Pray Your God!

"Pray that your god makes me choose the number you have chosen."

The Inquisitor says it every time. He is not being cruel. He is being thorough.

FOUND A CULT. BRING SPARES.

Name your cult. Name your followers. Choose two sacred colours, and decide how large a flock to bring along. Ten, if you like a brisk service. Sixty-nine, for an exact coin flip. A million, if you intend to be remembered.

Then you pray. You choose a number, one of a hundred; the Inquisitor chooses one too, after you, always after you, with a die that does not cheat. Miss, and a follower is quietly removed from the register, with a footnote. Miss again, and he reaches for a fresh form.

HIT, AND HEAVEN DOES THE REST

Guess right and your god finally answers, by removing the Inquisitor from the premises. Lightning from a clear sky, to begin with. There are 16 ways for this to happen, each with its own animation, its own obituary and its own achievement, and you do not get to choose which one you get. Not usually.

THE HALL OF FAME REMEMBERS

Every cult you found gets an entry, and every cult that doesn't work out gets a slightly longer one. Six plaques for six kinds of misfortune: the swiftest miracle, the longest calvary, the largest flock ever misplaced, the most numbers missed by exactly one. The crypt files your former cults in their own sacred colours. It is the tidiest cemetery in the business.

Your god keeps no records. The Inquisitor does.

THE DIE IS HONEST. THAT IS THE JOKE.

No rigged odds, no hidden mercy, no difficulty quietly helping you along. The number is drawn after you commit, and reloading a save will not let you try your luck twice. Everything that happens to you is exactly as likely as it looks, which is the funniest and least comforting fact in this game.

ALSO INCLUDED

• 36 achievements, most of them awarded for things that went badly

• A new cult every two to four minutes, and about a hundred prayers filed before one is granted

• A chiptune organ that takes all of this far too seriously

• Ten save slots, autosaved, and no way to un-pray a prayer

• An Inquisitor with over fifty ways of telling you no

HOW MANY PRAYERS?

A prayer takes seconds. A miracle takes about a hundred prayers. I keep sixteen obituaries on file, all of them mine, and which one you get is drawn, never chosen. I am in no hurry to show you the rest. Some cults I close before your coffee goes cold. Others outlive their founder's patience. There is no last page to reach. There are sixteen, and they arrive when they see fit.

Pray Your God! A game of faith, numbers and mild irreverence.