Developer: Massive Monster
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Genre: Hybrid Town Manager and Roguelite
Rated on: PlayStation 4
Also available for: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Series S/X, PC
Sometimes it can be very helpful to let a game sit with you for a while to form an opinion about it. Once an instinctive response to something settles down, you may find that you end up appreciating certain aspects of it much more than you initially did — though you’ll probably cool off on less phenomenal aspects more often. Unfortunately, cult of the Lamb, the hybrid game of roguelite and city builder about cute animals making blood sacrifices falls into the latter category.
When I first started playing Cult of the Lamb I was quite charmed by it. The game puts the player in the fleece of the eponymous Lamb, the last of its kind and the one prophesied to bring about the return of “The One Who Waits”, an evil god sealed long ago by his equally evil brothers. and sisters. After being successfully sacrificed in the early minutes of the game as an attempt to thwart this prophecy, the lamb is resurrected by The One Who Waits and told to gather followers for their own personal cult so they can speed up the prophecy to its inevitable conclusion. To this end, the Lamb takes on two different, yet interrelated fields of activity; manage their commune and dive into dungeons.
Dungeon runs play out in pretty standard rogue-lite fashion: the Lamb has access to a melee weapon and a projectile curse that they must use to blast their way through hordes of devotees toward enemy gods until they finally reach the enemy gods themselves. The curse can be charged up to a limit by killing enemies or dealing damage to bosses. Dungeons are divided into several nodes that form branching paths to the goal, each of which can consist of a series of battle spaces or any event, ranging from a free full healing or windfall for the commune to a curse of an enemy god that fortifies enemies . Even if you were unlucky enough to stumble across the last of those abilities, the enemies in question probably won’t pose much of a threat, as dungeon crawling is generally very easy. Frankly, the much bigger frustration is a lack of explanations for what many of the symbols on nodes mean until you actually enter them. Dungeon crawling isn’t that interesting to be honest – it’s a bit too simplistic, even aside from the lack of challenge it poses, to really hold my attention.
Which brings me to my other major complaint about: Cult of the Lamb, meaning it’s very easy to get completely absorbed in the cult simulator aspect of it to the point that you’re basically doing everything there is to do in that area, while completely neglecting the roguelite aspects. I admit that the cult building is compelling in itself, consisting of a solid feedback loop of the need to keep your flock happy so that they will produce more faith for you which you can then use for things that make them even happier and thus even more produce more faith. Faith in this game manifests as two separate resource bars, one of which is used to expand and upgrade the combat abilities of the Lamb and the other is used to unlock new buildings and amenities for the cult commune that have an increasing degree of automation within enable the sect. cult and/or herd keeping easier.
(One of the few things you can’t streamline, though, is that you have to keep pressed the button to collect all your faith in the great sanctuary in the middle of your congregation, a small detail that still drove me crazy when it came time to collect.)
Ironically, the cult simulation aspect of the game is far more successful at producing that “just a little bit more” feel than the roguelite side of things. The villagers the Lamb recruits for their cult are for the most part randomly generated, each given a name, a small selection of attributes that make them better or worse for the cult, and a random appearance taken from a pool of forest creatures available. are in both natural and technicolor flavors. When a villager is first recruited, the lamb is given free rein to customize his appearance and name to his liking, even the few villagers who not randomly generated and are instead taken from the service of enemy gods after being defeated as a middle boss. Managing the villagers’ health, hunger, happiness and loyalty to you is just as important as building buildings for the town if you want to grow your cult to its fullest potential, and some players are likely to become attached to a few of their obedient supplications. I myself developed a certain fondness for my dear followers Thebrety, Jorts and Sanic II among others, although as I progressed through the game and my numbers continued to increase I eventually reached a point where even keeping up with everyone else felt like too much trouble, and I started calling it a little bit.
Many times I’ve spent several consecutive in-game days scurrying around my commune (and the rest of the non-combat zone, which includes a fishing area) trying to enter one or two more cult levels, another building, another doctrine declared, while completely neglecting the dungeons. In fact I did this So a lot that by the time I unlocked almost everything on the cult manager side I wasn’t even halfway through the dungeon crawling side, which is less than ideal because the game is designed in such a way that the two supposed to inform and feed each other much more evenly. Even if I wasn’t looking at it from a balance issues perspective, it made me feel like I ran out of things a bit with the cult long before I was done with the game as a whole, and it then lost a significant chunk amount of magic.
Cult of the Lamb is also, at least on the ps4 version, rather unstable. Far too often my game crashed or crashed so much that I had to quit the menu and lost fifteen minutes of progress managing my commune. Furthermore, framerate drops and stutters were shockingly common, which is especially unfortunate because the game’s presentation is a delight when it works as intended. The bright, colorful and smoothly drawn visuals complement the dark tone quite well, even during the more gore-tastic moments, like watching a member of your cult be dragged to hell by a bunch of tentacles. Even aside from juxtaposition being the whole point, I have to give the art team props for not making the dissonance outright shocking.
in the end, Cult of the Lamb is one of those games where you get out what you put in, and unfortunately it can be hard to want put a lot into it. I suspect that many players will not form a specific attachment to their cult members or to the more structural development of their commune, even before they have run out of things to do, and for them I would not recommend this title. Even for those who would like to, my recommendation is still tentative, colored by the caveats that it’s a structurally flawed game with some very hit and miss aspects and more than a few performance issues. although Cult of the Lamb certainly has its charms, when I compare it to other roguelikes I doubt it will attract a lot of devotees in the long run.
Cult of the Lamb
7.0
Good
Cult of the Lamb has some strong ideas that suffer from imbalance, performance issues and boring dungeon crawling.
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Gameplay
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Presentation
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pleasure
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