Cult of the Lamb - Review
Cult of the Lamb is what you’d expect from game publisher, Devolver; it’s fun, hilarious, and takes a somewhat serious topic and makes it an absolute pleasure to play. Not just the fact that it’s a roguelike dungeon crawler, but indie game developer Massive Monster was brilliant enough to integrate aspects of Animal Crossing like building and colony management into it. This breaks up the game play a little and is a change of pace, making players giggle at what they can do, and what takes place in your cult’s village.
In a nutshell, the game follows a lamb who was set for slaughter by heretics. Upon death, you meet what seems to be a demonic god in the afterlife known as ‘The One Who Waits’, who makes a deal with you. In exchange for saving your life, you’re to be its follower by reviving and growing a cult in its name. With that, you’re given a cute Red Crown with its symbol which is later recognized by a character you meet named Ratau. From that point, you find out that Ratau is the lamb’s predecessor who had previously built a temple which is now in ruins. Ratau helps guide your journey, in which you re-establish the temple to your own cult’s village by rescuing and recruiting followers to your agenda to worship The One Who Waits. And most importantly, ridding the world of these four heretics.
The game’s visual design is quite the juxtaposition from its dark and horrific narrative, with you playing as a cute lovable lamb (hence the name), amongst all the cute little followers you enlist to your cult. A lot of the little creatures and characters you meet are too cute to be taken seriously - players will end up laughing at the nonsensical and comedic scenes of cute characters running amuck, dying, killing and being sacrificed. It makes the game all the more fun and is a great way to play around such a serious topic.
As the game progresses and your cult grows in size, you are tasked with ensuring the village thrives by tending to its inhabitants while maintaining and flourishing its amenities. Sermons and rituals need to be held to ensure that your followers don’t go astray from your beliefs and are happy. Not only that, but you’ll have to also manage feeding everyone, and keep all resources at a high to ensure the village thrives. This goes from farming, extracting building materials, and upgrading when necessary such as outhouses, decorations and more. As previously stated, it’s almost like Animal Crossing to ensure that the village is well kept and grows, and your acolytes are happy to be part of the cult.
In addition to the village, the game’s combat lies in its fun dungeon crawl. There are five different gates you’ll be able to unlock depending on the amount of followers you have, as expected. The later gates require a larger headcount and is obviously more challenging as the game progresses. Players are made to go through the dungeons four times where you’re met with a heretic boss fight for the first three, and finally a false prophet boss of that zone, which is a lot of fun due to the nature of its changing levels similar to the ever-popular game, Hades.
A random selection of weapons is presented upon the start of each dungeon run, which would determine a portion of your play style. This could be in the form of daggers which are quick and fast but low damage, to an axe which has a heavier damage but a little slower, all the way to a heavy hammer which seems to be the maximum damage but… you guessed it, slow attack. This would determine how much rolling a player would use to dodge enemies. In addition weapons could come with specific traits such as poison damage to enemies, ghosts that attack enemies with the necromantic weapons, and energy drain which heals you from any damage taken previously with the vampiric weapons. There are obviously more to unlock as you increase your faith skill tree when doing sermons etc. But as previously said, the weapons are random at the very start of the dungeon run, and if you’re lucky, you’ll meet Clauneck in one of the rooms during your run who could potentially give you a different weapon to select from, which you may favour instead. However, usually running into this NPC gives you the option to select a Tarot card which gives you a temporary buff. This could be in the form of extra health, map reveal, more damage on attack and a whole lot more. There are 36 different tarot cards to unlock. One thing to remember is that these buffs reset on every fresh crusade run.
Players can also use their secondary attack called Curses, which is usually a projectile or heavy damage slash of some sort, which are only available for players to use once they collect enough Fervour. Again, the type of Curse is randomized and given to you at the very start of your run.
Massive Monster has nailed an incredibly fun game that works really well in terms of its action gameplay, and extremely fun comedic narrative and visual style. On the flip side, the game doesn’t come without issues. Unfortunately while playing it, there were glitches that occurred such as villagers being stuck at a different location on the map, game freezing during various animations, enemies not appearing on screen while it’s attacking you, just to name a few. And though this isn’t a regular experience to come across, it’s enough for you to remember, and disrupt your game play. That being said, the amount of positives of it being fun really does outweigh the negatives - and the team have already pushed multiple patches to address a lot of these issues.
Cult of the Lamb is an extremely fun game, especially due to its narrative, and as previously said, juxtaposition of topic vs visual design and characters. It’s so funny that it makes you want to play and grow your cult to the optimum level. Not that just that, but it also changes the game from repetitive dungeon crawl (which changes every time you’re going through it mind you), to logistics of taking care and growing an entire cult village. And sure, there are bugs and issues with the game here and there that people have experienced, but the enjoyment while playing this game far outweighs any negatives. In fact, it’s pretty tough to find problems with it, unless you’re just not into roguelike dungeon crawls. Nonetheless, this is definitely one to pick up and have fun with. Praise Massive Monster for creating a truly fantastic game.
The Score
8.0
Review code provided by Devolver Digital
The Pros
+Absolutely fun and hilarious narrative and characters
+The change of dungeon crawl, and maintaining your village reduces the repetitiveness
+Extremely engaging roguelike dungeons
The Cons
-Came across a fair few bugs and glitches at launch
-Could come across a little too short
