outsider back to life.
• Equipment Upgrade: Most of the weapons you find can be upgraded with weapon parts found throughout each level/map for more firepower, larger magazine capacities, and faster firing rates. By the time you reach level five (The Crypt), you can replace using your lighter for a light source with a pocket flashlight, freeing up your left hand to properly use all your weapons again.
• Exploding Barrels: Red-colored barrels explode upon being damaged.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: You can meet enemies called Incinerators armed with flamethrowers, you can also grab one of your own.
• Flamethrower Backfire: Shooting the backpack of the Incinerators will eventually cause them to explode.
• Grenade Launcher: The player can use a pump-action grenade launcher. It's the horde clearer, and shoots out arcing grenades at a decent distance. A relatively late game weapon, the ridiculous damage it possesses is balanced by its extremely low and rare ammo pool, and that it is just as dangerous to you when fired at close range as to the enemy.
• Guns Akimbo: The Adept enemy dual wields a Sten in one hand and a sawn-off shotgun in the other. Luckily, they don't attack you with both at the same time.
• Hand Cannon: While the standard Mauser is a potent weapon in of itself, there's also the Mare's Leg if you want something that's an intermediate between pistol and rifle. One of the starting weapons for the [[spoiler:playable police officer for "Interlude" is a proper snub-nosed Magnum revolver.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Adepts and Snipers are dangerous because they can survive attacks that would otherwise kill normal cultists in one hit, like a Lever Action Rifle or Shotgun headshot. The only weapon that can reliably kill these enemies in one shot is the upgraded grenade launcher (snipers are unique in that they can't be killed via headshot while they're lying down; any shot that lands will make them stand up, at which point they can be headshot normally... snipers that are already standing up can be headshot without a problem).
  • Incinerators soak up damage like water. They're only kept from being more dangerous by the weakpoint on their back.
• Hold the Line: Chapter One launched with a Survival Mode, where you have to deal with waves of enemies to see how high of a score you can get.
• Homemade Flamethrower: The Incinerator flamethrower used by the eponymous Incinerators is clearly not based on any existing flamethrowers at the time and made from scrap. Being custom-made allows it the Secondary Fire of an explosive fireball.
• The Infiltration:
  • How the cult got the asylum shut down - they had members fake afflictions to get admitted as patients, when enough got in they caused a riot to close it down, then the cult's public sector bought the building after it was condemned and due for demolition.
  • Christopher Holloway ends up having to infiltrate the cult after finding out what happens to initiates that don't agree to join, eventually feeding info to the police in the hopes that they'll take down the cult before he ends up dead.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • One of the late game enemies, the Incinerator, uses a flamethrower of the same name. Which you can also end up using, and by god is this thing disgusting. The Incinerator flamethrower actually averts the usual trope by acting a bit more like an actual flamethrower. That is, it has impressive range, extremely accurate and the damage it inflicts on enemies just melts them. Elite enemies and early in-game mini-bosses just die from a few taps of this monster (And if the direct hits won't kill them, the pool of fire most definitely will) and even the final boss disintegrates within less than a minute from this thing. The only way to balance this monster of a weapon is the fact that it is a relatively late-game weapon, ammunition is somewhat uncommon, and it does not have any upgrades compared to the other guns.
  • You can find Molotov cocktails to use for fire damage, although they're rarer than TNT. If you want to just carpet bomb a room, however, you can combine the two for essentially a cluster firebomb. It is as glorious as it sounds.
  • The single easiest way to kill most of the Imbued horrors that you start finding midway through the game is by burning them, since the alternative is peppering them with your limited supply of ammunition.
• Lawman Baton: The police officer's starting weapon in Interlude is a simple nightstick. It's not as an effective melee weapon as the hatchet but it doesn't break and is overall handy.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: The playable police officer from Interlude can grab one of the shields from the cultists and use it to defend himself from a few hits, but just like with their previous owners. It can break if it takes too much damage.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Any explosive kill will pretty much shower the general area in blood and bits. Some of said bits, like eyeballs, can be picked up and used to kill enemies by being used as throwables. There's even an achievement for killing someone with an eyeball.
• Molotov Cocktail: The Molotov is one of the weapons you can use, and has Damage Over Time effect. This explosive weapon works the same as TNT (light and throw), but in addition to the (lesser) damage from impact, it will also cause pools of fire to appear on the ground, which will also do damage. Molotovs can also be taped to a TNT bundle to increase the damage of the explosion and create more fire pools over a wider area.
• More Dakka: Comes with the Sten Mk V, the only fully automatic weapon in the game, firing ridiculously fast and emptying its 50-round magazine in mere seconds. And you can upgrade it to fire faster. The FG42 can also be upgraded to fire in full auto.
• No-Damage Run: One of the Steam achievements that can be obtained is for completing a single map without taking any damage. And the game is appropriately difficult enough that the achievement name is just "How".
• No Kill like Overkill: Level six is nothing but the cult trying and failing to kill the detective in an old church, with them outright bringing a goddamn tank as the last resort option.
• No Name Given:
  • The detective has no given name, following the tradition set by Doomguy among the "silent One-Man Army" type of main character. The cult simply titles him as "The Outsider".
  • Interlude decides to get very cheeky. With the Outsider's body ending up in the same precinct he used to work at. Despite the Chief of Police doing his absolute damndest to keep his identity a secret and label him as a "John Doe". Most of the officers in the precinct already know who he is, yet never actually give a namedrop.
• Noodle Incident: The reason the Outsider got suspended is never given during Chapter One. A note in the Interlude reveals that he put one of the cultists in the hospital after he tried to abduct a child in broad daylight.
• Notice This: Keys tend to sparkle to be more easily visible to the player.
• Old Shame: Invoked in the form of one of the secrets in Map One and the associated achievement for it, "My deepest shame". It's a voxel tent, with a short explanation that all the tents were originally made of voxels, but it ended up being a huge waste of resources, so they were all converted to meshes to save on polygons.
• One-Handed Shotgun Pump: If you have your Zippo lighter out, firing the lever-action rifle will have you do the Terminator 2 spincock to cycle the next bullet.
• One-Man Army: Even though he got jumped in the intro, the detective ends up taking on armed cultists, the Imbued, a tank, and an Eldritch Abomination. By himself. And WINNING! Mind you, this is just Chapter One.
  • Lampshaded in Interlude: various notes found in the police precinct question what the hell the Outsider was geared for, noting that he had a high-powered handgun, an illegally modified lever-action rifle, an illegally modified double-barrel shotgun, an illegal fully-automatic submachine gun, a military-grade pump-action grenade launcher, a military-grade high-powered paratrooper rifle, a Homemade Flamethrower, and "many explosives".
• Plunger Detonator: A few plunger-activated detonators can be found in the mines and crypt. At one point, the player needs to find a missing part of the detonator.
• Recoil Boost: One of the shotgun's upgrades, Packed Shells, increases the knockback for the alt-fire to allow for a double jump if you shoot it straight down in midair.
• Revolvers Are Just Better: The Magnum in Interlude is a more powerful and accurate Hand Cannon than the Handgun, and it will pop heads on headshots easily. Only flaw it has is a poor ammo economy due to using Magnum Rounds instead of handgun rounds.
• Roar Before Beating: The abomination roars before the fight starts.
• Sawed-Off Shotgun: Your shotgun is a compact double-barrel, naturally. Kicks like a mule, hits like a truck, can fire both barrels with alt-fire, the standard retro shooter fare. The Interlude chapter adds the SASG, a sawed-down Browning Auto-5 (constrasting the previous shotgun is semi-auto and can be fired one-handed). A note on the typewriter reveals it was confiscated from an armed robber who tried to hide it in their coat.
• Screen Shake: Explosions cause screen to shake.
• Secondary Fire: Almost all the weapons have some form of secondary fire, or even a tertiary fire in two cases, either naturally or through weapon upgrades, with the main exception being the Sten Mk V. Hatchets can be thrown, the handgun can be upgraded to have burst fire, the lever-action rifle can rapid-fire, the shotgun can fire both barrels at once, the FG 42/II has a simple zoom feature to use its scope, the grenade launcher can be upgraded to allow for slam firing, and the incinerator can somehow accumulate a fireball to shoot. TNT and Molotov cocktails are the tertiary firing odd ducks: primary has you throw an unlit TNT/Molotov to use as a trap, secondary has you light it and lets you perform a quick full force throw after its lit, and the tertiary fire is either a cluster throw (TNT; the bundle is undone so the sticks can cover a wider area) or a combo throw (Molotov; a Molotov is taped to a TNT bundle, lit on fire, and thrown to cause both the TNT explosion and set the area on fire).
• Short-Range Shotgun: The shotgun the player carries has a high spread. It can be reduced with a weapon upgrade.
• Shout-Out:
  • The shield-bearing cultists bring to mind the shield-bearing Ganados from Resident Evil 4.
  • Killing a Cultist with a thrown bar of soap gets you an achievement called "Don't Tell David".
  • The Sawed-Off Browning Auto-5 is possibly a reference to Clyde Barrow's own. The fact it was taken from an armed robber and put into the evidence locker likely supports this.
• Stock Sound Effects: In the first level, some objects break with stock pottery break sound effect.
• Suspiciously Cracked Wall: Cracked walls indicate the presence of a secret. Such walls can be blown up with explosives.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: At the start of The Chapel, the player runs into plenty of supplies. This is followed by a large ambush, followed by the first proper boss fight. It's even justified: the cultists were planning to clear out the crypts you just came out of, and were stockpiling weapons to do so.
  • The room before The Abomination has a frightening amount of weaponry for you to grab.
• The '60s: While it doesn't outright look it, the game is set in the early 1960s, with 1962 and 1963 being shown in the intro and the game itself likely taking place during the late fall of 1963 and the Interlude taking place 2 months later.
• Tank Goodness:
  • The cult is so connected, they somehow got ahold of a fucking tank. Which they use on the protagonist in the sixth level. Specifically, it's a T-26E4 "Super Pershing", a rare Heavy Tank developed at the end of World War 2 for the U.S. Army.
  • It makes a return in the Interlude chapter as the "Armor Amalgamation", an Imbued aberration and the chapter's sole boss fight.
• Unperson: The Outsider, whom the cult is having registered as a John Doe in the police station's morgue, despite the fact most of the officers recognizing who their "John Doe" is and the police chief going on the warpath to keep his identity from leaking at all. Members of the police force that aren't part of the cult are very pissed from all the secrecy and red tape involved.
• Video Game Dashing: Player can dash for a short distance.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Averted, The Incinerator Flamethrower is the most powerful weapon in the game. Long range, high accuracy, large ammo pool and an insane damage output that melts both horde enemies and elites. It is balanced by being a late game weapon, its fuel tanks being the rarest type of ammo and that it is non-upgradable. The pools of fire it leaves behind will also hurt you, and flamethrower enemies are immune.
• Video Game Sliding: The player can slide for short quick burst of speed.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The tank in the Chapel battle is terrifying and difficult to fight at a distance, and also doesn't take a lot of damage from your non-explosive weapons (and since you just got the grenade launcher, it's probably not upgraded and you don't have a lot of ammunition for it). However, it's still a tank, and has to traverse the turret to point it at you, which turns out to take longer than it does for you to crouch-slide from one side to the other. You can prevent the tank from ever shooting the main gun at you just by running back and forth in front of it. The game will spawn cultists from the Chapel that you'll need to clear out occasionally, and the tank does have a respawning gunner, who will try to shred you with the mounted machine gun. But if he can't see you, he'll throw dynamite instead, which has a high chance of hitting the walls and falling on the tank. An intimidating battle can be made hilariously easy as a result, even on Very Hard and Extreme (though one mistake WILL get you killed).
• We Have Reserves: The cult never runs out of cultists. This gets increasingly apparent as you progress through the game killing literally hundreds of them. Even losing a tank doesn't slow them down.
  • Similarly, in Interlude, the attack on the police station results in many dead cultists and hidden police cultists, as well as an Imbued made from the remains of the tank, but the final words spoken make it clear that whoever leads the cult doesn't care even a bit about the losses. Considering they've apparently taken over most of the city, it makes more sense.
• Where It All Began: The game starts with the Detective arriving at the Asylum, only to get jumped by the Cultists and dragged very far away. You finally get back to the Asylum and the eldritch caves beneath it halfway through level 7.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: One of the cult members completes the ritual just before the protagonist arrives.

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"It is done."