1. Actually good music
2. Nice art.
3. You will have to take time to understand the game, overall it is not that difficult - and it has some Cultist Simulator vibes of "learn while you play", but, honestly, in certain cases hints would be extremely helpful. It took me a lot of googling to find out what exactly "pure essence" is, for example. Nearly every info you need is in the tooltips, but you do not always know which images on the screen actually give you tooltips.
4. The gameplay itself is actually rather good and engaging. The game doesn't take too long to complete - but as it is a mixture of Mafia and a card game it seems like it can be fun in multiplayer too.

I'm a Kickstarter backer of this game, but sadly as much as I love the premise of it- I can't recommend it. The creators have chosen to make the rules of the game a mystery, instead of focusing on actual gameplay mysteries that you could solve during the game. To give you an idea of how playing this game looks, here's how my attempt at playing the "tutorial" mode went:

Choose a character and familiar, them drag an item to complete a ritual and start the actual game - so far so good, could use an explanation of what the abilities actually do and what does each familiar do, but perhaps that will come later - I still hoped.

Go to locations, grab some ingredients, loose some stats in the process. After a few tries I realised how to see which location can have something useful, and even deduce how alchemy works. All this guesswork could have been avoided by a simple tutotial message.

Between going to locations have a few "events" with other characters, meeting 2 of them multiple times and 1 of them once.

Complete a ritual of Nyarlathotep, get access to a new location.

Complete another ritual, get "The Sleeper of R'lyeh Invocation of Cthulhu" achievment, Shub-Niggurath appears - what does Shub-Niggurath have to do with getting the Cthulhu achievment? I also now get the ability to sacrifice captured enemies - but how do I actually fight anyone?

Then the end of the game comes, I have to choose keepers and openers - but seeing as I haven't met half of them even once I have no way of determining who is who. So I mark the ones I have met, make a guess on the other 2 (since one of them had to be an opener and the other a keeper) - turns out I guessed wrong, game over.

So I had a 50% chance on winning that I could do nothing to influence. And I still have no idea what most of the things mentioned in the game do - what's the point of familiars, if they never do anything? What's the point of my vampirism abiity, if I can never use it and all it does is randomly cause me to lose sanity because of "bloodlust"? What are minions and sacrificing, since there was no way of getting any?

So to sum up on how playing the game is like: you click on locations, click on items to gather them, randomly lose some stats, them make a guess and see game over. Oh I guess you could also drag your items to other characters to use it on them - but there's very little point in doing that if you don't know which faction they are a part of.

I got pulled in by the "Night in the Lonesome October" vibe, but unfortunately it turns out reading the book again would be a much better idea than buying this game.

I love the idea. I like the aesthetics, graphics, music and SFX create nice mood. Unfortunately there is no gameplay. Most of time player must make blind decisions. Many elements in the game don't seem meaningful at all, just creating impression of complexity. Good game is supposed to present a set of interesting and meaningful decisions to the player. I hardly found any in this game so far.

I played two runs and failed two times. The game is deeper than I expected. What's bad is that I'm alone and can only play with bots.

Bots are strong. Is this because they don't have sanity?

The Idea is fun, a lot of the game is fun. But there are so many game breaking bugs. This can be frustrating, when you play for multiple hours just to be stuck in a screen in Round 28.

I have summoned a Crawling Chaos Nyarlathotep what else would you wish for!

This is a nice little puzzle-like game, and it's more complex than meets the eye at first time. I enjoyed it more and more, when exploring how things worked out.

I found the hunt for manage the achievements fun, and I have collected 21 of 23. Coming Halloween I will reach 22, but to get the last we all have to wait until 2039! (Playing during Halloween, beneath full moon)

But ... after 98 hours playing the "Halloween" campaign I have reached my goals, more or less. Will I play the game again? There is a second campaign "Freezing Moon". I didn't see anything that interested me there. The only effect I could see was that you take injuries by the freezing cold. I will check it out again ... but I don't see it as that fun.

Do I recommend the game? Yes I do. It absolutely have a place in your game collection. You play it now and then 1-2 hours and come back when you have time. It's so quick that it doesn't matter if you fail. Just give it another try.

Good music, nice atmosphere, clever gameplay. The final ritual could use a quick introduction as to how it works, though everything is explained in the manual.

Amazing occult ritual game where you and your hidden teammates are trying to work together and carry out more rituals than the opposing party. I find the game slightly to punishing sometimes when you gather the ingriedients for the rituals. Its only annoying that the AI f-ing cheats. They constantly fight and gather stuff (where you lose health or sanity) and still have tons of health when i encountered them. Makes no sense.

Tentative thumbs up. If you like the Cthulhu theme and board games then you will probably like this. The main problem is that it's just a very confusing game. Even after reading the entire tutorial and playing the game a few times I still have a few unanswered questions.