Cult of the Lamb Review

Have you ever thought about starting your own cult? How about a cult made up of cute anthropomorphic animals? If you said yes to either of those questions then Massive Monster and Devolver Digital have just the game for you: Cult of the Lamb. If for some reason you answered no to both questions, Cult of the Lamb is still worth a look due to its unique blend of gameplay styles; half of which is roguelite action, and the other half is building a village and managing your cult, ensuring its survival and expansion.

The intro sets up the basis of the game with your character (a small lamb) on the chopping block, about to be executed on order of the four Bishops who rule over the land. They say that you are the last lamb and that once your character is killed the prophecy can never be fulfilled. The prophecy states that a lamb will help The One Who Waits escape their captivity and then overthrow the Bishops, thus regaining its spot as the one true god. As the executioner’s ax blade falls, the screen goes white and you awaken to see that you are in a new area. The One Who Waits is there to greet you. He offers you the chance to be revived but only if you help fulfill the prophecy, meaning you will have to start a cult in order to accumulate power so you’ll be able to defeat the four bishops. 

I’m not really big on management or base builder games, but I do like action roguelites. I was curious how the two styles of gameplay would fit together. Neither side of Cult of the Lamb’s gameplay truly stands out, but they synchronize well together; they balance each other out and have multiple synergistic systems. To become stronger in your crusade runs you need to upgrade multiple aspects of your cult, such as the members’ devotion to you for instance, which is attained by giving a daily sermon – the more cultists you have, the more points you will earn. This upgrade tree makes a huge difference because it unlocks much more powerful weapon variants and a variety of potent curses (the game’s name for spells). The cult building portion of the game takes place in a medium-sized area. You are given a slew of tutorials at the start of the game and more throughout your journey explaining the mechanics of the base building/cult management portion. The cult area is a grassy expanse with some trees and rocks of various sizes strewn throughout. You can collect resources by interacting with the trees and rocks (simply hold down the A button), but you’ll want to assign your cult members to collect the resources for you. As your cult grows you’ll be able to assign many different tasks for the members to carry out, but at the beginning, there are only a few options. Once you have a few resources you can start building certain pre-selected structures. As you play you will expand your catalog of options and will be able to add a little flair to the layout of your cult’s home. Don’t expect Minecraft levels of customization or creative potential. You are only building on one plane and are limited by the grid-based placement system.

There are a number of systems that you must learn about and more importantly, learn how to manage in order to build a thriving, successful cult. The three most important of these aspects are Faith, Hunger, and Sickness. Faith is the overall well-being/happiness of your cult. The easiest ways to increase your cult’s faith meter are by giving a daily sermon and performing rituals. The faith meter will go down if your cult isn’t happy, and that usually happens when the hunger or sickness meters are low, but there are a number of other things that will bring it down as well. I felt like the game could have been more clear on that, I spent a portion of my early playthrough struggling to maintain the faith meter, and later I realized it was because I was getting penalized for waking up my followers to give them sermons (this happens if you do any actions at your temple during the night). When the faith meter gets too low some of your cult members will start to dissent, which will spread throughout the cult if not dealt with. To help keep track of all this, three meters are displayed at the top left of your screen whenever you are in the cult building portion of the game. Keeping your cult’s hunger and sickness at bay sounds like it would be easy, but at the beginning of the game, it can be a real challenge. 

For the first hour or two of gameplay, I felt less like a cult leader and more like a butler or nanny because it seemed like I was spending all my time cooking and cleaning for my cult when really I just wanted to get back to crusading. Preparing food isn’t that difficult, but the resources needed to do so are scarce at the start, and the recipes you can make aren’t very beneficial to your cult members. The menu where you select what to make will tell you the pros and cons of each meal. Many of these early meals have a 15-25% chance of making your cult members poop instantly, making them instantly sick, or making them tired. Some early recipes, such as a bowl of grass clippings or a bowl of poop, can make your cult members upset as well which will lower the Faith meter. On the flip side, many of the more fancy recipes you can cook later have positive benefits such as increasing faith or causing some resources to instantly appear. Some meals can even heal the sick. Sickness is the third system tied to the well-being of your cult, this is of course related to whether or not you have any sick members, but it is also related to how clean your cult is.

I’m sure you’ve heard of the book “Everybody Poops”; well that is true in the world of Cult of the Lamb as well. After eating, a cult member will go out into the grass and relieve themselves, and to make matters even ickier they can throw up as well. When a cult member dies most of the cult members around them will start throwing up, so you need to swoop in and dispose of the body and then quickly clean up the mess they made, otherwise cult members will get sick and your faith meter will plummet. Luckily later on you may assign cult members to clean up duty, and you also get the option to build outhouses (they still need to be emptied though). Cult members dying was a constant strain on my playthrough. There is a little info feed on the left side of the screen that keeps you updated on the status of your cult. I can’t tell you how many times I had to cut a crusade short because some dumb loser in my cult kicked the bucket and I knew the rest of my cult would be standing around the newly dead corpse puking their guts out, making a huge mess and causing my faith meter to plummet.

There are a few tools at your disposal to help you progress and grow as a cult leader. One of the first things you build is a shrine at the center of the map. The cult members will pray at the shrine and as they do the shrine will collect devotion – it is earned in a number of other ways as well, such as leveling up your followers. Once enough devotion is collected you will gain a divine inspiration point to spend on the unlock tree. This unlock tree (there are a few others) is tied to the building and management side of your cult and gives you the option to unlock new structures to build, such as the aforementioned janitor station, or outhouses.

The other tools are all contained in the temple (another early construction project). Each day you can give a sermon to your cult and you will gain points based on the number of members and how high their loyalty level is. The points fill up a bar and once filled you will be able to unlock an item on a different upgrade tree. This one is related to the crusades, so it is extremely useful and important to make use of daily sermons. You can unlock new weapon variants, such as poisoned weapons, more starting health, new curses, more fervor (the game’s name for mind points), plus a few more options. Filling out this upgrade tree made a huge difference in the difficulty of the game, once I rose a few ranks and unlocked a bunch of stuff I felt like I was breezing through most of the crusade portion; I was having a blast though, and it should be noted that the game has four difficulty options.

Your church allows you to declare new doctrines for your cult. These are earned by collecting three commandment stones which make a slab. You gain stones from defeating minibosses and from leveling up your cult members. The doctrines are an interesting feature, they allow you to customize your cult behind the scenes, setting their core beliefs. Before you declare a new doctrine you will be given two choices that will determine which rituals you will be able to perform and how your cult will react in a certain situation. For example, in the sustenance category, the first choice you are given is between the Ritual Fast and the Feasting Ritual. Performing the fasting ritual will cause your cult members to not be hungry for three days, but their faith will go down. The feast ritual gathers your cult for a large meal allowing them to fill their bellies and hunger meter and raise the faith meter. Each has its benefits, I went with the fast ritual because I was having a hard time finding the resources to make food; I also pictured myself doing the ritual and then crusading for three straight in-game days, but that never happened as there was always some emergency or other at my cult. Agarath has died, Hejul is dissenting, and the list goes on. There are five doctrine categories in all and each has four levels, meaning you’ll get to make twenty decisions that will shape your cult.

The structure of the dungeon-crawling roguelite half of the game is relatively simple. There are four dungeons you can play, one for each of the Bishops. Each dungeon has a different theme, with different environmental decorations, but the only one that I thought really stood out was Anchordeep, which is aquatic-themed. I liked how the lighting made it look like you were underwater. Overall the art style fits extremely well with the game. The characters and art assets are 2D but placed in a 3D space. The art has a cute, cartoon-like quality but employs many gory details as well. Each bishop you defeat ends up in essentially a bloody meat pile with a head. The art isn’t super hi-def but it looks fantastic and most of the assets don’t give off the appearance of being flat – something that you might expect from 2D assets. It seems obvious that this art style was chosen to get more eyes on the game; it has the cartoony look that has become common in one corner of the indie game scene, and while it definitely reminds me of the art style of other games such as The Binding of Isaac, Massive Monster have created a look that feels unique to Cult of the Lamb.

Each of the four levels has its own set of enemies, such as the spider-like creatures in the Silk Cradle dungeon. The dungeons are made up of a series of connected rooms, and the mini-map layout is very similar to the one found in top-down Zelda games or more recent games such as Binding of Isaac or Undermine. Most rooms are enemy encounter rooms where the entrance and exits will lock until all enemies are defeated (this usually only takes at most 30 seconds). Some rooms have NPC encounters such as the tarot card dealer, whereas others might just have some free items. You are rewarded with a treasure chest at the end of each small dungeon. You are then shown a map with branching paths and you can pick which room you’d like to travel to next. Each one has an icon that informs you what will be within. There is a nice mix here with many resource-gathering sections that are only one room. Another icon I was always on the lookout for was the follower icon; these also consist of only one room, but you have to fight a few waves of enemies to save the creature who you can then add to your flock. The final encounter on the map is always another dungeon-style encounter with multiple rooms, but at the end of these, you will fight a miniboss or a Bishop. To unlock a new dungeon, you simply need to reach a certain number of cult members – the fourth and final dungeon unlocks if you have twelve followers. I sort of lost track of the other dungeons and focused on the first one, and after defeating that level’s Bishop, I was able to unlock the three other levels because I had plenty of followers. The areas get progressively harder, but because I focused on upgrading my cult, I didn’t have much trouble with the game while playing on normal difficulty. 

The actual gameplay of the dungeon-delving crusade portion of the game is sort of a blend between The Binding of Isaac and Curse of the Dead Gods. Your two forms of attack are a close-quarters melee weapon and a curse (magic). Most of these are ranged attacks; either shots, lobs, or a cone in front of your character that gets bigger depending on how much you charge the attack. At the start of each crusade, you are given one weapon and one curse. There are only five types of weapons, and they are not equally good. The dagger is straight trash because it has such a small reach. I didn’t like the claws at first either until I realized that they have an uncharacteristically long reach. I also liked the Ax and hammer because they do the most damage per hit and often times on the bosses you only have a chance to get one attack in at a time, but I’ve heard some people complain about how slow the hammer is – which is true.

There are twenty-five curses in total giving us much more variety here than with the weapons. Some are very strong and most can really help you get out of a dicey situation. My favorite is The Hounds of Fate which shoots multiple projectiles that seek out the enemies. The enemies also attack with melee and ranged attacks. Fortunately, all the enemies have a tell as to when they are about to attack, some of them flash briefly, while others might pull their weapon back to wind up for an attack. Sometimes the ranged attacks create a sort of bullet hell style feel, and due to the viewpoint, it can be difficult to dodge the attacks. Despite the simple nature of the crusading I really enjoyed the gameplay, and I kept thinking about it and wanted to get back to it while I was in the cult building portion of the game. Something that I really like about Cult of the Lamb’s roguelite, crusade portion of gameplay is how each run takes on average less than ten minutes. I like games that split their gameplay up into bite-sized chunks, and Cult of the Lamb does it perfectly. To get to each Bishop you have to beat three minibosses, meaning you have to do three separate runs through the dungeon. This is a good way to ensure you aren’t away from your cult for too long.

Once you beat a bishop you can replay that dungeon in its entirety; playing through four crusades and fighting a boss at the end of each. Luckily you can return to your cult in between sections without any penalty. I should mention that similar to other rougelites there is a penalty for dying: you lose a percentage of the resources you’ve collected on that run, usually about 25% (which isn’t too bad). You can also get an upgrade (another persistent unlock tree) that allows you to return to your cult at any time during a crusade; simply hold down the right bumper, and as long as you don’t get attacked while the short timer counts down you will return safely to your cult, but with 10% of your crusade’s resources lost as a penalty.

One final thing I loved about Cult of the Lamb is the insane amount of activities at your disposal. Sometimes I get bored playing games and need to take a break and come back later because I feel like I’m experiencing too much of the same thing. That is far from the case here. Besides the two main gameplay systems that complement each other wonderfully, there is a lot of other stuff to do. As you play each of the four dungeons you will unlock the ability to travel to other locations in the outside world. These locations have interesting inhabitants that give you quests and sell you things like tarot cards and decoration blueprints. In addition, some of the locations have specific activities that you can only engage in there. The Lonely shack is a meeting place for creatures to play a dice-based game that you can bet money on called knucklebones, and for a simple in-game minigame, it’s surprisingly fun. At Pilgrim’s passage you can fish, which is a great early game way to feed your cult, but keep an eye on the clock because time is always ticking (except when playing knucklebones).

Conclusion

Cult of the Lamb might not have the most complex systems, but it has a magnitude of quick and fun activities for you to engage in, and everything fits together wonderfully. The management system can feel a little frustrating at first while you learn the ropes, and there were many times when I just wanted to get back to the frantic action of the dungeon diving portion, but once you understand the best ways to proceed you’ll have a ton of fun just like I did. Massive Monster have created a winning combination here and they plan to add more content in the future so I’ll definitely keep my eyes open for it because I would love to continue my tenure as a cult leader.

This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox One console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.