Honey, I Joined a Cult Review

Honey, I Joined a Cult is such an enjoyable tycoon/simulation game with a unique theme! It has achievements for 3 different kind of endings but if you make a save before making that choice you can easily do all 3. Takes around 30h to 100%.

Approximate amount of time to 100%: 30h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 2/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1 if you save before choosing a “theme” and then play through the ending 3 times
Is there a good guide available: No, but you don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Yes, but using the 4 save slots can help out with this. Save before you choose a theme
Grinding Achievements: Yes, the 100k influence is quite a grind
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can play on the easiest difficulty
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Honey, I Joined a Cult is an awesome tycoon kinda game in which you run a cult and try to keep your inner circle believing in what you say, but also get more followers to get more money and influence. And if that isn’t enough, you try to keep the heat as low as possible otherwise people will start to demonstrate before your building and that will not do any good for the mood of the people in your inner circle.

I love this kind of unique theme. I enjoy building theme parks/ hospitals and things like that, but those more unusual ones just feel refreshing. It is nice to explore this kind of themes and what to do different. Here it made sense to send your people on missions to reduce the heat or get more pr so higher quality people want to join your cult. And having to hold ceremonies every 24h to keep your people believe in you made sense as well.

It took me a bit to get used to the game, not everything was clear at once. The game does a good job of trying to explain everything but quite a lot is happening, so I didn’t memorize everything from the tutorial at the beginning. I would recommend doing the tutorial at the beginning, as that also is an easy way to get the achievement for holding a 5-star Sermon. What I also liked was that the game told me how to get influence when it recognized that I struggled with that a bit.

A few things I would love to see in the game are a few more Quality of Life features. For example, you have to order ingredients for your cook to make food. I would love to see a button to just order everything to max capacity at the top o the screen, or the highest quality food at the top, now those are on the bottom, which means you have to scroll down every time you have to order food. Kinda the same thing with the followers, later on, you get options to see the quality of the followers, but those where you can see the information from in the followers menu are at the bottom, so again you have to scroll down. A way to be able to send away multiple people from your inner circle (aka Watchers) or followers without having to open their menu and send them away and then open the main menu again for the next one would also be a welcome addition. These are all small things but would make the game a lot more friendly in my opinion.

The achievements are mostly what you expect in a management/tycoon kind of game like this. Get an X amount of all the different resources. Get good quality people, place decor items, and more things like that. There is an achievement for losing the game, this is easily done by turning off the vending food and don’t make your Watchers any food. There are achievements for the ending with each theme and there are 3 themes in total. For those achievements I would highly recommend waiting with selecting a theme very late in the game so you have unlocked all the other stuff and have a nice cult, then make a save which you only use to restart and choose the other themes when done with one theme. The game only has a few save slots, so be very careful to not save over that one save slot you used for this.

This review for Honey, I Joined a Cult was written on 23 November 2022, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 31 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.