Cult of the Yellow King layers cosmic horror atmosphere onto an incremental game built around prestige mechanics and cult-building progression. Each run pursues different objectives while spreading the Yellow King's influence through a blend of clicking and automation, supported by genuinely unsettling Lovecraftian writing and oppressive sound design. Best suited for players drawn to weird fiction and idle games willing to prioritize tone over traditional incremental depth.
About this game
A cosmic horror idle game where you build the Yellow King’s cult, spread his living mold, and click yourself hollow. Memory by memory. Scream by silent scream, as the sky blooms with eyes watching your beautiful undoing.
Players, last 71 days
Peak 227 · Low 0
Daily peak concurrent players, sampled once a night from Steam.
What players are saying
▼ Not recommended4 hrs
An incremental game that doesn't really do incrementing, a clicker that doesn't really do clicking, and a strategy game that doesn't have any strategy to it, a casual game that's inaccessible. This game doesn't really know what it is.
Basically this game has prestige loops with different objectives each time, kind of like challenge modes in most other idle/incremental games but baked into the core prestige mechanic. The first 5% of your time in each prestige will be buying the exact same upgrades as last time to boost your economy as far as you can before increasing costs make it unviable to increase that way. Then you have the upgrades that just gate content, so you grab those. Now you have three currencies increasing. The first currency can technically increase itself and the third currency, but the self-boost increases in cost so rapidly it's only to get you bootstrapped. The second currency has a small handful of upgrades bought with the first currency that give it a flat X/second income that cannot be increased. That second currency gates the upgrades that give you generators for the first currency, of which there's three and cannot be increased.
This means that both the first and second currencies have a cap of how fast you can increase them per second, that you reach within twenty minutes of a run. After that the second currency is useless and there is nothing to spend it on. The first currency can still be spent on increasing production of the third currency, indefinitely at increasing cost, however there's only a limited number of upgrades you can buy with the third currency, so there's no point in increasing its income.
This basically means that you effectively run out of things to do within twenty minutes of a run and then just sit there waiting for the objectives to finally grind out, while you're fully capped on production and have nothing to do.
There's basically one optimal path to get the unlocks, or who even cares if it's optimal or not, you're barely optimising 2-3 minutes of how long it takes you to reach the exact same cap either way you do it.
Many of the upgrades are nonsensical and worthless. A 30% cost reduction in cultists is meaningless when the the cost of cultists goes up by 30% each time, that just means you can afford ONE extra cultist. Given you will only be able to afford 20 or so, and be getting the other 100+ from the "1 free cultist every 15 seconds" upgrade, being able to afford 21 cultists of the ones you bought is completely irrelevant. It saves you 15 seconds of time for a new one to automatically generate... is that REALLY worth a limited prestige point? Actually it kind of is, because most of the other prestige upgrades are even less useful: Do you really need 15% extra production of a currency when you have nothing to buy with it?
I wanted to like this game, the lore seems kinda fun, if sparse and vague in a way that makes you feel there's nothing behind it, rather than vague in the way that makes you feel there's mysteries to discover.
I wanted to, but I don't. There's no actual game here to like, just a series of barely obsfucated time gates with almost no player agency.
It is the most EVIL implementation of idle/clicker theory and strategy.
The people who came before, know nothing of what they speak. Particularly the negative reviewers.
The game was beyond their puny mortal minds. They had not the VISION to understand the subtleties of play, nor the imagination to tear away the veil of sanity that protected their infantile intellects!
Children require 'tutorials'. TRUE BELIEVERS, grasp the mechanics quickly - and enjoy the narrative, atmosphere and cosmic horrors that spill forth from their shiny reality windows!
TIME IS INDEED A FLAT CIRCLE!
And the experience illustrates it to you as you 'grind'- but, you're only 'grinding' if you haven't truly grasped the cosmic knowledge that is constantly fed into your brain tubes and eye holes!
Feast upon the SPORES, revel in the maddening COSMIC KNOWLEDGE, and sip the wine of INSIGHTs that constantly flow over and through you as you play this! BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY- PRAY! Learn how to pray, prostrated before the mighty King! More fervently than any Onanistic ritual you may have self-performed ever in your life. SERIOUSLY & FEVERISHLY PRAY - and You Shall Be Rewarded!
This is truly a masterpiece in dopamine addiction, 'just one more' mechanics- and tasty fungoid bounties!
Would pay double the price I got it for ($2.99)!
I look forward to many more journeys amongst the stars, and be made whole and worthy of- THE CULT OF THE YELLOW KING!
I think it's a missed opportunity to not have the final prestige track turn the game from cosmic horror into a dating sim set during the siege of the paris commune
Heyy Cultists! 💛 A new update is here! This one fixes a big bug with Songs of Commitment, along with a few smaller fixes and clearer tooltips.Songs of Commitment: Fixed a major bug that prevented you from buying Scripts after choosing this path. If you chose Songs of Commitment and still can’t buy Scripts, please send me your save file so we can help you get it sorted! (bilge@metaphor-games.com)Relic upgrades: Generator-related relic upgrades now explain why they’re locked when you’ve chosen Songs of Commitment.Stasis Ritual: Trying to buy an upgrade without enough Yellow Mold now shows an insufficient-currency message.Temple Flares: Flares now stay visible for 15 seconds. Each flare also has a tooltip explaining the Insight reward and the relic’s temporary click-power bonus.Scripts: The purchase row now explains what you need to unlock them when they’re unavailable.Sorry to everyone affected by the Scripts bug, and thank you so much for reporting these issues and being patient with us!
Hey everyone 💛The balance update is live, along with some QoL improvements and bug fixes.We think we made a mistake while trying to make a longer idle game. We love leaving idlers running, coming back to buy a few upgrades, and letting them run some more. That’s how we like to play. But while making our own, we ended up adding too many bottlenecks and stretching things out more than we should have. We see that now.With this update, you’ll get a shorter, more compact Cult of the Yellow King experience, with less waiting between upgrades. Quality of LifeAdded bulk buying for Whispers, Horrors, Cultists, Librarians, and Writers. You can now buy them using x10, x20, x50, and x100 buttons.Added an auto-repeat toggle for the Biomass Furnace. When enabled, it automatically starts another sacrifice cycle using the last selected fuel.BalanceReduced Whisper, Cultist, and Horror costs and lowered Shrine/Altar multipliers.Reduced the Biomass Furnace cycle time from 900 to 120 seconds and increased the Biomass reward per cycle from 1 to 4.Rebalanced Prestige story goals, Crossing costs, and Campaign unlock requirements.VisualsFixed some UI panels that weren’t displaying correctly.Bug FixesFixed Rites of the Yellow Architect preventing four relics from working.Fixed some story messages appearing twice. Tonight was rough. Some of the reviews were hard to read, and we felt pretty down. We care a lot about this game. And we really wanted you to enjoy it.We’re reading every review and discussion, and we’ll keep working on the game. If you didn’t enjoy the version you played, we hope you’ll give this update another chance. We’d really love the chance to win you over.Thank you to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts, report a bug, or send us a kind message. It means a lot
Hey everyone 💛 Just wanted to let you know that we’re working on a balance update and some qol improvements. We’re hoping to push it in a few hours. We’re reading every single review (more than once), and we want to thank every one of you who left one. Reviews are so important for small indie devs like us. Ngl some of the negative reviews really hurt. We put so much of ourselves into this game, so it’s hard to read harsh words about it. But that doesn’t mean the criticism isn’t fair. A lot of you made valid points. Art, music, and storytelling are where we feel most at home. We still have a lot to learn about game design and incremental balancing. The reviews showed us this too, but please know that we’re doing the best we can. If you left a negative review, I hope you see this and consider giving the game another chance once the update is out. We’d love for you to enjoy the thing we’ve put so much into.Thank you to everyone who shared feedback, reported bugs, or left a review. - Bilge, Kerem and Anıl
Posts come from Steam's official announcements feed.