The only roguelite I ever got into majorly was the Binding of Isaac. I played Hades and Returnal but while I thought those were fun, I never played them for too long unlike Isaac (I should get back to them though). Cult of the Lamb however is now the 2nd roguelite I've ever beaten a run of. Did I like it? Yeah I enjoyed myself but compared to something like the Binding of Isaac, this game's lacking a bit.

The first thing you'll notice about this game is it's not just a roguelite. It's also a management simulation type game. Basically, the times you won't be playing through the roguelite sections, you'll be working with your cult on a day to day basis. You have to make sure they're fed, make sure they have beds to sleep on, make sure to clean their literal shit as well as making them do tasks like harvesting crops or mining rocks and stuff. Also, since you're the leader of a cult, you can also perform rituals and sermons daily. At first I found this really refreshing and a nice break from the roguelite sections. Well, I'd say its the other way around as you'll be in this mode a lot more than the roguelite sections. While this part of the game is fun, it never gets super fleshed out at all and becomes a bit tiring in the endgame, at least for me. I will say, this part of the game did kinda freak me out with the depictions of cult behavior. Idk why honestly since I don't get freaked out by stuff like this usually but after a bit I got used to it.

In between these simulator parts are the roguelite sections. Compared to something like Isaac, these are not fleshed out at all. They're fun but in terms of content, there's not much here. You have a small assortment of weapons to choose from. They can have passive abilities but each type plays the exact same each time. You have a regular attack, then a strong attack which uses fervor as well as specials you can collect that also use fervor. Fervor is basically just like SP you can collect from enemies to perform these moves. You don't have much in terms of a move set and it pales in comparison to Isaac's many synergies. You can also get tarot cards and relics which both provide other upgrades or abilities but there aren't many of those either and I kept getting the same ones a lot of the time. The bosses are pretty fun I will say and while I didn't find this game hard really, some of the later bosses can be tricky. In the early game, I was having a blast with the simulator section and less fun with the roguelite section, but in the endgame, it was the opposite except the roguelite section was just fun rather than a blast.

I will say, probably the aspect that holds up the best is the art style. Despite some of the disturbing stuff you can do in this game, it never is that bad (despite me being creeped out at first) because of how cutesy everything looks. In general, it's just a really nice art style and everything looks really good, as long as it doesn't glitch out on you.

Yeah uh, I saw some people mentioning glitches and while they never bothered me, it is worth mentioning. I played the PS5 version and every time the start of a new day happened; the game would literally freeze for 5 seconds each time. You get used to it but the first time it happened I thought the game crashed lol. I also had an issue where followers would glitch out and work on something like a block or two away from where it should be so it looks like they're working on nothing which is distracting. Also had a glitch at the very end of the game where the floor texture would go from looking normal to being reflective like water. Idk if all this is just in the PS5 version but it all happened throughout my game and it's worth mentioning.

Overall, I enjoyed myself, but I wish a lot of the game was more fleshed out. The simulator and roguelite sections are fun but because they're trying to balance the two, neither feels super rewarding in the end. The fun concept, cute art style and really fun early game is what made me enjoy this game in the end. Just wish it was better overall. Also didn't bother with the platinum despite it seeming easy enough. Looks like it requires way more playtime than I'm up for lol.

Whilst in the middle of playing Cult of the Lamb I spoke to a friend who, and I quote said "Isn't that the poop farming simulator?" Apparently when just casually speed skimming through a video about the game that was the core of what he picked up about it. In some ways he isn't wrong though, you see Cult of the Lamb is a weird mixture of base building for your expanding indoctrinated cult and Rogue Like dungeon crawling to get resources to keep them fed, clean and happy as they are mostly incapable of doing that on their own apparently.

It's two games merged together and while certainly fun, neither feels as fleshed out as it needs to be. Your cultists will just dump a poop out anywhere, some food will make them do it faster, they'll leave it, get ill and possibly die from hygiene issues, literally. That means in between dungeon runs I was running around cleaning poop. You can eventually get the ability to build an Outhouse but I had mines and a church before that which seems completely nuts on the village building priority scale for what unlocks. Even then though it's my character, the head of the Cult of the Lamb cleaning out the Outhouses. It's just odd the way it all works, there is no way to automate another character to cook or clean the outhouse I could find, you have to do it all or use a ritual to make them fast. Buildings will break for no reason, like beds and tents specifically just fall apart because "reasons" forcing you to rebuild them. Adding to the headache of cult managing, the layout is in a diagonal grid scheme in which trying to build next to other items in situ is so difficult I actually didn't think you could for about 5 hours. It's terrible. I also barely had to use most of the buildings available. I tried a couple that seemed like they weren't worth the effort, destroyed them and never looked back.

The dungeon crawling is kind of similar in that it feels a bit underbaked. It's a Rogue Like that mixes up the rooms you get going from the start to a boss or mini boss each time in one of 4 different areas. There is so little variety per run though it may as well not bother. Everything just looks and feels the same, there are maybe 4 weapon choices that can have a variety of modifiers based on what you've unlocked like poison etc. but they are much the same. The only other thing you can do is use Curses which feel kind of underpowered or all kind of the same that once again it feels like any would do. Each room is so noisy for things going on and so small in most circumstances simply using your weapon is enough, I beat the game and barely used a curse, it was rarely worth it. There was just a lack of variation or strategy required to get through each level. To add to this each time I was in the dungeon you get messages about your cult members dying of old age, getting angry or sick as it continues to flow whilst you're not there and they are completely incapable of looking after themselves unless you set up rituals to keep you covered.

I also had technical issues playing the PS5 version. Every time a new day came the game freezes as it works things out, moving in the dungeon too fast like rolling to get through fast and it hiccups and jitters. I had one hard crash and once my followers all went and stood in the same location morphing into each other and wouldn't do anything forcing me to turn off the game and restart (I was worried it was a game breaking glitch but did carry on fine after) which all hampered my experience as well.

I've been pretty negative so far but I did actually have a good time with cult of the Lamb. It's got a great atmosphere with these super cute anthropomorphic animal people mixed with this satanic sacrificial dark undertone. Making your dead followers into meals for others, sacrificing them to an eldritch tentacle when old rather than have them die in your village is all entertaining stuff with a really nice art design and soundtrack to boot. It just isn't balanced enough with how the Cult building works and not deep enough or varied enough in combat where it needs to be. It's got a lot of character however which does make up for that somewhat.

As someone that was burned out by the rogue-lite genre so much I couldn't even enjoy Hades, playing Cult of the lamb felt like a breath of fresh air. It barely feeling like a rogue-lite might've helped with that lol.

Cult of the lamb reminded me a lot of this game called Moonlighter, which also mixes the rogue-lite aspect with some management sim gameplay. This time you're managing, what else could it be, a cult. Growing your following and ensuring they have a place to sleep and enough food to keep them fed, performing sermons and all kinds of rituals to further develop their belief in you is something I really enjoyed and where the game really shined for me. It scratched the itch I've had for a Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing-type game.

While it is advertised as a rogue-lite, don't go into this game expecting some deep rogue-lite experience with synergies and all kinds of gameplay mechanics, because CotL doesn't offer this. Runs are short and not difficult at all and they're separated in those 4 biomes with their own enemies. What burned me out on the rl-genre is starting at the beginning when you die and having to do everything over again. I never felt that in this game and I had this constant feeling of making progress. Don't think this will stand among the greats of the genre but it did enough for me.

Sadly, it gets held back by a few things, performance being the biggest. I played the game on Switch and the game freezes a lot during specific moments (change from night-day for example), but also during moments where a lot of stuff is happening at the same time. I died a few times because of this during boss battles and it sucks.
The weapons and skills feel super unbalanced with some being so OP compared to others (heavy-slow-poison >>>> anything fast). Most of the bosses felt underwhelming and easy but especially the final one. Despite those few annoying things I still had a great time with this game. I can definitely see myself going back to it when they release some DLC.

TL:DR
Super fun rogue-lite mixed with some management sim that gets held back by poor performance and balancing.
I also going to need more games like this and Moonlighter, why isn't this a genre yet? (pls let me know if there are games that are similar to those two)

Talk about addictive. Cult of the Lamb was weird and wonderful, all about maintaining a cult (through nice or nasty means) while trying to achieve godhood. It was part colony sim with building up a camp to suit the needs of followers, including things like crops, outhouses and a variety of buildings. It was even possible to pretty up the place with decorations, which I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to do. Sure, keeping the cult alive could be tough, but at least it looked nice.

Then there was the roguelike grind, the aim to defeat the big rival bosses. It was mindless, with interesting abilities and weapons, some more powerful than others—it was up to RNG on what was dished out, some curse / weapon combos making it a breeze. The overall gameplay loop was excellent, with even more content added since release.

Cult of the Lamb is likely not exactly what you think it is. While the flashy roguelike action has drawn a lot of comparisons to Hades, it’s not really the crux of the game. At its core, developer Massive Monster’s new ultra-cute cult simulator is just that - a simulation. Players will spend around 75% of its 14 hour runtime playing a masterfully designed city-builder/management sim, with bursts in between of mediocre roguelike action that far out stays its welcome weighed down in poorly paced progression systems.

In Cult of the Lamb, you’ll become a lamb sent to slaughter in the name of a false god. On your way to hell, you’re rescued by a demon called The One Who Waits, who has been shackled between the surface world and inferno. In exchange for sending you back to the world above with its remaining power, it tasks the Lamb with creating a cult in its name, in the name of the Red Crown. There are four bishops, who serve as the bosses, that the Lamb must defeat while managing their cult compound to free The One Who Waits from its demonic chains.

I first want to speak about the thing that draws the most attention in Cult of the Lamb - the art style. It’s beautiful, it’s colorful, it’s easy to distinguish in the heat of combat, and most importantly it’s consistent. Even during the garish occult rituals and demonic summonings, the presentation of Cult of the Lamb never, ever wavers. The artists and animators are 110% dedicated to making this the most adorable Satanic ritual you’ve ever experienced, and do not back down. The contrast of the subject matter and art style is not just something to catch players eyes - it’s an aesthetic decision that was made with purpose.

As I mentioned previously, Cult of the Lamb is a management sim supported by small chunks of roguelike action. You’d be forgiven for thinking the management part is secondary based on the trailers, but really the game is about growing your cult and making them more powerful while the runs through the four procedurally generated biomes serve to help you gather followers and materials for building. Each run is actually quite short, depending on what you run into; I had some that were as quick as 3 minutes, with the longest being about 10.

Cult of the Lamb, like any good management sim, is made up of a dozen interlocking systems, each one both feeding and being dependent on several others. As the game progresses and your cult expands, you’ll be able to automate these processes so you can focus on more high level planning. It very much has the cadence of a city-builder RTS like the Tycoon games, but on a much smaller and more palpable scale for newcomers to the genre.

After inducting your first few cultists (those are freebies), you’ll need to construct your most important structures - a shrine and a temple. The shrine is the beating heart of your cult, and is where your followers will worship you so you can gain power over the course of your journey. The temple is the brain, where you will make the decisions that affect your followers, tell them how to live their lives, dictate their eating, sleeping and working schedules, and more.

From there, you’ll branch out and need to collect rocks, wood, grass, flowers, seeds, food and a variety of other materials so your cult can thrive. There’s three meters you’re trying to maintain - loyalty, hunger, and sickness. If your loyalty depletes, your followers will revolt and declare you a false prophet, leaving the camp. If your hunger depletes, your followers will begin to starve and die. Likewise, if the sickness meter hits 0 disease will begin to spread and followers will be similarly snuffed out.

There are nearly two dozen systems running in the camp by the time it's operational, and it is frankly mind blowing that they all work together so well and never become overwhelming. Like any good management game, it’s all about getting better stuff so you can automate your basic systems, then automate those systems, and so on and so forth. At first you’re scrounging for berry seeds to put together meager meals for your cult, but 6 hours later you’ve got an industrial farm complete with fertilizer and irrigation automation.

You’ll construct housing for your followers, decorations to brighten the place up, and lots of idols to increase the amount of faith you’re collecting each day. All of these systems lead directly into leveling up your Lamb. Each day, you can host one sermon, which feeds skill points into a tree that increases your attack power while increasing loyalty. You can also declare a new doctrine if you have enough tablets, which are gained by doing nice things for your followers. They’ll age and die and you’ll find new ones over time, and restart the cycle.

New doctrines can either be passive buffs for your camp or active rituals that can be cast with a 2 day cooldown. Roughly half these doctrines aid you in leading by way of love, and the other half by way of fear, so you can definitely choose what kind of cult you would like to run. I only picked the love-based doctrines because I am a merciful god Lamb and would bestow my grace upon this flock. But you can go full dictator on it if you wish.

One of the best parts of Cult of the Lamb is that you can name and customize your followers, so, like most everyone, I named them after my real life friends and asked everyone which animal and what color they’d like to be. Everyone had a good time watching their antics as one friend would report another as a traitor, or when two of my friends who barely know each other fell in love, or when one of them showed up at camp covered in blood and just died without explanation. There are certainly other games where you can name characters, but the concept of the social interactions takes the interesting part of Miitopia and Tomodachi Life and puts it into a good game instead.

Now it’s time to talk about the mediocre part of it - the roguelike action stuff. At the beginning of each run, you’re given a weapon and a curse, which is a magic spell. Defeating enemies gains fervor, which is in turn used to cast spells. Simple enough. You’ll unlock tarot cards that give small buffs, like turning your weapons to poison or raising your crit chance, and collect a different assortment on each run. And that’s it. The color palette changes between the four biomes, and there’s a few monsters that are unique to each, but they all effectively do the same thing. As I was spending just a few minutes at a time in combat before heading back to the farm, it didn’t hit me until about 7 or 8 hours in that the combat had not changed. The way that it feels at the beginning is the way it will feel in hour 14, just with new (mostly worse) weapons and upgraded versions of the same spells. The combat is smooth, quick, and certainly eye-catching, but without any additional layers it grows boring after a time.

This leads to my next, much bigger issue: progression. The management sim in this game was not designed with me in mind, who put 20 hours into Factorio over just two days and who builds large scale automated mining operations in Minecraft for fun. As i normally would with a game in this genre, I optimized my followers and automated them, then automated the automations, and so on. I ran a sermon every day, ran as many rituals as possible, upgraded my worship speeds right at the beginning to accrue faster over the life of the game, and talked to every follower to inspire them every single day and extort resources from them. I also mostly ignored the side quests, because mathematically the amount of loyalty you lose for accepting and then not doing them can easily be made up with a single ritual the next day.

There’s a saying that if given a chance, players will optimize the fun out of a game. Well, I did it, and I did it barely halfway through. As I was early on in the third biome, I completed the doctrine tree, the sermon tree, the fishing quests, the mushroom quests, and everything useful in the camp tree. What this resulted in was no progress for the last 5 hours of the game. I had already finished everything the game had to offer, so the next few hours were just maintaining my camp for no reward and outputting resources that would never be used. It slammed to a crashing halt. There is a difficulty modifier for combat, but god I wish there had been a hard mode for the management part of it. I never struggled with collecting enough of anything, and if I didn't have enough resources my automated systems would have it ready for me in just minutes regardless. Perhaps I got too eager, but as a fanatic lover of management games and city builders this was hugely disappointing. Imagine playing Fallout and hitting a level cap halfway through the main story and having to continue without the small reward of simply leveling up.

Another issue that really put a damper on my experience was the requirement to have 20 living followers to fight the final boss. The second biome required me to have 9 to enter, the third required me to have 10, and the fourth required me to have 12. However, to face the final boss I needed to find 8 more. This was such a strange ramp up in requirements I did not expect. In addition, one of the features of the fourth biome is that your followers are summoned and possessed and you must kill them to progress, so right after losing 4 followers in this way I was presented with a gate telling me to find 8 more to proceed.

It’s not actually all that simple - you can buy one follower a day from a spider nearby, but you cannot just fast forward through the days and buy them because your followers will continue to age and die. Rather, I had to basically speedrun 4 more runs hoping that my current elderly followers wouldn’t drop dead any second so i could grind out more cultists. It was not fun in the least. While narratively satisfying, the final boss was also a disappointing fight that lacked a single new combat element.

The first 8 hours of Cult of the Lamb were magical, and if the game had ended somewhere there this review score would be a 10. But it doesn’t, and it goes on and on and gets less and less interesting as it reaches the conclusion. With progression systems that are way too easy to bust and combat that goes stale halfway through, my time with this game did not sustain the high I felt at the beginning. But there are strokes of a masterpiece in here, with excellent music, whimsical characters, starkly themed visuals, just enough narrative push, and management tools that allow for the player to really experience their own story. If you don’t optimize the fun out of Cult of the Lamb, there’s an incredible amount of it to be had.

I feel like at this point it's basically just a given that any time a stylish, smaller scale indie game is released, that we get a huge crowd of people palming it off and declaring it to simply be a case of "style over substance", but as time goes on it becomes increasingly difficult to quite understand exactly what they're getting at. Do they mean that it lacks complexity? because in that case games like Mario should also be regarded in the same way, unless you'd just say that those games lack style AND substance. It also couldn't be a case where the substance you're talking about narrative depth or anything because tons of other games also will decide to eschew these elements in favour of focusing more strongly on the gameplay without getting pushed into the same box as stuff like this. In the end it just feels painfully clear that the term itself is inherently flawed and genuinely meaningless in actually conveying an experience in a way that doesn't feel like an active attempt to ignore the artistic strengths and distinctions on display. If you look at Cult of the Lamb as a pretty game but a comparatively shallow experience in all other aspects, while technically correct it really doesn't say all much either, it ignores the ideas behind why something might have been crafted in such a way to ignore why an approach might differ to your preferences or be more geared towards a different audience.

In this sense, Cult of the Lamb isn't exactly a game that wholly appeals to me with its simplified take on both colony management and action roguelite elements, but what it does is provide an easy avenue for newcomers to the genre to experience the ideas behind them without getting thrown entirely into the deep end either. The biggest thing that makes me feel this is the way that the dungeon crawling segments are handled, not only being about 10 - 15 minutes at most, but also providing the random elements of a game like this without having the vaguely sadistic tendencies that a lot of the bigger names tend to have. Lessening these essentially provides a dynamic where you still get a lot of the feel for how these types of games tend to work, with the runs having some clear variance from your difference weapons and items, but very easily being able to tackle the situation without any of this since the upgrades are largely rather minor instead of being wildly transformative. It might not lend itself to an experience that feels endlessly replayable to particularly crazy with how runs can go, but that doesn't feel like the point, it's secondary to providing these bite sized procedural dungeons and being able to use what's present here to strengthen your cult.

Likewise, while the cult management is on the more basic side of things, it does the job pretty well ad lends itself to a lot of the reward mechanics that the game has to offer, which leads to a gameplay loop that can feel very compelling with a constant sense of progression being felt. All in all it's a very light game with just the right amount of total gremlin energy to be an absolute winner for me, but it's bogged down by a couple of flaws that stop me from truly loving it, and it's not just a case of not entirely being in the target audience due to my experience with roguelites. Above all, the economy of this game feels extremely off with how early you can break things. By the end of the 2nd of 4 areas, the vast majority of cult options and tasks can be automated, making the work you need to put in feel minimal. On its own this isn't entirely bad, it's a good ultimate goal to strive towards, being able to run the cult with almost no hard work put in by you, but it just ends up happening too early on and makes it hit a point where it just feels like you're playing the game to hurry up and get to the end, since the reward from these dungeon runs of slowly gathering materials to build and upgrade things starts feeling rather worthless since everything already feels solved. Such a goal being something that could be fully easily achieved around halfway through area 4 seems like a much nicer point to aim towards personally, keeping the player's drive intact for longer instead of making the reasons for continued exploration be purely from a narrative standpoint.

I can't fully make the argument that this was an intentional decision yet again designed to make for an easier time more focused on aesthetic and atmosphere either, as the initial experience feels very different/ In the early game while building up your followers, it feels as if just one or two mistakes can tremendously ruin plans due to limited resources and avenues to salvage a bad situations, but it adds so much extra weight to your decisions and performance in the action portions as a result. I think it's a great dynamic, but it once again ends up clashing with how you can so easily hit the point where all this becomes a non issue, every problem you could have being solveable with just one or two minor actions. Due to this lack of feeling the need to keep improving what you have past a certain point, it also makes the relative dryness of the dungeon portions become more problematic too. If you're striving towards another gameplay element, it feels more worth it to explore all the rooms for extra resources or perhaps even an extra upgrade, but after a certain point, the lack of this combined with the rather stagnant power level you can have makes it feel more worth it to save your time and just run through and avoid risking taking an extra hit since the game can sometimes feel rather stingy with the HP restores, which also yet again feels like another element of things that ends up clashing in certain layouts, going through the entire place with each small mistake being something you can't fully recover from.

For as much as I heavily appreciate a lot about Cult of the Lamb, these flaws combined with that minor identity issue in both trying to be a more involved experience while being so simplistic so quickly ends up being enough for me to not 100% love what's here. I'd definitely recommend it for sure, it's short, super charming and has a lot of fun to be found, but a number of the ways in which the experience progresses over it's 10 - 12 hour runtime doesn't fully pan out and leads to a surprisingly uneven time. It's also 100% not style over substance it's just aiming towards a somewhat more inexperienced audience or is at least keeping them pretty nicely in mind.

I completely lost interest in playing this after only, like, two hours. In the beginning the entire experience is really engaging, with you getting to know more and more of the central gameplay loop - and then it kinda just stops and gets stale really quickly. The base building is fiddly as well as kinda unsatisfying in its design and the combat really isn't all that engaging (I wished I was playing Hades instead). What's left is the absolutely stellar presentation, the bad performance on Switch and some bugs dragging down the entire experience.

I also want to point to Archagent's review, which I wholeheartedly agree with!

Cult of the Lamb is very shallow and devoid of content, but the devs perfected the art of the streamerbait.

The game looks and sounds amazing, and presents the whole gameplay loop within the first hour, so if you catch a glimpse of the game on someone's stream, you will probably think "oh damn, this is really cool" and go to buy it.
If you haven't played any games in either the roguelite genre (The Binding of Isaac, Hades, Enter the Gungeon, etc) or the colony management sim genre (Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Oxygen not Included, etc) you might even have some fun playing it. Otherwise though you'll quickly notice there's nothing more to what you already saw on stream, and that the game doesn't live up to the level of an average game in either of those genres.

I've beaten the entirety of it in about 10 hours; the colony management is primitive and about 5-6 hours into the game my cult started playing itself with the only remaining duties being cooking and preaching, and after that I just rushed through the dungeons, of which there are only 4, all of them functionally identical. It's possible to repeat those dungeons after defeating the corresponding big boss, but outside of a tat one of the NPCs dispenses for completing the repeat dungeon for the first time, there is no point to it - they play exactly the same except you can loop 3 times through them to collect more rewards in one go (the rewards are completely meaningless by that point, because the cult will already be developed enough to maintain itself).
The combat itself is completely broken - rolling towards the enemy, striking once and rolling away by far outperforms any other tactic you can come up with, and there is pressure to avoid fooling around too much with suboptimal tactics because of the global timer which means that the cult's stats will diminish even during the dungeon time.
The enemies are copypasted from TBoI, and the bosses are just the same enemies, but bigger and with the ability to spawn smaller enemies. The only boss with the actual patterns is the final boss, and he's laughably easy, some bosses from the early floors of the aforementioned TBoI are more difficult to beat than the final boss in this game.
There are curses which act like the active items, but there's no interesting utility to them, just outputting a bit more damage.
There are tarot cards which act like the passive items, but they can be roughly divided into the two categories: minor buff to health/damage and an extremely circumstantional benefit you will never fulfill the conditions for.

I wrote a lot about the dungeon part of the game even though I think it's meant to be secondary for the colony management part.
This is because there's not much to say about the colony management part.
Followers have basic needs: hunger and hygiene, and they generate devotion. You build structures to satisfy those two needs, and structures to farm materials to build structures to satisfy those two needs. You use devotion to unlock more structures to... you get the idea. You can also preach once a day to make your followers generate cooler devotion which you use to unlock completely unsubstantial upgrades for the dungeon part. The followers level up which does pretty much nothing other than eventually allowing you to unlock perks for the cult none of which are particularly transformative.
It's all functional and completely boring, the only paradigm shift that happens in this part of the game is that eventually it loops onto itself and the cult generates enough materials which the followers use to satisfy their needs without any input on the part of the player (with the exception of cooking, and apparently the chef was on one of the promo screenshots, so I'm guessing they either removed this to put in a DLC later, it was too buggy to put in the game, or they realised that the player will literally have nothing to do at the cult anymore except preaching if the chef is present)

This shallowness, however, makes the game very approachable, and the target audience for the game, I think, is pretty clear. There is a lot of effort put into the visuals, the sound, and the Twitch integration, and seemingly a lot of money put into sponsoring the streamers to play it. The game allows you to pet a dog to tick off that meme "can you pet a dog in this game" twitter account box. The game has a fishing minigame to tick off that meme "does this game have a fishing minigame" twitter account box. When you finish the game, before the credits roll the game makes sure to plead you to recommend the game to the others.

At the end of this review I will instead recommend playing Oxygen not Included for the better colony management sim experience, and Hades for the better roguelite experience. They're just as polished as Cult of the Lamb visually and acoustically, but also are much better designed games.

Love it when a game just goes out there, does its thing, and says, hey man, thanks for playing. You want some more of this? Sure, you could 100% it. It'll take a little time, but you could. You don't have to though, that's up to you. Haha alright man, talk to you later.

Cute game! You go around making your followers happy while occasionally delving into dungeons to hit things with weapons. The song that plays when you're in your cult area rules. Comat could use some more depth I guess. It's only a 10ish hour game though, and maybe 65% of that is spent fighting things. That's what, like 6.5 hours of fighting things? It feels good anyway, so by the time you're getting a little bored of hitting the X button, you're at the end. I'm sure there are some FREAKS out there who will 100% this game and won't like it as much. That's up to you though.

Devolver Digital is really trying their hardest to become the A24 of video game publishers, they even have their own corky cult game, just replace the themes of abusive and toxic relationships and the creepy Swedish cult, with a super fun upbeat game where you give prise to a dark evil deity, and make lots of cool friends along the way.

It also helps that game is also really really fucking good; it has this super additive gameplay loop that just sucked me in and had me playing for hours apon hours. I will say this if you're going in for just the rouge-like gameplay you'd probably wanna play something else, this game is like 80% village sim and 20% rouge-like. Now that's not to say that makes it a bad thing; because this is the rare case where it's juggling both styles of gameplay and loops it together so well that they both feel rewarding and make the game much for fun as a result.

But yeah Devolver Digital truly is the A24 for video games, now all we need is a video game version of the movie Crank that'd be fantastic thank you (remembers and then rewatches the trailer for Angry Foot)......................OH................ soooo do you want my money now or later?

I absolutely did not enjoy my time playing Cult of the Lamb.

The game starts off with a simple enough premise: you're a little lamb being sacrificed to four religious leaders because some really big scary dude will come back or something, but after the sacrifice the big dude brings you back to life and instructs you to build a cult in order to grow more powerful and kill the four religious leaders so that the big dude can come back. He gives you a crown. The crown can turn into a sword, a knife, claws, an axe, and various tools. You're given a home-base, and a level-select hub-world-type area to open the door to the first "world."

Then the gameplay loop begins.

God damn I hate the gameplay loop of this game.

I've read some takes from other reviewers on this site I respect saying things like "gameplay loops are inherently suspicious" and, while there are better more egregious examples of games with capital-O Obvious gameplay loops, I think Cult of the Lamb is an excellent example of a game with a fucking horrendously obvious gameplay loop.

In short, there are two core sections of the game:

1. Binding of Isaac-but-worse roguelike dungeon crawling.
2. People-farming.

You do these as far as you can, and when you get to the end you win!

In long, Massive Monster put these two core sections next to each other in the most annoying way possible. You go on a "Crusade" to "purge the heretics" and "convert" any new potential followers to your cult, collecting miscellaneous resources along the way. Then you go back to your cult, do your dailies (I detest this fucking term), run out of resources, and then go back on another crusade until some kind of emergency by no direct fault of your own (aside from deliberately playing the game, which I would argue is very much your own fault) forces you to go check on the cult. Maybe someone died? Bury the body or collect meat. Someone's starving? Gotta make food and farm more. Poop everywhere? Gotta clean. Faith level low? Fix it. Health level low? Fix it. Issue? Fix it. And the loop repeats itself ad nauseam.

Listen, I do chores in my own home already. I've played enough Animal Crossing and had enough "chore simulator" arguments for one lifetime. I have no problem with a game having chores in it, but there has to be some kind of tangible payoff if you're gonna put a checklist of chores in a video game. And by nature of it being a CULT, "Smiling Happy Faces" and undying loyalty from cult members you "rescued" is a fairly fucked up reward. It could be argued that this is the point, but it doesn't make for a fun video game to me. I play video games for fun.

I'm glad I brought up Animal Crossing just there, because the satisfaction I get from creating a "neat and tidy" "home" for my cult members is on-par with the enjoyment I got from molding the island to my every whim and desire with no real consequences in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Minimal.

And that's completely ignoring the combat half of the game.

The combat half is fine. Not great. Fine. It would be even better were it not constantly interrupted by the day-night cycle and the people farming gameplay loop. I get that this was probably a deliberate design decision, but it's a decision that actively interrupts progress for no reason other than to remind you that you've got "people at home."

In contrast, the lessons I'm picking up from the gameplay hints that this game is dropping via the pressure of time, aging cult members, and the sheer number of times it suggests doing mean things to your cult members, is to view my cult members as dispensable.

No matter how much you'd like it to be, this isn't a family. You're collecting pawns. You're repeatedly given choices that seem to imply otherwise, but just remember: this is the all-messed-up cute animal game.

Absolutely depthless.

There's very little actual direct involvement from your cult while you're fighting. You're just getting stronger through the farming gameplay loop giving you more points to get more resources to get more upgrades to get more point generators to get more points and you get the idea. They're separate, except that the game will remind you that the other exists and needs tending to, so they're forced to exist together. Actually separating it from the farming half completely, the enemies and bosses are unremarkable and, with some minor exceptions, there aren't all that many core differences between weapons and curse types.

The closest immediate comparison I have of a game integrating combat and farming together well that I actually enjoy is Pikmin. Literally any of them. There's an element of direct resource/people management in both Cult of the Lamb and Pikmin games, and, while they are completely different genres with the former being a farming-sim roguelite and the latter being an RTS game, I just think Cult of the Lamb is somehow way worse about both creating a consistent element of emotional attachment to your "underlings" (which could be argued is the point of the whole game, which is even worse) and the collecting element. It wants you to exploit them as much as you can, and there's no option not to. It doesn't even bother pretending like you're capable of making moral choices here, you know what you are and you know what you're doing.

It has about as much subtlety as, I don't know, what's a good example...

The Jonestown Massacre?

Yeah, that's a good example.

I don't mind a game portraying religious extremism and cult behavior, but if your gameplay is mid, at least have literally anything to say about your subject matter.

Whatever. Cute marketable lamb character doing weird things a cute marketable lamb character wouldn't normally be doing, very clever and never been done before. Twitch streamers delight. Money all around.

Anyway, just play Binding of Isaac again instead of getting this.

If I'm gonna play twitchcore bullshit, it should at least be good.

Cult of the Lamb would be more impressive if ActRaiser hadn’t done the same thing a whole lot better decades ago. The dungeon crawling lasts too long for how uncomplex and imprecise the combat is and the lack of meaningful dialogue or events when managing your cult removes a big emotional hook from the proceedings. Also, do NOT play this on Switch. Loading times are abysmal and I experienced two crashes. Hard to get too upset since it was free via game trial, but these technical issues should have been patched by this point.

"Woah its like cutesy cartoon animals but like they are a running a dark satanic cult so quirky." This gag in all its tiring monotony sums how I felt playing three hours of this game. Its all just so banal. An isometric hack n slash rougelite with perma stat upgrades where you just dodge and hit and grind to get stronger.

The cult management aspect could be interesting but so far its bare bones and amounts to little more then repetitive busy work between runs. There are flashes of interest here and there. Like a run where one of my followers was cursed with starvation during a run which certainly encourages you to go fast (though on a side note I took my sweet time on this run and finished it in 20 minutes and my followers hunger gauge had barely drained so perhaps its just a fake timer). There is certainly a lot more to unlock here- perhaps depth is lurking just around the corner- but very little has surprised or interested me in the 3 hours I played.

When judging a piece of media, I think it’s important to meet whatever it is you’re judging where it’s at. One of the most frustrating things in media critique space for me is how often will the critiquers either misunderstand the intent of a work, misrepresent it’s budget and scope, or mismanage their expectations of it going in, and then proceed to levy criticisms at this work that, essentially, have nothing to do with reality. Like when people say that New-Vegas is a shitty game because it has shitty combat, or that Minecraft is dumb because “there’s no point”.

With Cult of the Lamb my only real expectations from playing the demo back in June were that it was going to sound and look amazing, and (puts on a satanic cowboy hat) by golly – they did it! (the hat runs away). You’ve heard this a million times by now since the visuals pop out like crazy, but the art-style Massive Monster were going for was realised almost perfectly, and I really dug the soundtrack. Sure, the theme for the first dungeon is the only real memorable one out of the four that’s there, but the rest are bopping too, and other tracks like the ones playing in the village or in the other NPC areas are really nice and soothing.

The combat is also pretty awesome, even though after the demo I wasn’t expecting much from that department. The sheer agility Da Lamb always has is amazing, with you being able to dodge roll-animation cancel out of any action besides casting spells (which gives you I-frames anyway). The weapon selection is not the best, but each one feels different from another in pretty substantial ways, and adds variety to your base moveset. With a dagger you’ll be zipping around as fast as you can doing small damage quickly, with a hammer you’ll be carefully weighing every opportunity to strike vs every opportunity to eat a fireball to a face, and an axe allows you to do massive damage twice if you roll after every slow-ish attack you make to negate recovery time. Spells also work nicely, though I wish there were more opportunities for you to use them in combat; right now they feel constrained. Overall, it’s kind of one of my favourite melee combat systems of any roguelike I’ve played so far, which I guess is not high praise given that most are either about shooting or are turn-based, but still.

But honestly, my favourite part of this has to be the tone. Yeah, probably sounds weird, but I’m a big sucker for disparate ideas, emotions and influences coming together in a way that reconciles and harmonises them, instead of keeping them separate. Cult of the Lamb could’ve easily been a straight-forward cute action-game where the fucked up Eldrich Horror shit was downplayed or not done with enough effort, but this game works because it’s authentically both cute and horrifying all the time in almost equal measure. It could’ve been as bland and annoying as Happy Tree Friends, where a story about cute animals doing cute stuff was just sometimes interrupted by gore, but the different tones just click in the best way possible.

Unfortunately, Cult of the Lamb game is perfectly willing and able to hook you in and get your mind racing from your earliest minutes with just the premise alone, which, to put it mildly, gave me expectations.

So what’s the premise? You’re a cute little lamb being dragged off to an altar to be slaughtered for the sake of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, before a mysterious god, locked in chains in some ethereal dimension, gives you his power and recruits you as his servant, giving you the task of starting your own cult of other cute animals and killing off the gods that tried to kill you. And gameplay-wise, what you’re looking on with this one is a whole ensemble-cast of genres: action-rogue-like, farming sim, management game, and adventure game, with mini-games thrown in.

With all that being considered, I don’t think it’s physically possible to not be excited for what’s to come when you get going. Sadly though, while being a well-made game I was glad to play through, I don’t think Cult of the Lamb really delivers on any of it’s (admittedly implicit) promises.

The weakest part of this genre-mashing is definitely the rogue-like. It’s okay-ish with enemy and item variety (though all the fucking “Receive X-amount of blue hearts” items are definitely annoying to have), but like I’ve said, the weapon variety is sorely lacking. This game basically went the West of Dead route, – having a small number of weapon types that have a few variations that apply a unique status effect. Specifically, Cult of the Lamb has 5 main weapon types and 6 variations, including “Godly”, which just gives you basic weapons, but they’re stronger now! That’s not even to mention that only one of those status-effect variations is really useful – the poison one. The rest could be interesting, but they…just don’t seem to work? I mean, they technically do, but the chance for effects like “Heal after killing an enemy” or “Posses a slain foe” seem so small that I’ve seldom encountered them even a few times during all of the runs I’ve picked them up on. “Critical damage” weapon variations are better, but even then, they just don’t seem to make a tangible difference. The same goes for spells – there are like 4 or 5 types of spells you can get, but all the same status-effect special editions, which are almost exactly as boring and meaningless as those of the weapons.

The management/farm sim part of this game is not the best either. It doesn’t take even a few hours before you’ve found enough cultists, unlocked all the OP rituals and built enough infrastructure before your sect is almost entirely self-sufficient, automated, and fully taken care of, and you only need to actively visit to, bizarrely, cook food, take care of dead bodies and unclog the outhouses, which I guess my cultists are not able to take care of themselves. In fact, they’re so dependant on Da Lamb that they will piss, shit and cry forever, until their Messiah comes to bury the body they’re just vomiting on when walking by, or to unclog the toilets they abandoned to shit in behind the temple instead, or to eat some fucking grass instread of starving to death. Kind of off-topic, but the funny thing about shit in this game, in particular, is that it’s given tons of attention: there are a few dishes you can make that will instantly make a cultist shit themselves in public after eating, there are quests you can do for your cultists where you make them or their brethren eat literall bowls of poo, and there is a whole-ass Janitor Station that allows your flock to (finally) wipe after going № 2, but even that doesn’t give them the ability to flush after visiting an outhouse. Sad!

Especially sad given that your cultists can die and go to hell for all you care – you’re literally given no real gameplay incentive to take care of them. They can dissent and leave, they can die of illness or old age constantly, but who cares? What you need to progress the game is just to have a certain number of guys in your cult, which is not hard to do considering how easy it is to find new recruits or to quell the rumblings of the old. Just keep the bare minimum standard of living up and you’ll do fine.

That’s not even to speak of the fact that there is little to no personalization or characterization involved with your Sheep-Believers. You can change what animal they are when recruiting, change the colour of their skin and give them a name, but it’s still hard to even remember them, let alone get attached. Even when you have pink unicorns with bloody horns and people with white Cthulhu heads named “Dickn’balls” running around your camp, from that far away they all begin to blend together, and they don’t have any interesting behaviour to call upon when trying to tell them apart. There was definitely an attempt to give some traits to your guys, but there are like 8 possible traits your cultist may have, all inconsequential and all completely unrelated to their behaviour on camp or how they respond to your actions. Sure, some might get sad for a minute about the fact that a fellow cult-member died, but this, in reality, doesn’t affect shit, and you always forget who has what even after seeing it a dozen times, not to mention that a lot of these minute set-backs can be mitigated by upgrading your cult to automatically value stuff like cannibalism or human sacrifice.

Speaking of cult upgrades: they kinda suck. It is fun, at the beginning, to declare a fast because of your religious value of hard work and humility, then to sacrifice an old guy to your god because of how much your cult loves ritualistic homicide and the olds being eaten, only to then give them mushrooms and do whatever the fuck you want for a whole day, but this whole Ritual and Doctrine system is really unbalanced. At first I thought that the Doctrines were mutually exclusive or at least synergetic, meaning that having a doctrine of hard work will somehow connect with a doctrine of “big money and house good”, but no – every one of the five doctrine trees can be fully upgraded all at once, and it’s not even hard to do. In the beginning every new doctrine/commandment stone I’ve unlocked was a real reward for a series of challenges, but quickly I’ve amassed so much that I’ve upgraded my cult in every way possible, with no feeling like that was an actual achievement. Again – this game is like 20-ish hours long, and in terms of progression fizzles out at 12 or so. That is super upsetting, because just making every new level of all the upgrade trees cost a bit more would make this system a thousand times more satisfying.

It’s especially upsetting because Cult of the Lamb partially exists in two whole genres known for how long or potentially infinite they are, and it fails to live up to both of them in terms of the breath and the depth of it’s content. Cult of the Lamb is a well-done game, and given that it’s a game made by a total of about 20 core developers, it is kind of amazing how great it turned out to be. But playing it I just kept thinking “what if that was a bit more developed”, or “what if this was expanded upon”, or “what if they changed this”, while enjoying or even loving the stuff that’s already there. That’s the worst kind of great game – one that promises to be even better and just fails to deliver in a million tiny ways.

Maybe I’m just being petty or entitled, but I can’t stress enough how fun and addictive Cult of the Lamb has been. It’s just a shame that the ambitions or the budget of the team didn’t allow for it to grow into something more than a game that I will mostly only remember the visuals of a month from now.

Extremamente divertido esse simulador de vila.

Como pode um misto de rogue-like e gerenciamento pode ser tão bem feito e divertido?

Jogo difícil, charmoso e com um humor as vezes mórbido, não tem como dar errado.

As constantes atualizações trazem muito conteúdo completamente grátis e a Massive Monster em conjunto cm a Devolver devem ser aplaudidas por isto.

Recomendo muito pra quem gosta de rogue-like, o gerenciamento vem de bônus se tu curte um Animal Crossing ou Stardew Valley.

Part Animal Crossing base building, part Rogue-lite that comes together in a cute package that is better than the sum of its parts.

The above comparison may be a bit overused but it's honestly quite appropriate for what Cult of the Lamb has to offer. The gameplay loop is - run around in a dungeon collecting materials, money, and recruiting followers, and then retire to your cult to work on building out your base and putting your followers to work while working on your relationships.

The thing is, I wouldn't say that any one specific part of the game is good enough to stand on its own. There are much better rogue-lites and there are better base building/resource management games. That said, Cult of the Lamb somehow brings those parts together in a package that absolutely shines better than any of its individual components do on their own. I don't know if I'd play this game for just the cult or just the combat, but those two systems balance each other so perfectly that I enjoyed bouncing from one to the other throughout the game.

Still, this game could've been a perfect game had those elements been a bit better.

The combat leaves something to be desired. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but it's quite basic and it has no way to mitigate RNG the way other games in the rogue genre often do. In fact, the randomness of your builds gets worse as you progress through the game. The deeper into the game you get, you unlock more weapons, more spells, and more modifier cards. The pool of potential items you can find on your run gets about 6 times larger by the end of the game compared to the beginning of the game. I was constantly grappling with weapons or spells I didn't enjoy and had no way to toss them. I honestly wish this game had more of a deck-building mechanic to it allowing you remove certain things you don't want from the pool so you can refine your runs a bit. But honestly, even if they had that, there's not much of a reason to keep doing runs. Runs push the story forward and help you find followers, but I never really had any shortage of followers or materials so there's not much of a need to do runs outside of what's needed for the story unless you're doing a side quest.

The base building and resource management aspect of the game has far fewer flaws overall. What shocked me the most about Cult of the Lamb is that I spent far more time building out my cult than dungeon crawling. Partially because there's more to do in your base, but also partially because I think that part of the game is just better. Honestly, the biggest issue with that is the pacing ends up being a bit off. I had finished my skill tree when I was only about halfway into the game. And while I didn't have this problem, I also had some friends who maxed out their cult well before reaching the end. I think it would've been nice if they had built some better pacing into the game.

Overall, despite the drawbacks with the Rogue-lite half, I think Cult of the Lamb is a really fun and inventive new game. The visual style is a delightful contrast to the grim theme. I enjoyed building out my cult and naming all my followers to that it was more tragic when they died. I loved my time with the game and I definitely think it's worth playing.

+ Great balance of combat and base building
+ Fantastic visual design that makes light of the grim theme
+ Base building is fun and addicting.
+ The dungeon exploration is fun enough even if it's not amazing

- RNG gets worse as you progress in the game
- Some general pacing issues
- Overlapping cultists in the base make it hard to select what you want occasionally
- Lots of bugs at launch make it worth waiting a bit on

Played through NSO game trials. Reminds me of Hades mixed with Animal Crossing which feels weird to say. I can see the appeal and the premise is pretty interesting but I don't enjoy the gameplay loop. The mechanics seem to have a lot of depth and complexity and personally I think it's a lot to grasp all at once. Not a fan of 'textbox after textbox' tutorials since I don't absorb it well and forget it quickly. Putting aside personal issues, the game seems fine if you enjoy rogue-likes mixed with chore sims. The art has a cool style and the music was nice to listen to; The devs definitely put care and effort into making this an interesting game.

Side note: The switch version had lots of stuttering that got annoying pretty quick. Cutscenes were choppy and gameplay usually runs slower than 30 fps. Maybe pick this up on a different platform if you're interested.