The recently released Cult of the Lamb hasn’t disappointed fans, despite being one of the most anticipated indie titles in recent memory. With a unique blend of roguelike combat and city-building mechanics, the game thrives on its replayability and fresh experience.
Game Rant recently spoke with Cult of the Lamb art director James Pearmain on the title’s early development concepts, its horribly fun art style, and the inspiration behind some of its intimidating and memorable foes. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: To begin with, which aspect of? Cult of the Lambs development process was the hardest to get right? What part did you especially want to be absolutely perfect?
A: The first big challenge we faced was coming up with the right idea. We knew we wanted to combine roguelike combat and resource gathering with some sort of colony base building simulator, but it took us a long time to come up with the idea of Cult of the Lamb. A first concept was about Boy Scouts breeding magical weapons, then the game was a ‘make your own hell’ simulator in the afterlife, then you played as a God and his tribe who lived on top of a floating whale… We have a lot of work resistance before we finally landed on the idea of running a cult of animal worshipers in the forest.
The next biggest challenge was getting the two sides of the game to work together in harmony. Traditionally, roguelikes have been all about survival, getting as deep as possible, making long runs and holding out as long as possible… But we also wanted a day and night cycle so that your cult members have their own daily routines and needs that need to be met every day. met. Achieving these 2 things and getting them to work together in a smooth and accessible way took a lot of work and design iterations.
Q: Roguelikes have become more and more popular as a genre in recent years, what would you say is the biggest factor that Cult of the Lamb apart from other roguelikes?
A: This is a game about running your own cult. There are random dungeons with battles and bosses and all the things you would expect from a traditional roguelike… But building, growing and running your cult is central to the game. The base-building colony simulator is just as important as dungeon crawling, and the marriage of those two genres sets it apart from any other roguelike you’ve played.
Q: Would you say the game leans more towards a dungeon crawler or city-builder sim, or is it a fairly even split?
A: It’s pretty evenly distributed, but we also wanted to give players the freedom to lean more to both sides of the game if they wanted to. If you’d rather spend time with your cult, there are ways to gain resources and new followers without leaving. If you’d rather spend more time on Crusades, you can do that too. Ultimately you have to play both sides of the game to progress, but we wanted to provide some flexibility in what players can spend their time on.
Q: The game is cute dark, but how much of the evil can the player control? Can you choose to lead your cult through kindness or fear?
A: We definitely wanted to give players the choice to be good or bad. If you want to treat your followers well and be a kind and respected leader, you can do that. If you want to be a tyrannical maniac who sacrifices every follower who doubts you and then makes the others eat poop, you can do that too!
As you progress through the game, you will set up new doctrines for your sect and be given a choice between two different doctrines to unlock. Will you choose the wedding ritual and marry a follower, or the ritual pit and have two followers fight to the death? Do you choose the ability to inspire your followers and generate more faith, or the ability to intimidate and scare them into working harder? The decisions you make will help determine what kind of cult leader you become.
Q: The four bishops seem fascinating, how much of an imminent threat do they pose during the game, and what was the process of making each of them so unique?
A: Yes, you will definitely see a lot of the bishops! Without giving too much away, we do have a story that runs through the game, and you’ll encounter more bishops as you get deeper into each of the 4 realms. We wanted these encounters to surprise players, give them backstory and build knowledge of the world.
In terms of their development process, like all characters in the game, each bishop is based on an animal, and they have their own realms based around these animals. Leshy is the Bishop of Darkwood and is a forest worm who can tunnel through the earth and has the power of a mighty tree. Kallamar is the Bishop of Anchordeep and is a monstrous eldritch squid with many tentacles who summons jellyfish minions to fight against you. We wanted them to be scary mysterious creatures that turn into huge monsters when you eventually fight them.
Q: If a player gets seriously far in the game, what does a high power level look like? How crazy do the late game skills get?
A: When you preach in your temple, you draw power from your followers and unlock new weapons and curses that will then appear on your crusades. You can also find and unlock new tarot cards that give various improvements and benefits, and then rare shiny tarot cards that have even stronger effects! You can get quite powerful, and certain combinations of weapons, curses, and stacked tarots can be super effective together.
Q: It seems that followers in the game can be influenced by “false prophets”, there will be some kind City of Salemlike social deduction mechanism to determine which members of the herd have been led astray, or does the player identify these followers through some other process?
A: It will be obvious when one of your followers has lost faith in you. Unhappy followers will eventually tell you and loudly try to persuade others to leave your cult. It is up to you how you handle this situation – will you speak to them quietly and re-educate them in the way of the Lamb? Do you throw them in jail so your other followers can laugh? Will you sacrifice them to the gods in front of your other followers, or kill them at night when no one is looking, and then serve them for breakfast? These are the decisions a leader must make.
Q: What was the art style process like to find the perfect mix of cute and grotesque, were there any limits you set on how extreme you were willing to take it?
A: The drawing style in our games has always been kind of cute and cartoonish, so basically it was the other way around – how can we make this world feel scary and dangerous when you’re away from the safety of your cult? These monsters look too cute, how can we make them scarier?! We decided quite early on that we wanted to add horror elements and dark themes to our cartoon style. We tried many ideas to find the right atmosphere for the monsters and hostile cult leaders. We wanted them to be scary, but not overly horrific, and feel grounded in their natural environment, rather than appear supernatural or demonic.
Q: You previously talked about a post-launch roadmap for: Cult of the Lambwhat does that look like now that the game is almost out?
A: Yes, we are expanding the game with free updates after launch – we are still working on the details of what will be in this. We like to respond to the community as soon as they start playing the game, making sure we focus on the areas people enjoy the most. We want to add more content to the endgame and more things to do after beating the story. We want more enemies and weapons and depth in the battle. We want to add more buildings, more ways to interact with your followers and more follower forms… There’s a lot we’d like to do!
You can expect a good roadmap for the updates sometime after launch.
Q: You’ve also said before that you didn’t want “gore for gore’s sake”, as seen in Happy Tree Friendswhat are some of the ways you have given meaning and importance to the game’s gruesome art style?
A: We’ve decided to go against the super-violence route – our last game Never give up had a lot of over-the-top cartoon gore and blood effects splashing all over, which was fun to do and provided lots of satisfying visual feedback, but also pushed the game overtly cartoonish and over-the-top. While the art style in Cult of the Lamb is still unashamedly cartoon, and we have curses and rituals and supernatural elements, we also wanted the visual direction to feel more natural and grounded within the cartoon style. The game still has moments of violence and horror, but we found that if you do it all the time, it loses its impact. Sometimes less is more.
Q: What do you think is the biggest factor affecting the replayability of Cult of the Lamb?
A: As mentioned before, the doctrine choices mean you can replay the game and choose a completely different set of rituals and unlocked skills, which will provide different ways of playing and interacting with your followers. Some players may choose to be an evil overlord on their first playthrough and next time be a holy leader who is kind and caring to their followers.
It’s also a game that’s bursting with customization options to unlock, with lots of decorations for your base and different animal shapes for your followers. When you defeat a mini-boss on a crusade, you send them back to your cult to be indoctrinated. You can then customize them and change their shape – so you could have a playthrough where you have a cult full of friendly monsters, and another with a cult full of purple cannibal pigs. Your cult, your rules!
Q: What aspect of the game do you like most for fans to explore?
A: The game has a colorful world to explore that is full of interesting characters to meet. There are thrilling, randomly generated dungeons full of gruesome enemies and massive monstrous bosses to fight, and an epic story that runs through them – but the things we want players to experience most are the stories they will create themselves. We’ve tried to make a game full of possibilities and systems that work together, and we hope that the relationships and interactions you have with your followers are the moments you will remember the most.
Q: Is there anything you would like to add to inform fans sooner? Cult of the Lambs release?
A: We just hope people like the game, and keep an eye out for free updates in the future. We consider the launch version of the game to be the original story of the Lamb and hope to expand the scope and depth of the game and its world over the coming months and years. Praise the Lamb!
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Cult of the Lamb is now available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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