Aug 10

Aug 10 Review | Cult of The Lamb - Devilishly Good

Cult of The Lamb merges genres that I never expected to see together. Town building resource management meets dungeon crawler. If the past few years have left a Hades-shaped hole in your heart this is the game for you. You play as Lamb, a cute little guy who was sacrificed in his previous cult. How they were not destined to die, it is time to build your own cult and become powerful in your own right. However, that does come with its own risks, so be careful!

Welcome to the village, pal! Play date party on the left, ritual sacrifices further left!

I loved how the game gets you instantly into the nitty gritty of building a cult, immediately being hit with village building, member recruiting and an engaging story. One thing that I did have to change during this time was the controls, as I found it really odd that it was “C” to attack and “X”' to interact on a mouse and keyboard. These controls didn’t feel natural to me, and I’m glad that they were easily re-bindable at the start of the game before I even started. There are also fantastic accessibility options which I always appreciate, such as subtitle changes, a motion blur toggle and the ability to lessen flashing lights, which I personally found really useful as there can be a lot of flashing lights at times throughout the game.

Todays sermon: Kissing or Killing, which is cuter?

The combat mechanics within the dungeons can be a little bit tricky to get used to but once you get the hang of them, fighting enemies can be really fun and pretty easy. Each arena is a one-screen affair, and you get the choice in which direction to explore further after clearing each room. Sometimes you may happen upon a room where you get to pick a card to give you a buff, sometimes you might find some really cool items or a divine intervention to boost your cult, but usually, you will be hacking and slashing away at cute monsters trying to murder you.

I really enjoyed having these choices laid out in front of me, as the language about what I was about to get into was very clear and concise, making it really easy to understand and making fighting feel like a more substantial part of the experience. There were some really fun boss fights, with unique mechanics, but l I never found myself getting stuck or frustrated.

Despite the dungeons being randomly generated, I really enjoyed the resource management, compound building and the continuous questline that tied it all so nicely in with the dungeon crawling part of the game. You dive deeper and deeper into dungeons to forage for food, building supplies and new followers for your new cult. Once these disposable sheep valued members of the community have joined, they can then be assigned to tasks around their new home to make them useful. Through divine power, they can be used to buff you and make you more powerful in the long run. Who knew running a cult could be so fun?

Not only was it exciting meeting the new followers of the cult, but you can customise them with creature parts that you have scavenged, even choosing their outfit colour and renaming your cult members once they have moved into the compound. It is a really cute/disturbing feature that I had a lot of fun playing with, and spent a little bit too much time making sure that my cult members looked as cute as can be! I also enjoyed the idea that you were stealing cult members from the previous cult you were in, purely to spite your old cult leader.

That’s right, starting your own religion has never ended poorly for anyone.

I have sunk a lot of time into this devilishly cute game, and I plan to sink way more time into it, too. Despite spending hours with it, I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface of Cult Of The Lamb.

I can’t wait to see where being a cult leader takes me… Somewhere good probably, things have never ended badly for a cult before, right?