Cult of the Lamb (2022)

Cult of the Lamb was an impulse purchase at a time when I was simply curious and looking for something new. It fits neatly into the wave of distinctive indie titles from recent years. The presentation is charming, and the contrast between cute aesthetics and darker themes is clearly intentional.

However, the spark never quite ignited for me. The core gameplay loop did not hold my attention long-term. The management elements combined with the roguelike combat structure felt repetitive rather than compelling. I also found parts of it surprisingly difficult, without that difficulty translating into deeper engagement.

I am aware that the game has since received expansions and additional content, but during my time with it, I could not fully connect. I wanted to enjoy it more than I actually did. In the end, I never managed to lose myself in its world.

Played on PS4 in the co-op mode. Was fun at first but became a slog toward the end. The spider zone kept crashing right as we got to the last floor. I think doing a rescue quest bugs out the spider zone for some reason, we were able to fix by retreating immediately after that quest. Random lag in the home base, especially when it gets large. Sometimes random lag during crusades, which was frustrating. You may or may not have these issues if you play on PC.

Even so, strip away the performance issues and you still have a game where the colony management aspect becomes tedious thanks to bad scaling. None of the upgrades will put a dent in the amount of extra work you have to do micromanaging.

There was a fun bug where player 2 can become invulnerable under just the right circumstances. Something to do with the mechanic where player 2 gets some healing if downed while player 1 survives. Take damage at just the right time and you get revived with zero hearts, making you unkillable until the end of the dungeon.

I really liked this! The two game modes, the roguelike crusades and the farming sim-esque cult builder, were not the greatest in either genre but their synergy between each other was what made this game work so well! In practice you end up with this nice back and forth where each game mode helped you progress in the other in numerous ways. As a result, almost no moment felt dull. There was always something more to do.

I do take a long time to play games and this game did suffer from the fact that you can "beat" the cult building part long before you finish the main story if it takes you awhile. So unfortunately the last 25% of my time with this game felt a little more tiring than the beginning.

I played on Switch and heard it used to be nearly unplayable, but it seems the developers have fixed it up quite a bit. This is not the worst but in retrospect I should have played this on Steam. The game can encounter some hiccups and slowdown when your cult grows bigger, and suffers an issue where having more than 20 cult followers causes the game to begin collapsing. Thankfully you don't need more than 20 to beat the game, but this was a shame that the game did not scale well when you maxed things out. Overall the Switch version is fine, and if you're diehard about playing games on Switch then go for it but otherwise I'd recommend playing this on some other platform.

Tons of content, especially after all the free DLCs that have come out over the past couple of years. Combat and interface can be a little clunky at times but you get used to it. Hilarious aesthetic that bounces between cute and gross (intentionally so). Probably my biggest issue with the entire game was platform specific as the Switch version runs very poorly. Low framerate and some really nasty hitches. Play on another platform if you can.

Definitely give it a shot if you love games like Binding of Isaac or Slay the Spire. This is like a mashup of those with a bunch of Tamagotchi and fishing thrown in for good measure. I am hoping they make a sequel called Cult of the Ham.

A Cult Simulator, Town Management and Roguelite all in one neat package.

The Cult Simulator Part

I have played Honey, I Joined a Cult! (actual cult simulation mixed with Prison Architect/Rimworld levels of management) but this one takes the cake: you gain followers, they give you Devotion, they ask you to do the most insane quests ("Great leader! I have a desire to eat poop!"), you can sacrifice/ascend a follower, they die of old age, you go out in your crusade and get a new follower. Rinse and repeat.

It's a very comfortable routine that makes appeasing Followers easy and keep them in your clutches. The happier they are, the more Devotion they generate. The more sermons, blessings, rituals and quests you go through, the higher a Follower's loyalty will get, making them generate more points during Sermons and being much more valuable to you in rituals.

The Followers are dumb cute and I wish I had enough arms to hug them.

The Town Management Part

Forget Animal Crossing and Necesse/Rimworld/Keplerth level of management, forget also Prison Architect style of management and simply focus on the basics: cleanliness, comforts and food. That's all you need for a perfect little settlement; Cult of the Lamb provides you with a small-sized plot of land where you'll find yourself only ever managing the space if you're over-decorating, in which you will always need to have: a cooking site, a church, enough beds for your followers and a shrine.

Those are your basics, can you improve upon them? Yes, of course. You can get an outhouse, a janitor station, better beds, refining stations, quarries, logging sites... but they're all additions onto a very simple management gimmick. Your basics will always be: faith, hunger and cleanliness.

Even at higher difficulties I found it hard to simply make my followers "stop" believing in me: even when made to starve by Heket or sickened by Kallamar.

The Roguelite Part

Coming back from Hades, I expected a fight as challenging and unforgiving as the masterpiece by SuperGiant Games... only to find a perhaps less complicated and intrinsically difficult dungeon crawls in the form of a 'Crusade' which compliments perfectly the fact that sometimes you will need to stop your dungeoneering to go back to base in case of an emergency (if you haven't dealt well with Kallamar and Heket's anger, you might find yourself in a sticky situation!).

On top of the Town/Follower management part, the lighter version of roguelike dungeoneering that Cult of the Lamb offers makes sure to reward you for exploring every room (finding Tarots, Relics, new weapons, better weapons) within a level and for varying your path every Crusade you perform: one time you might find a lake where to fish for provisions, another a respite and heal, another a fat cat with many goods for you to buy.

The NPCs

I simply couldn't get enough of the weird and interesting NPCs that are scattered around the world: not only all of them are cohesive to the story and compliment many parts of it but together, they paint a picture perfect plotline.

It does help all of their designs are absolutely amazing.

The Graphics

I simply have no words for how charming and perfect the hand-drawn style is for this game: cute and innocent and yet capable of making you flinch a bit in occasion of boss battles or particularly gore-y scenes.

Combines rouglite with base building, neither of them very complex or detailed, but both come together rather nicely. Base building is the more enjoyable part since it is less repetitive, than the uninspired dungeon dwelling, but the dungeon dwelling is the hearth of NG+ which gets old super fast.

It thrives on the cute-animals-doing-not-so-cute-things, which does really well. It is not a gimmick and not overdone, with "ha ha look at those cuties doing sacrificial murder". It treats itself rather serious, which makes the contrast actually funny, instead of addressing it directly.

It is just a shame, that after 10 hours you've seen it all, but the game thinks it is very replayable. Maybe it is if it is an entry for you to rouglites or city-builders, but for someone who has seen the best of the genre is seems like a demo of both of those. Which is understandable due to size of the studio and the price.

Cult of the lamb is really fun.

A lamb is supossed to start a cult to worship an undescriptable entity beyond our comprehension, to do this we need to find, rescue or brainwash npc's in the shape of cute little animals and make them do some tasks in our cult-camp

The good things:

-Art department is awesome, the feeling i have playinf this game is like reading some kind of child's book that was to creepy to be sold.

-The "verbal" and non verbal humor in this game is really funny, having an aesthetic like this mixed with really dark humor and/or sadistc rituals are weird but enjoyable.

-The music is alright, but sometimes is too repetitive. I would pay to have more diverse music.

-Characters in other map regions offer quests and insight on this world, also, they help you progress and acquire upgrades like shards or rituals, so there you have another way of playing besides being on camp all the time

-And speaking of ways to play this game, the roguelike aspects of the game are really fun: a fast combat where you have acces to many archetype of weapons with different passives from one another, the use of curses as ammo and projectiles, the heavy hit that is different with every weapon archetype, the passive and active relics that have effects depending of which one it is. All of this gives the player full replayability.

-After defeating a Main Boss (the important ones) you can fight against them again if you break their statues and you can keep exploring after defeating a regular boss to acquire more loot and better things, giving us an almost endless playtrough trough the main 4 zones if we are good enough.

Everything is pretty much all I want in a game, but, obviously there are some aspects I didn't like: Time.

Don't get me wrong, in this kind of games you need to have a time mechanic to progress trough the game, the only problem with this is that your cult members need to be on watch almost 24/7. I can't go exploring the rogue-like zones if 3 minutes after entering a zone one of my followers bring the faith down enough to spread false information or someone dies making everyone sick in the process. I know there is one skill called omnipresence that can for sure help you with this issue, allowing you to come to camp at the press of a button, here I commited an error not picking this power-up, instead I picked an evil heart in every run because I tought it was like in The Binding of Isaac. I can't keep progressing at my own pace if i need to speedrun every single one of my adventures to make sure nothing wrong goes on in my cult after 5 minutes. That's the only grip I have with the game and is one I am responsible for.

I need to start a new game and fix all the errors I did in my first save.

8.5/10

Who is your favorite character of a video game released on 2022?

Mine is The Lamb

I usually gravitate to character with a lot of depth and background, who give me complicated feelings or just really sexy. But this year.... Just look at that thing! It's adorable! As I said on my list of favorite games of the year, I just can't resist the mix of cute and macabre and the compromises you need to make to be sure your cult is succesful and self-sustaining can be pretty harsh. Its also extremely powerful, shows a lot of agency at the end of the game and can marry whoever they want. What's not to love?

So, I told you mine. Who is you favorite video game character of the year?

Played this on the switch and it's buggier than i would have thought, which gets in the way. Especially during combat.

The art and music is great, and i enjoyed the sim aspects to the game of running and growing a cult. The combat was way to simple, also you level up pretty quick in this game. Pretty much had everything unlocked before I even cleared the second dungeon.

The biggest con of this game is that nothing is fully fleshed out. Like i mentioned the combat when compared to other rougelikes is too simple, as far as I can tell you can only swing in one direction which makes it pretty annoying when i can't tell if Im aiming at the enemy or not. Your weapon and special are randomized at the begging of each dungeon but there's only three weapon types so it's not a huge challenge. Enemies aren't a big deal either, the friend who recommended this title said to but it on hard difficulty to make it somewhat challenging.

The biggest draw is the sim part of the game where you raise a cult. That's what I had most fun with. Sadly even this isn't to fleshed out either, it's not hard to keep track of the loyalty system and the town gets automated pretty quickly so a couple hours in you should be hands off with the cult and barely running it. You can decorate and build but even that's frustrating, because for some reason the tiles are diagonally placed rather than evenly on a line, it's a small annoyance that just doesn't make sense to me.

The story is pretty whatever, and the ending is anticlimactic. Almost a none ending and not really satisfying. There's are side missions and other stuff you can do, but nothing to crazy. At least the characters are well drawn and have fun personalities. Honestly that's the best part is the art and music of the game.

If your looking for an easier type of rougelike i would recommend, it is fun even though it's mechanics are simple. just keep in mind as of right now it's pretty buggy on the switch. Constant stuttering, frame drops, and soft locks. It gets annoying after a while especially since it doesn't seem like a game that's should be that demanding of the hardware.

I've been stuck for days on the third boss fight because the dungeon gives me slow weapons (hammers, axes) at the beginning every single time and the combat is so fast-paced and bullet-hell based that unless I am lucky and find another faster weapon, reaching the boss with a slow weapon makes the battle downright unwinnable. You can't have a boss that fires bullets everywhere like a freaking uzi while spawning at thousand enemies and intend me to use a weapon that needs you to stay still for two seconds.

To all the game developers out there: not every game needs to be a randomized roguelike. Be the change the world needs.

I need wood for a ritual, but I ran out of wood and trees,so I decided to go back into the dungeon to get some wood.

But I can't go back into the dungeon until I do the ritual. The ritual that I need wood for.

So I spend way too much time grinding divine inspiration so I could unlock the building that gives you wood.

A building that requires wood to construct.

Yeaaaah, not the brightest of starts here.