I’ve been playing my Sims 4 character Tess Macchiato lately, who happens to be a barista-turned-internet-celebrity. She leads a very interesting life, though one that’s mostly without devious schemes, backstabbing, and secret encounters with discreet lovers.
But I decided to check in on Mayday Moonflutter, whose life is actually full of the things I mentioned in the previous sentence. I didn’t expect anything too crazy to happen (I really just wanted to work on some aspirations), but once again, I underestimated the deviousness of Mayday Moonflutter.
I picked up The Sims 4: Get Together when it was on sale, and it adds some new social options that Mayday was just itching to get her manipulative little hands on. The main feature here is that you can start your own club. That sounds innocent enough on the surface, but given how easily Sims are manipulated, and how good Mayday is at manipulating them, things can go from club to cult very, very quickly.
But really, I was into the whole cult thing from the moment Mayday suggested it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. And, after playing around with the club feature quite a bit, it seems like The Sims 4: Get Together is pretty much designed from the ground up to be a starting-a-cult simulator.
So we created a club and called it Ancient Order of Algalot. Here’s a description:
The almighty Algalot shall arise from her slumber and bring forth a new order of blood and mischief.
It’s invite-only, and in order to get in you’ll need at least +2 Charisma (to help with recruiting) and +2 Mischief (to help with the mischief). The activities are drinking plasma, stealing things, hanging out by fires, woohoo-ing everyone, and playing the pipe organ. Banned activities include bowling, swimming, and using alien powers (alien powers, you see, do not originate from Algalot — don’t ask me to explain the other two…)
We decided to hang out in parks, because that seems like the best place to really freak people out.
Oh, and of course we needed some official outfits. These oughta do the trick:
Once the Ancient Order of Algalot was set up, we had to start recruiting. Some star power would be really, really valuable here, so our first recruitment victim was Tess Macchiato. She just happened to show up at the door just as we were getting the club put together (and she also lives next door to a park), so the will of Algalot is already proving to be a powerful force in our little world.
We had our first meeting — Tess, Mayday, and our newest recruit — but I realized that none of our activities are really available in the park. So I had to get creative. I ended up finding some ancient ruins (in Windenburg, which comes with the Get Together expansion pack) that would make a much better meeting spot. So I built a brick shelter with a bedroom (for the woohoo) and a bathroom (for the peepee), then added a bonfire pit and a pipe organ. I also removed the drinking plasma and stealing activities, replacing them with grilling and kissing. Then, I added a picnic table and a grill to our new meeting grounds.
And I have to say, we absolutely nailed it this time. Our first meeting in the ancient ruins was a huge, huge success. We grilled, we danced around the fire, and several members hooked up in the bushes (despite the fact that there was an empty bedroom just meters away).
There were some hurt feelings because of all the woohoo, but if you’ve willingly joined a cult — ahem, a club — where woohoo and kissing are regular activities, you have to keep your jealousy in check.
But after a successful meeting, we decided we needed to keep expanding the group. Mayday would have to hit the clubs to locate some new recruits. Thankfully, she’s really good at hitting the clubs. The Anceint Order of Algalot continued to grow (but not for too long — the maximum club size starts at six but can be increased to eight if you buy the right perks).
At this point, I made a huge mistake. I somehow messed up the meeting location feature, which resulted in the Ancient Order of Algalot meeting at Mayday’s home instead of the ruins.
There’s a whole backstory to this involving Mayday’s relationship with her roommate, but I wrote about all that elsewhere — check out that post if you want all the details. What you need to know for this particular incident is that Mayday and her roommate Evangeline Yup are in sort of an on-again/off-again relationship, and that Mayday has been getting it on with basically every Sim she meets while Evangeline is occupied with other things. Mayday’s been really, really good at keeping Evangeline in the dark about all this.
But when the meeting started, and Evangeline was still asleep, Mayday and Tess (the founding members of the Ancient Order of Algalot) decided to woohoo before Evangeline woke up — that counts for both woohoo and mischief, right? The thing is, instead of going into Mayday’s room, they went into Evangeline’s, woke her up, and got busy right there as Evangeline was coming out of her slumber-induced weariness. Bonus points for mischief, I guess?
That’s when I realized that if I wanted to preserve the basic tenets of Algalot (those being mischief, blood, and woohoo — but, let’s be honest, mostly woohoo), I would need some perks. In an ideal world, every member would have the Player trait, which means they can do whatever they want without causing jealousy for their significant others. But this skill takes a lot of dedication to earn, so it can be kind of time-consuming. For starters, I figured that, at the very least, Mayday would need it. And really, if you know anything at all about Mayday, you can probably agree that she should have been working toward the Player trait a long, long time ago.
So that’s when I strapped in for a long grind. Getting the Player trait requires a whole lot of effort, in which you must seek out potential romantic partners in the world, then sweet talk them into dating you. When you acquire too many of these partners, every trip the the club ends up being a potential disaster, where two of your romantic partners meet each other, compare notes, and realize what you’d been up to.
Through sheer persistence, I did it. Both Mayday and Tess acquired the Player trait. The thing is, by the time I got this far, all of the cult stuff felt too exhausting. We held one more meeting — this was what we’d been working so hard for, after all — but it just wasn’t all that interesting. Sure, we could now woohoo multiple partners in a row, which was a really effective way to earn club points, but it started feeling like we were just going through the motions at that point. Like Sims. I was starting to feel like the Sim in this equation… Dear God, the existential anguish…
The upside, I suppose, is that Mayday is now ready to really make some mischief. I’m sure that makes her incredibly happy, but for me, I’m just left with an empty cult-shaped hole in my soul. Maybe that was the point? Who even knows anymore?
