Cult of the Lamb

Cult of the Lamb is an action roguelite that combines standard dungeon crawling with a side city simulator. Unfortunatly it ends up feeling a bit underbaked in both aspects, and its a game that has a very clear ending in sight.

The best part about the game is clearly its cute cartoonish aesthetics. It never stopped being amusing seeing these cute characters performing blood sacrifices for your cult. Its really aesthetically pleasing to the eye and the sound design is also captivating.

The dungeon crawling is very standard for the genre. You get a melee weapon and a sorcery to wield, and the combat is very roll focused. None of the enemies are particularly creative, and they become a bit too spongey in the later areas. The roguelite elements of the dungeon crawls are quite banal, with a very limited amount of passive powerups available, and due to the short nature of the runs the possible builds (and synergies) are also very tame. Its perhaps the easiest roguelite I have ever played, which takes away the need to invest in the town management.

If the dungeon crawling is on the average side, than the town building and management is just mediocre. There is a lot of it that feels like busy work, including some timers that feel ripped out of a mobile game. It doesnt feel rewarding to invest time build your town since so little of it feeds onto the dungeon crawling. Its also hard to get attached to your villagers since they die to quick, and the best way to use them is to sacrifice them in rituals for passive upgrades to your character.

Despite its shortcomings, its still a pleasant 10 hour playthrough. It fails to bring about the replayable aspects of roguelites, and the more methodical cravings of a city builder, but I would say that its artstyle and mood is just about enough for a light recommendation.

An accessible hybrid of an Animal Crossing-like sim and a Hades-like roguelite. Either element remains quite basic, but the fact that you can spend what you’ve earned in combat in building a village and spreading your cult makes the experience much more rewarding and motivating.

Days in-game pass so fast that I was barely able to catch up with all the activities available, yet I still got the chance to focus on either the simulation or dungeon crawling depending on my mood each day. With the difficulty set on default, the level of challenge felt just right if not a little too easy towards the end, granted you took proper care of your cult and followers.

Although your followers are treated as little more than expendables to eventually sacrifice in exchange for experience and resources, I have to say I would have appreciated more focus on each character. There are hints at their personal traits as well as their interpersonal relationships, but they rarely impact the gameplay. The role of doctrines in morphing the way the cult acts could also have provided much more depth if properly expanded.

All in all, the game still guaranteed a lot of quality time and lighthearted fun, especially for mobile sessions. The ending and final boss felt a little underwhelming, but it might also be due to the fact that I ended up maxing up my stats a little too soon.

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.

Cult of the Lamb is probably the best game to come out so far this year, and I don't know if it's going to be topped going into the latter third of releases (yes, I'm including Elden Ring). Cult is just a ludicrously smart game - it's not some funny gimmick title, but rather an insanely fun, 15-hour romp that's one half Isaac-esque roguelite, and another half twisted, wicked fast Animal Crossing. Massive Monster, the studio behind Cult, knew exactly what they were doing here, and the attention to detail over every single minute gameplay aspect is commendable to say the least. Pick this up, it's not worth skipping whatsoever.