I had a really great time with Cult of the Lamb! From the farm-sim style cult management to the roguelite dungeon crawling to the demonic visual theming of the whole game, it was a blast.

I think I ended up taking a bit longer than most people at 21 hours for my playthrough, but I don't think I went above 15 followers until I was required to for the final ritual so that probably slowed down my cult's growth a good amount. I was having too much fun managing the cult and building stuff to do all that much dungeon crawling until I started running out of stuff I wanted to build.

I found the difficulty maybe a bit on the easy side, save for the third major boss, who kicked my ass real bad for some reason. But the combat kept me on my toes enough for me to never get bored of it. The dungeon crawling aspect was very fun, though I kept getting stuck with the claw weapons for my runs, which I really hated using because I wasn't a fan of the three-hit combo they did. It's random chance which weapon type you get and I'm pretty sure I didn't so much as see a sword for the last two main areas of the game. It was all claws, daggers, and hammers for me. Just bad luck I guess. Loved the daggers and hammers though.

Another thing I loved was the game's aesthetic, which makes sense given I'm a big Binding of Isaac fan I guess. It just oozes personality and everything looks so crisp and vibrant. Pretty much everything you do in the game is also accompanied by very satisfying sound design and fun animations that just make interacting with the world and your cultists feel worthwhile, even if only for the sheer enjoyment of it.

I think my one complaint (if I had to have one) would be that I felt like things started to drag a bit near the end for me, as upgrades began to feel superfluous and not really worth getting outside of checking off a box on my list, but I'm willing to chalk that up to me being too slow to grow my cult's size early on. I'd bet the progression feels a lot smoother when you focus the dungeon stuff a bit more heavily than I did.

Again, this is a really fantastic game and I can't wait to see what the team behind it does next!

Mixing Hades with Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley seems like an absolutely great idea, and it actually is!

I suppose the whole design of this game is a little top down from this idea. The central narrative theme of building a cult as a sheep works great with that as well.

Cult of the Lamb shines in two things: general idea and art direction. The game simply looks great, yes, it's the classical cute-look, but combined with the dark theme it has a burlesque, Alice in Wonderland-esque touch to it. The idea of the gameplay mix is great, the gameplay itself is a little too straight forward.

It does not do any grave mistakes in the different gameplay meachnics in which it is branching out the more you progress throughout the game. It executes them professionally, but neither the base building nor the character relations nor the roguelike aspect really shines.

Especially the combat in the roguelike run and the progression system for those runs almost feels a little dull. The weapons and tarot cards don't feel meaningful at all. I liked the fast paced quick combat at first, but without a proper meaningful progression system it feels superficial quickly.

For me, the roguelike combat is still the most essential part about this game and it's average at best.

A well rounded, good game though, most definitely.

Cult of the Lamb is Rollercoaster Tycoon except instead of an amusement park you're running a death cult (with, ironically, fewer deaths by drowning), and instead of trying to make a profit you're trying to earn your cult members' devotion so you can build more buildings to support a larger cult to earn more devotion so that eventually you can make a profit and I'm not even joking. But also if you earn their devotion inside of the temple instead of outside it fills up a different bar and that's the one that gets you upgrades for the other part of the game which is the rogue-lite dungeon run.

But don't worry about that part, you'll only be spending about 20% of your time there. The rest will be spent cleaning up shit and vomit and trying to figure out why feeding people barely fills the hunger meter given that while you're queuing up the meals to cook it shows the hunger meter filling all the way up. Although actually, unless (I assume) you're playing this on PS5 or a gaming rig, you'll be spending most of your time waiting for your list of followers to load. Or else just ignoring half the game in order to avoid that.

It's kind of a mess, is the point, with a solid handful of good ideas executed very poorly, and another solid handful of bad ideas also executed poorly. And this is both for the management side and the combat side, where only two of the weapons are actually any good and combat is frequently so illegible that I will literally not know what hit me. Also at one point they introduce a new enemy with a projectile that you have to deflect back at them a la Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time but at no point have they explained that that's a thing you can do, and also most of the time it isn't, so the first time you meet this enemy you'll just be running away from this projectile (it's a homing projectile and quite fast) while trying to get in heavy attacks against what you assume is a shielded enemy because your regular attacks don't do anything, and then you'll die. And then the 2nd time you'll attack right away to try to get in before the projectile launches, thus accidentally parrying it and then immediately destroying the enemy, but you won't have any that that's what happened so it won't be until the third time, if you're lucky, that you finally figure out what you're supposed to do, at which it actually becomes pretty much trivial.

Ultimately while the progression had its hooks in me for a while, once that ran out I was left with a mostly unenjoyable and tedious gameplay loop, so when I had the opportunity to end it all I took it gladly. By which I mean I sacrificed myself to The One Who Waits and rolled credits so I could consider the game done.

p.s. the music is great though, especially the Darkwood theme and the end credits theme, I love the vocal-samples-as-instrument thing, and it fits the mood of the game really well too. Honestly I think the music carried me through the first 75% or so just as much as the progression system.

p.p.s. On the in-world game list I'd say Knucklebones ranks in between Gwent and Machine Strike. While I like its simplicity I never felt like I understood it at a strategic level (despite winning fairly consistently), so Machine Strike is more satisfying. But Orlog is still more fun. Gwent can still suck my ass. Though that reminds me, did I ever rank Roach Race? I think I'd put it in second, actually, it's a little longer than it should be but that length is a direct result of being good at it so it kind of works.

I might need to start making an actual list of these. I mean Caravan should be on there somewhere, surely. And probably some others I'm forgetting.

Game #66/225

Cult of the Lamb stands out to me as a worthy successor to Isaac (my favorite game), and not in an "Isaac 2" kind of way, but as a redevelopment of its basic formula into something very fresh and new while still being authentic to many of its principal mechanics and design philosophies. What is most fascinating about the game, besides its "farming simulation" component intrinsically, is how it maintains its roguelike genre status by encouraging repeated playthroughs and incremental progress without the core mechanic involving death. Yes, death will happen and you can increase your meta progression that way, but in general, CotL involves going on "micro runs" (they're never labeled that, but it seems odd to call the sub-10 minute laps "runs" after playing games like Isaac and Darkest Dungeon II where you can be stuck on a run for an hour or more) in which materials are collected and rooms are completed before encountering a mini boss, after which you simply return to your encampment. There is a constant dopamine rush from building your cult, with a number of "unlockable trees" present that are linked to your actions and progression is a couple of areas. The game provides so many types of tasks and collectibles that you are really constantly managing something. But the rewards provided are so immediate and satisfying (not unlike a Survivors-like TBH) that you are always buzzing around looking to do more tasks. There are also other areas to check out with NPCs, some secrets, and more various tasks and side quests. To summarize, the game packs in a LOT of content that is not unlike a ~10-hour sugar rush.

I'll mention that the music and art are also phenomenal. Besides that, the gameplay core is solid with a pretty basic top-down hack-and-slash style. I found that it was a bit hard sometimes to determine where an enemy was attacking, but other than that the attacking is crunchy and satisfying. There are plenty of weapons, relics, and sub-weapons, but not an abundance. It's plenty fun smashing through obstacles and killing monsters as you progress -- but nothing groundbreaking. The main appeal, I think, is everything surrounding this core gameplay loop, which is even evident as you choose your path to the boss: the majority of options are non-combat areas where you can get lumber, or gain a new follower, or buy from a shop, etc. I strongly recommend CotL as a fresh vision on the roguelike genre that is greatly in touch with what makes these games work mechanically.