It's got cultists and it's got tentacles but at least there's no Cthulhu in Cosmoctopus. Instead, we have a cosmic octopus that players are summoning from its inky realm. As you might guess, Henry Audubon's game design for Lucky Duck and Paper Fort Games is a tongue-in-cheek spoof on the ubiquitous Lovecraftian theme but it's a fun game in its own right.
The 1-4 players move the Cosmoctopus mini around a 3 x 3 'Inky Realm' grid of tiles, taking the indicated action at the spot on which they end the move. Some tiles give you three of a specific resource but others give you one resource plus a card from the three on display from the 'Devotee Deck'. On your turn you can move Cosmoctopus one space on the grid for free but you need to pay a resource for each additional move. In addition to moving the Cosmoctopus and gaining the action tile benefit, you can play a card provided you can pay its resource cost...
There are four categories of card: Scripture cards give you a discount on future card plays; Relic cards give you ongoing bonuses whenever you take the indicated action; Hallucination cards give you a single-use bonus; Constellation cards provide a location to place out your resources and trade them in for a tentacle. When you gain your first tentacle you get to choose one of the four First Contact cards, which you can play for free on a future turn. And to win the game you need to be the first to collect eight tentacles.
You can't hoard more than eight of any resource between turns so it's quite hard to earn a Forbidden Knowledge token, which requires you to have 13 of any single resource, but if and when you manage this then you gain two tentacles.
Cosmoctopus is well-produced, with art by George Doutsiopoulos. It has cute components and mostly very clear cards and iconography. Most turns are brisk but the game is essentially an engine-builder so you'll occasionally have a longer turn where you collect the resources needed to play a card which then triggers a cascade of other actions. Tho' you can take the player count up to four, we've preferred Cosmoctopus as a two-player game. With just two players, the game takes no more than an hour but you'll find it takes notably longer when you play with four. As a plus tho', Cosmoctopus is a versatile game where you can vary the difficulty level, including by varying the layout of the Inky Realm. And, by incorporating the Private Investigator non-player character, you can play in fully cooperative mode as well, of course, as a solitaire game.