In Weather Factory's 2018 game, Cultist Simulator, the card play is taught in a way that reinforces thematic intimacy not typically seen in tutorial practices across video games. If we are to assume a traditional slope for how games meter out mechanics and their respective use cases, we would assume a linearly progressive trend correlating mechanical complexity with in-game progression; the player is first taught how to jump or move a puzzle tile and, after more time spent in game, proceeds to executing complex combo strings or corroborating dozens of puzzle elements. In Cultist Simulator however, the player progresses down a tutorial path that does not assert an expansion of its mechanics, although further complexity does incur as the game progresses, but a larger and grander sense of what the game’s systems and world are not allowing the player to intercede with. At the game’s outset, the player is given a small arrangement of cards which indicate commonly seen game resources: health, money, equipment, etc. However, unlike in games like Link to the Past or Dark Souls, the player is not given any indication of the use case for their resources: no press A to jump, no select to open crafting. This feigned obfuscation of Cultist Simulator asserts that the game world is not one manufactured for traversal by a player but is one of error and expansion, a transgression of purpose which denotes the mood and theme of a cultist’s desire to go beyond the knowability taken for granted by the in world fiction and outer world understanding of how game tutorials traditionally function.