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.

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

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 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.