Part of the magic that lies in the video game medium is related to how certain games can easily mix and match concepts that can feel completely juxtaposed at first glance.
Like, what if we take the most adorable types of anthropomorphized animals and have them create a demonic cult together? What if these animals work to develop a unified community, but one that is happy with things like sacrifices to an eldritch god? And what if we also throw into the mix some thrilling elements from an action-based dungeon-crawler game, as well as the relaxing gameplay loop that is found in management simulators? As the answer to these unusual questions (and a few more), Cult of the Lamb is a game that takes inspiration from multiple games and genres in order to deliver a surprisingly good and unique experience.
This unusual adventure starts with the titular lamb, which finds itself stuck in a cosmic conflict between eldritch beings. It is foretold in an old prophecy that one of the docile lambs would be responsible for the revival of The One Who Waits — a god-like deity that was exiled by the Bishops of the Old Faith. As the last of your kind, you end up being sacrificed by the followers of the Old Faith in an attempt to prevent that terrible outcome. However, instead of simply dying, you are revived by The One Who Waits as their earthly avatar.
No more a defenseless lamb, you are now the wielder of a magic crown, which has bestowed you with not only dark magic superpowers but also the ability to siphon the powerful faith energy from your followers. With that, you must create your own cult, gathering loyal followers that will be essential to how you will become steadily more powerful, until the point that you are able to challenge the Bishops of the Old Faith again.
Faith Has Multiple Faces
It is hard to make a direct comparison between Cult of the Lamb and a single other game because it is quite a unique title that manages to go back and forth between drastically different gameplay styles. It is easy, however, to compare each of Cult of the Lamb’s segments to a different title. Managing your cult, for example, is akin to farming/simulator games such as Stardew Valley, Spiritfarer, or Graveyard Keeper. Exploring and fighting in each of the four dungeons found in the game, on the other hand, feels like something that blends the action-based gameplay of a top-down game like The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening with the randomness and unpredictability of roguelike titles such as The Binding of Isaac, Hades, and Slay the Spire.
Drawing comparisons with so many different titles doesn’t necessarily mean that Cult of the Lamb is one of those games that blindly rips-off ideas from successful indies in order to create a familiar experience that will be all comfortable, albeit unoriginal. On the contrary, Cult of the Lamb manages to create an experience of its own — all thanks to how it masterfully balances its pacing, changing between its two most distinct game mechanics in a seamless way.
While they may look like separated instances at first, the fighting and management segments are equally important in Cult of the Lamb, because what you do in one will directly affect your odds of progressing in the other. Making your cult members happy, creating new buildings, and doing your sermons are only a few of the many ways of getting faith and becoming stronger. While exploring dungeons and fighting, you not only can get valuable resources to be used in your cult, but you can even find cult members, unlock additional buildings, and beat powerful bosses that are key to your overall progress.
When you consider all that, it is easy to say that Cult of the Lamb is one of those games where there is always something different for you to do. The best thing yet is that it does a great job of making sure that everything you do is valuable and interesting.
Animal Culting
Similarly to other farming sim games, the activities you need to do when starting with your cult in Cult of the Lamb will be plentiful and labor-intensive at first, but that will change drastically as you progress. The main catch here is that there are multiple ways in which your followers will help you, so you will progressively unlock new commands to automate the most time-consuming activities of your small community.
Loyalty, hunger, and health are the three main factors at play. Performing sermons and rituals, having enough beds for everybody, cooking food constantly, and keeping your village clean are just some of the many tasks you will need to perform in order to maintain your flock of believers. In the beginning, while there are only a handful of buildings available for you, you will need to be a jack-of-all-trades, managing basically every single of these tasks manually.
Every time you surpass a certain faith threshold, though, you can unlock a new technology in a fancy skill tree that represents the progress of your entire cult. With that, you can unlock new buildings that can be used by your followers to speed up many of these processes.
The starting version of the farmer station, for example, works as a handy way to get your followers to help you in planting seeds and getting a constant stream of resources for your food needs. However, at first, they don’t know how to harvest those goodies, so you must do that yourself. By upgrading that building, you unlock their ability to harvest and put the products in a chest for you. This premise of doing things yourself first, then unlocking skills for your followers is replicated in basically every single other aspect of the management game in Cult of the Lamb.
As a consequence of that, the management aspects of Cult of the Lamb get less and less prominent the more you progress, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Automating your entire village is an enjoyable progress by itself, and having an almost entirely self-sufficient village by the end of the journey is a cool reward by itself.
Your Own Holy Crusade
Every time you finish what you have to do in your cult, it is time to explore and fight through each one of the four regions in the game. With their own unique themes, visuals, and set of enemies, each region is related to one of the four Bishops of the Old Ways (which awaits you at the end of their respective dungeon, in the form of the main bosses of the game).
Following some staples of roguelikes games (but without any of the permadeath stuff), each time you venture into one of these places, you will get a new procedurally generated map, with an entirely new sequence of rooms, disposition of enemies, as well as different secrets and bonus areas. The exploration works in two different segments. First, you are given an overall view of that random-generated version of the region, with different paths that you can choose to proceed through (imagine something like the overall map of Slay the Spire or Bad North).
Every time you select a specific item, you will be able to explore a specific sequence of rooms, which will drastically change depending on their representative icon. If you choose a map icon of a resource, for example, you will be given a single room to explore, but it will be filled with objects that will award you with that specific resource. Select a sword, though, and you will have a sequence of multiple rooms to explore, that can be filled with enemies or goodies alike.
Then, we arrive at the combat itself, which is… good enough. In this regard, Cult of the Lamb does a good enough job, but it doesn’t really reach any new heights when compared to other top-down action-focused titles. At each dungeon, you will be provided with a random type of weapon and magic, which can be changed depending on your luck with the game’s RNG. Each weapon has a specific speed and range, and the skills can offer all sorts of projectiles. Add to that a rolling button that gives you some invincibility frames, and you have a bonafide combat system that does its job.
Confessing Some Sins
With its beautiful hand-drawn art style that somehow manages to be equally cute and creepy, Cult of the Lamb could easily stand among the best indie games released this year… If it was not for some frequent sins that unfortunately plague the release version of the game.
Environments in Cult of the Lamb are lush, with lots of interactive elements such as grass that can be cut and cracks that can be broken — not to mention the enemies that are out for your throat. As a consequence of that, you can face some pesky frame drops in some of the most frantic scenarios. More often than not, they are brief and not harsh enough to get in your way, but it is still a shame to see that happening.
Even worse than that, though, Cult of the Lamb also has some weird progress-breaking bugs. Multiple times, I found myself locked on a screen when a menu would never close, or an animation wouldn’t start, which would only be resolved by closing and opening the game. There was also a particular bug with the Brazilian Portuguese localisation, which was only solved recently. At least, developers Massive Monsters are aware of these issues and are working on future patches for the Switch version.
These problems aren’t enough to take away from how great Cult of the Lamb is. It is a game that manages to blend different genres so well, that it would really be a sin if you missed it, so give it a chance and start gathering your flock right now.
Cult of the Lamb £22.49
Summary
Part top-down action game, part management simulator, Cult of the Lamb is a game that perfectly blends multiple genres, and does so in such a great manner that not even some nasty bugs can take away its shine.