I agree with the other reviews, having the time just tick down turns the gameplay into rating the success probability, hit a button quickly, rinse and repeat. I even did not wait for the newspaper animation to finish and tried to advance as quickly as possible and still had just 6 days left or so until I awoke C'thulhu. I don't know the mechanics, is there a required number of successful actions? Or must a certain amount of time have passed?
The game would be much more accessible if there was a terror meter and the days remaining would only reduce after each action you take. To increase the level of strategy add more mechanics to the game. I can think of for example having different ratings for each event:
- complexity: influencing more complex events needs more effort
- likelihood of success: you can keep that
- scale: how much terror a successful intervention yields
Then for each event the player can chose how much time your cult should spend influencing the flow of events. The more power you already have the more effort you can spend per day, yielding in a greater success probability. But the more effort you spend, the fewer events can be influenced before time is over.