There’s a certain allure to the dark seamy underbelly of things. Maybe that’s why our media has gotten progressively darker and more violent. More disturbing trends in our societies, more advisory warnings, more uncensored content. Some of the most consistently fascinating things in societies though are cults. Jonestown. Waco. Hale-Bopp. Manson. Cults absolutely captivate us even as they horrify us, showing us the worst within humanity, the unredeeming qualities reflected in others that we fear to address in ourselves. What does that say about us as humans? And what does it say about us that we make video games based on such ideas?
Cult of the Lamb is a new hybrid game from developer Massive Monster and publisher Devolver Digital. Part rogue-like, part management sim, and all disturbing, the game has you as an actual anthropomorphic lamb slain in a dark ritual and resurrected by a bound god in order to, well, start a cult. Your job is literally to find followers, increase your power and free the dark god as services rendered for your revival. But hey, it’s cartoony, so it can’t be all that bad right? That lamb is cute after all…
To get an idea of what you’re in for, you’ve got to understand that there are two very separate parts of Cult of the Lamb, the action portion of the game and the management portion. After a rather disturbing introduction, you’ll learn the basics of combat and then rescue your first follower. After that, it’s management time! You’re put in an empty field and forced to mine resources, make food for your cult members and build buildings and sleeping areas for everyone. You’ll need a church too and a bunch of wood, money, and stone to build stuff (where does that money go??).
Once things get started in your cult’s home base, it’s time to go back into the dungeons. Each dungeon is broken up into shorter stages, some with mini-bosses. Each is random and provides you with a random assortment of available weapons and special attacks. You have a regular strike and a dodge roll at first, then gain a special attack later. Depending on what you get each run, you can end up easily overpowered or struggling to survive these random rooms full of enemies. Defeating them gets you gold, tarot cards which boost your stats and abilities during a run, and hearts to fill any hits you took, along with a variety of items you can use at your home base.
Along the way there are a number of options between each stage including a tarot card reader who provides you with an assortment of helpful abilities, a blacksmith who gives you more powerful weapons, areas to rescue new members for indoctrination into your cult, and areas to earn more wood, stone, or hearts. What’s frustrating about Cult of the Lamb is that while the action portion of the gameplay loop is well-designed, the combat is surprisingly rudimentary. The controls are loose and floaty and it’s easy to misalign your lamb in relation to your enemies and miss them with a simple attack. Depending on the special attack you get, they can also be surprisingly hard to use. This is unforgivable in a rogue-like that penalizes you for dying and can lead to a ton of early game frustration.
If you die on a run, you’re returned to the home base, but your followers lose faith in you and you have to make them feel better about you. If they lose too much faith, they become dissenters and start telling the others how you’re a false leader, significantly impacting the morale and eventually absconding with your stuff and leaving the cult. In other words, don’t die. It definitely costs you! Fortunately there are a few ways to deal with dissenters…
Cult of the Lamb is a ridiculously dark game. As you increase your followers’ devotion to you, they give you gives and you use those gifts to write the doctrine of your cult, enabling you to control your followers even more thoroughly. Sacrificing them in front of their fellow cult members can actually get you net positive results and if you have dissenters, well, you can always just murder them. Seriously, there’s a murder option. Just don’t let your followers see it or they’ll be mildly disappointed in you. And how to dispose of the body? Well, sure you could dig a hole and bury it but there’s a lot of meat there and there’s no sense in letting it go to waste so you may as well chop them up and feed them to your flock. You’ll have to cook up the body and serve it of course, and they’re likely to get sick, but you’re the leader after all.
Yeah, it’s that dark. All the time. You can perform rituals in order to increase your followers devotion, sacrificing and resurrecting cute anthropomorphic animals. Sometimes they ask you favors too. One follower came up and said “I’ve always wanted to eat a meal made of poop. Can you make me one?” Deny them and they lose a bit of faith in you. Feed them the poop and they get sick. Fun choice. All this time you’re also raising berry bushes, harvesting lumber, building better living quarters, and collecting devotion to upgrade your buildings and abilities. 2/3 of the time you’re just standing there watching time tick by as you chop away at a tree or dig up some rocks or build something. Eventually when you get enough followers you can get them to do most of this stuff for you, but it takes hours to really get a good flow going on Cult of the Lamb.
There’s a lot more going on here too. Some follower quests will require you to go back into levels to harvest items or save people. There’s a fishing game that’s fairly tedious but not altogether bad. And as you slowly power up and beat bosses the dark god is freed from imprisonment bit by bit until you’ve repaid your resurrection and who knows what else. The power of faith is strong after all.
The timer on the management sim portion of Cult of the Lamb moves remarkably quickly. Day and night cycles zip by so fast that there’s no way to accomplish everything you need to do in a single cycle. Stay aware from your base too long and your followers really start to lose faith in you too, so you’ll have to keep coming back and making sure everything is ok. It’s a tedious thing to give a blessing to each character and continually reassign them to do various tasks around the camp. Sure they mostly manage it on their own most of the time but to be truly efficient, you’ll have to take an active hand in arranging every aspect of your cult’s functions.
After the initial novelty of Cult of the Lamb wears off (they said what?!?!), it’s clear that the game has a pretty straightforward loop. Go out and fight, come back (or die), spend two times as long managing everything while you have a chance, then go out and fight again. The incremental rise of your strength will make combat easier but each new level has harder enemies as well, so while the controls aren’t the best, the difficulty is well-balanced. But the larger balance between combat (definitely more fun) and management (more relaxing but rather tedious) is not as well done as the power creep of the enemies you’ll face.
Cult of the Lamb is definitely a visual spectacle but this is definitely not a game for religious people. The dark and even Satanic undertones of the game are clear in all of the designs, the color palettes, and even the artwork itself, which is full of pentagrams and other religious iconography. There’s a clear and blatant eschewing of religion here couched in a cute animal skin and while that’s not a bad thing, it’s also not for everyone. This is certainly a game for adults, not children. The soundtrack is also excellent, accompanying the dark gameplay with solid music that never gets boring.
But whether you’re a fan of management sims or rogue-likes, Cult of the Lamb is essentially a sub-standard version of both with a dark, violent wrapper and never manages to fully excel in either realm. Management tasks can be frustrating and gameplay could definitely use a control overhaul. Neither are bad, but the hybrid design of the game never exceeds the sum of its parts. In short, this is a solid game with excellent production value that just doesn’t quite have the fun factor it should overall. It’s compelling though and it’s hard to stop playing once you start but after a while, you realize that you just don’t care whether your cult members die and as the lamb, you’re just not all that likeable. Engagement slows and drops with extended play and the game feels like it fizzles somewhat as it adds more and more complexity, forcing you to perform a wide assortment of tasks that you don’t necessarily want to do.
Cult of the Lamb is a unique, high-concept hybrid game with wildly creative design elements, interesting world-building, and excellent artwork and sound, but it’s just not quite as fun as it seems like it should be and the management of your cult is certainly a bit tedious. Combat is fun but could definitely be improved and though there are a variety of interesting enemies, they all start to feel a bit repetitive after a while. You’re certainly not getting a bad game for your $25, but you’re also not necessarily seeing each element of the game in top form either. A lot of people are going to have a lot of fun with Cult of the Lamb (unless they’re religious) and it’s definitely a unique and bold take on traditional versions of these gameplay genres, but it could have done with a bit more balancing.
This review is based on a digital copy of Cult of the Lamb provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes. Cult of the Lamb is also available for PS4, Xbox, and PC on Steam and GOG.