Bucephalus Studios has released a free alpha demo for CultGame, their upcoming cult management RPG 4X. It’s available for Windows and Linux and launched on the 27th October 2026. The demo allows you to build a cult in a procedurally generated dark fantasy world.
Your cult’s beliefs do more than just define it; they’re in effect perks and upgrades. The whole game is about converting people, expanding your religion into the government, and taking your followers into missions yourself. There’s a whole range of forbidden rituals which can be used to gain power (summoning demons, sacrificing cultists etc). All of this is presented in text and ASCII art, and the game runs in a terminal window.
The Alpha is a 36-turn campaign (equivalent to 3 years in the game world), and the dev says that a standard playtest took between 45 minutes and 2 hours to complete. You can restart as many times as you like, and the demo contains the full world generation system with seed sharing.
There are 10 levels of belief upgrades to go through, along with AI-controlled religions, cave crusades, and dating. Dating in particular suggests something about the game’s sense of humor in that you can lead a cult and still have time for other things in your life.
Those ambitions can get rather out there. The full game lists potential objectives ranging from world domination to hurling yourself into the sun. Faith goes into faith-based upgrades; gold can be spent on weapons, drugs, and property. Bucephalus names Dwarf Fortress, Warsim, Liberal Crime Squad, Dominions, and Stellaris as its influences, and so CultGame sits comfortably in the pantheon of the strategy/simulation games which are all about player freedom.
CultGame is run by Jeff Stevens (founder of the Columbus, OH studio), with ASCII art by littlebitspace and music by Evan Stevens. The whole point of the thing is the presentation, taking the cult’s activities and fantasy world and putting them into a format that’s essentially characters on a screen.
The demo is still very much an alpha and Bucephalus’ focus for the time being is on fixes rather than content additions. Feedback will be used to inform the next beta demo, which will in turn be followed by a more complete release demo at a future Steam Next Fest. The full game is slated to launch shortly after that.
CultGame’s full release date is still to be announced. The free alpha is available via Steam and itch.io and you can wishlist the full game on Steam.
