Developer: Dillo Interactive
Publisher: Dillo Interactive
Platform: PC, Android, iOS
Tested on: PC
My Little Blood Cult – Preview
When we first heard My Little Blood Cult’s title, we had quite a few ideas of what the game could be like, but we’d never have guessed that we’d be dealing with a fishing simulator. The game recently debuted in Steam Early Access on PC, for an appropriate price of $6.66, with “full” versions available on iOS and Android, as free-to-play titles. We’re taking a look at what My Little Blood Cult has to offer on PC so far. Is this a cult you should join as early as possible or is it better not to take the bait?
When it comes to fishing simulators, there are plenty of fish in the sea (pun intended), so you might be wondering how My Little Blood Cult is trying to hook players (pun intended again). Well, you’re fishing for hellish demons instead of normal aquatic fauna here, so the least we can say is that My Little Blood Cult deserves points for originality. The same can be said for the game’s presentation, with a striking art style and an unsettling atmospheric soundscape. Unfortunately, the presentation suffers from the UI clearly being intended for a mobile title first and foremost. The gameplay is entirely situated in a vertical strip in the center of the screen, because that would be the visible area on the screen of a phone. This isn’t the only hallmark of a mobile game that My Little Blood Cult incorporates. We’ll get to those, but first, let’s take a look at what the gameplay is like.
The aim of My Little Blood Cult is to complete a collection of demons listed across various grimoires, with each grimoire acting as a separate level. You’ll need blood vials as bait, and in order to snag rarer hellspawns, you’ll need to harvest special bait elements from lower-tier catches. The execution is extremely simple: you attach a blood vial to your fishing line and then drop it down into the depths associated with your chosen grimoire. Once a demon takes the bait, a minigame starts where the demon’s power is represented as a red dot on a gauge, and you need to tap a button to match the position of the red dot. Keep up with the dot while a meter fills up, and you’ll successfully be able to reel in the demon. It will then be added to your grimoire and any useful bait parts will be added to your inventory. The PC version of the game is played entirely with your mouse, and the single button tap input for fishing is yet another aspect that feels more at home on the touch screen of your phone.
The core gameplay loop then follows a very familiar pattern, which sees you try to hook in exponentially rarer and more powerful demons as you obtain more bait. In-game currency can be spent to upgrade your fishing gear, and better gear gives you more leeway and makes it easier to reel in some of the more powerful demons. There is an in-game shop where you can buy demon parts, in case you don’t feel like grinding the same basic demons over and over again to get the right bait for that one demon you’re missing to complete a grimoire. Of course, you’ll also need blood vials, but fortunately, the human resources department -get it?- has a steady stream of willing cultists that can be sacrificed to craft more of these vials.
Strip away the whole demon cult skin and beneath it is your bog standard thirteen-in-a-dozen basic mobile fishing game. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of gameplay. In fact, it’s quite repetitive and dull. You’d assume that this means that, as a whole, My Little Blood Cult is an inoffensive release, but there are plenty of reasons to outright skip the game that don’t even take the unoriginal gameplay into account. The biggest issue we had with My Little Blood Cult is that it feels very much like a predatory game, built around microtransactions. You can only carry a limited number of blood vials and crafting more either involves waiting for real-world timers to run out or spending gold. We didn’t run out of in-game gold during our time with the game, but then again, on Steam, My Little Blood Cult costs actual money while those Android and iOS versions are freemium releases. We should note that PC players start out with 50.000 gold and we got another 20.000 gold as a thank you for starting the game, though it’s unclear whether this is because we started the game in Early Access or if this was a perk of playing the game with a review code. Either way, this hefty sum of gold made the early game a breeze, since we could get most upgrades from the get-go, defeating much of My Little Blood Cult’s purpose.
This is still an Early Access release, and more and more content is being added, but the flaws that we see in My Little Blood Cult are ingrained in the game’s fundamental structure, and the potential changes we can reasonably see implemented, like an overhauled in-game economy, aren’t going to fix this. The gameplay is simply too shallow for a PC game, and we can imagine that once the game is “finished”, any additional content will focus on limited-time seasonal events to capitalize on FOMO as well as further squeezing money from the pockets of the game’s mobile audience. That is provided that My Little Blood Cult finds a fanbase gullible enough to buy into the game, that is. There is of course a beautiful irony that a game that is about sacrificing willing cultists is hoping to drain their audience as well.
We’re being cynical about the PC version, because My Little Blood Cult’s predatory tactics are par for the course for most mobile games these days. If this had been a mobile-exclusive title, we wouldn’t have had so many issues with it, but the PC version of the game is such a blatant afterthought that we can’t help but feel annoyed by it. With its mobile UI, content being locked behind timers and microtransactions, and extremely shallow gameplay, this game simply doesn’t belong on PC, and it’s clear that the developers are simply seeing this version as a quick and easy cash grab.
Conclusion
While My Little Blood Cult’s hellish setting and audiovisual presentation are original, there is very little positive that can be said about the gameplay. The core mechanics are shallow and basic, and the game follows the predatory mobile game playbook to a tee. Some of the freemium mechanics remain in the PC version, although the game tries to counterbalance this by gifting PC players a significant amount of in-game currency. Nothing of value is added by this port, and even though this is still an Early Access release, we can’t see the full version changing enough to turn My Little Blood Cult around.
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