Cult of the Lamb | REVIEW
Cult of the Lamb is an incredibly cute rogue-lite game about a demonic lamb prophesied to overcome the false prophets and restore “The One Who Waits” back to power. But before that, you have to grow turnips, build beds and amenities for your followers and occasionally commit ritual sacrifice to keep morale high.
The game has two main parts, base-management, where you direct your followers and craft, and crusades, where you venture into the domains of the Four Bishops to fight, and you go back and forth between these two parts of the game as your character and base grows and you unlock the chains that keep your character’s deity bound.
The base is where you manage your cult, which is composed of adorable animals that you rescue, come to you for refuge or that you purchase from a spider. They labor over the land to provide materials, worship shrines to accumulate points and as your deity explains, essentially exist solely for your own advancement, which would be mechanically true for any game with a population management feature. That being said, you can choose the tact you take, whether it's that of a patriarch, benefactor or vindictive leader.
For the crusades, where you leave the base to fight enemies in different environments, the structure is really simple. Each crusade features several branching paths that reach to your main objective, usually fighting a heretic boss. You enter randomly generated maps and clear out rooms and advance through each section using your main weapons and your special power which are both randomly generated when you first start the crusade with opportunities to add power-ups and swap out items as you progress. The fighting is straightforward and satisfying, and I find myself swinging away just to hear the combat sounds.
The biggest appeals to the game for me are the art direction and the gameplay. It feels good to play. Everything is really well paced and can be performed in discrete units of time. This is the type of game I want to play if I only have half an hour to decompress before bed or in between tasks. And the game at its regular difficulty won’t tend to punish you for not being good. You simply restart and get to try again and it doesn’t feel like you’ve lost progress.
When I was younger and I could dedicate days to cranking through a challenge with a sport-like mentality, I would absolutely commit the time to beat the boss or “get gud.” That’s no longer the case and I need my chill options. This is one of them.
I find this game most enjoyable played at a leisurely pace. There’s no need to try to crank through all four bishops quickly. Take your time. Eat some grass gruel. Play some knucklebones.
It’s a darkly comic game that looks good, feels good, and sounds good. Highly recommend it.
Source: Nintendo.com
