Kult

Kult is a psychological horror role-playing game heavily based on gnosticism and kabalah, as well as Jung psychology. Humans are trapped in an Illusion by the Demiurge, and their objective is to break free from it by reaching illumination.

The personality aspect on player characters is deeply developed, and depends on a few important parameters. The main characteristic is called "mental balance". If your mental balance is close to 0, you are considered a very "normal person", sheep who follow standard moral considerations and socially accepted behaviour.

Positive mental balance leads you towards illumination through self-control. As your mental balance goes upwards, you lose desires, violence, etc. The goal in the positive MB path is Nirvana, in which you get trapped before real illumination.

Negative mental balance leads you to illumination through self-destruction. You become more and more controlled by your insticts and desires, until you absolutely lose control. The goal in negative MB is Chaos, in which you are also trapped before real illumination.

Each of the two paths is incomplete: as your mental balance goes to extremes, a shadow (much jungian-like, but more physical) appears and opposes your actions. Real illumination requires you to stop confronting your shadow and joining it, as neither self-masturbatory saintness neither self-destructive misery are enough, but the two at the time.

In Kult, you need to escape from the Illusion. Either you are standard sheep, either a stupid self-proclaimed saint, either a misery-maker. There's no real answer, and even questions are left opened after illumination has been reached.

Kult has many interesting twists about the personal-development and illumination themes, challenging many of the usually accepted ideas. So, you thought illumination was going to make you that ideal awakened being; wrong. There's no "good", no idealized human being. Humans are the problem, humans and their endless quest for the infinite are the evil in the universe which creates all the pain and misery in the world.

The Demiurge is just another human being, who created us from a higher world (much in a kabbalistic sense) and trapped us in this lower world. Through his sephiroth he is fighting his own shadow, the "devil" and his dark angels. He must unite with him to reach an upper world in the so-human quest for the infinite, and he has probably become aware that in order to reach this higher world he had to create things like mercyless Gaia (Nature, from a different point of view), the Illusion, and other human beings. The Demiurge feels so guilty from all the misery it has created in our world he even trapped himself in the illusion,... so, if you look at this world and what humans have done with it, just think about millions of human souls in a god-level world trying to awaken even further.

Kult is a deep analysis on the issues of mystics and awakening, and the hidden presupositions self-masturbating traditions hold on human spiritual development. As well, it is an extremely powerful tool, which can be used to confront players with extreme situations through psychological terror in order to "mindfuck" their brains and make them ask themselves a lot of questions.