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The game universe is strongly influenced by Gnosticism. Influences of Clive Barker, H. R. Giger are also obvious.
The setting is exceedingly gloomy: The world is nothing but a prison for humanity, put there by the Demiurge (or if you will, God). The world as we see it is as real as a movie set: All smoke and mirrors. In reality, humanity lives in the ruins of its former greatness. Around us in the darkness are our guardians, the Archons, put there by the Demiurge to keep humanity in ignorance. The Archons have various creatures do their bidding, and these are our jailers. Death is merely a ploy to reset the consciousness of the soul and make impossible the acquisition of enough knowledge to escape the prison.
The system is a skill based system utilizing 20-sided dice (It is however not the d20 system published by Wizards of the Coast), with point based characters. It has one of the most deadly combat systems yet seen in an RPG and fatality rates of the characters to match.
The first version is out of print, and a French company called 7th Circle has bought the license and has now released a new edition. The first game was originally created by Gunilla Jonsson and Michael Petersén from Sweden and released by the company Target Games .
There are some similarities with Kult and some versions of the Swedish games, this is most obvious in the role-playing game Mutant Chronicles . Some symbols and creatures that appear in Kult can be seen in other Swedish games at odd locations.
Some magic societies have theories with similarities to the gameset in Kult. Dragon Rouge magic beliefs generally works well with the magic-theory described in Kult, if one ignores the more extreme aspects of the game, such as; The creatures that functions as "enemies" to the players or that the world is just an illusion pulled down to blind us from the truth.
Kult was, for some time, covered in media due to a suicide committed by a young boy who was playing the game. The Swedish TV-newsstation Rapport went out with a warning for the game. This only resulted in an increase of popularity for the game. Later, it turned out that the suicide had nothing to do with Kult.