Right from the front-end experience, Cultic presents itself as the quintessential 90s FPS with little threatening to get between you and the action. Aside from a gracious helping of settings to tweak, including a welcome spread of accessibility-minded options, you’re only a short few seconds from being in control of a grizzled detective, known simply as the Outsider, and mowing down cultists and monsters. Even the level names are straight out of the boomer shooters playbook with refreshingly blunt titles like The Asylum, The Farm, The Mines. Beautiful simplicity.
Keeping with that ethos, Cultic plays – at least as a first impression – like the vast majority of DOOM Engine/Build Engine games from ancient history. Despite the 3D environments, your weapons and the enemies you’ll use them to murder are 2D sprites animated and angled within your first-person view to appear dimensional. Shooting is fast and loose with no ability to aim down sights outside of scoped weapons, generous auto-aim and hit boxes ensuring your focus is kept on movement and the use of space rather than pixel precision.
Starting things off simply enough with an axe that you can opt to either swing with wild abandon or chuck directly at a bad guy’s head, CULTIC’s weapon selection is magnificent. Made up of 60s era-appropriate firearms, you’ll eventually amass everything from handguns to rifles, shotguns, grenade launchers and more, each packing an alt fire and a series of potential upgrades. Every one of them has a distinct feel that really does seem like it was agonised over, researched and refined to be as interesting as it is satisfying to explode domes with, and it’s certainly paid off. I don’t think I’ve been as jazzed about a gun in an FPS as I have about the Lever-Action Rifle.
The level designs support all of this with a frankly astonishing amount of variety, deftly moving from corridor mazes filled with zombie-like creatures to open air camps where snipers stalk force you to cover, a Christmas-themed carnival full of legitimate horrors or an ornate church where you show down with an entire fucking tank. Cultic does incredibly well to keep you on your toes, and vary the pace with quieter, darker and more tense moments before rewarding your patience with skull-popping rollercoasters.
Secret hunting, ever the pastime of the boomer shooters enjoyer, is especially good here. The majority of item-packing hidden spaces can be found through careful observation of the map, noting where a seemingly-impassable door or unreachable trinket exists within the level and then canvassing the geometry around it to find an in. Some of the most helpful secrets, like a single maximum health upgrade in each level, are far trickier but that much more rewarding for it.
But for everything it does well, Cultic’s clear success is in the impeccable vibes it cult…ivates (sorry). This thing is precisely as dark and unnerving as a game about a supernatural, killer cult in small American town should be, even through the lo-fi audiovisual treatment. Or because of it, perhaps. It’s a game that feels disturbingly of the time that it emulates, like a piece of banned media unearthed from a landfill and remastered for a new audience of sickos.
The game’s pastiche of visual flourishes, ripped straight from the technology and idiosyncrasies of the 90s, is simply stunning to look at. That’s thanks for the most part to strong art direction backing up the tech implementation, rather than leaning hard on “it’s retro” as an aesthetic. It’s a dark, grimy, disgusting world to exist in and the harshness of the low-res textures and blocky geometry on works to sell that more. Same goes for the crunchy audio and a soundtrack that has the same cinematic aspirations as the era that inspires it, and knows when to kick things up a notch to suit the on-screen action.
Now, the motivator for publishing a review of Cultic in July of 2026 is that the game has freshly made its way over to console platforms, and so this, my first tussle with the game, has come by way of the PS5 version. New players are lucky here, dropping into an already-complete version of the game that originally released in two distinct parts with a three-year gap.
Curiously though, I ran into quite a few frustrating bugs in my time with the game on PS5, the majority of which were issues where dying after activating a switch or door would render it unusable when I loaded back in – forcing a full restart of the level. These aren’t from quick or manual saves either, but the game’s scripted checkpoints, making it all the more confusing and frustrating.
Through all of this, Cultic takes a sharp swing at something that looks and plays classical, but is propped up but a lot of modern sensibilities and a strong aesthetic to make it a compelling work. Those with a thirst for grimy, violent, occult media, those who relish an old-school challenge and design ethos – or the lucky few who sit right in the middle of that venn diagram – will find a lot to love here.
Reviewed on PS5 Pro | Review copy supplied by publisher
Great
- Dripping with retro-tinged thriller atmosphere
- A selection of incredibly satisfying weapons
- Nails the 90s pseudo-3D look in a mode modern format
- Banger soundtrack and delightfully crunchy audio design
Not great
- Some annoying checkpoint bugs that slow progress
Born into the world of video games through SEGA, and in particular Sonic the Hedgehog, Kieron’s gaming tastes now consist of the latest, shiny AAA thing, an indie darling or two, and an embarrassing number of hours of Balatro.