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

Reviewed on Aug 26, 2022


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