Cult of the Lamb

Genre: Action-RPG / Roguelike / Management Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Cult of the Lamb, released in 2022 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, is an Action-RPG with strong Roguelike and Management Simulation elements. In this game, players take the role of a small anthropomorphic lamb about to be sacrificed in a ritual intended to and the looming threat of an ancient deity known as The Waiting One. However, the ritual ends up having the opposite effect, sending the lamb to The Waiting One, who resurrects the lamb with the instruction of starting a cult to worship him, and giving the lamb the ability to slaughter those who killed them.

Right from the start, Cult of the Lamb is a game that combines extreme opposites. The lamb and their growing lineup of followers are absolutely adorable, depicted with wide eyes and voiced in a cutesy babble-speak. Yet, your character will violently slaughter your enemies and desecrate their corpses, communes with his ancient god by having his eyes glow red and start bleeding, routinely “indoctrinates” new followers into their cult, can make those followers eat grass or excrement, or even make their own followers into blood sacrifices to achieve their goals. Yeah, this is the same sort of “adorable” we saw in games like The Binding of Isaac, which is to say that this cuteness is only to make the game’s extremely dark content and tones seem even darker by contrast.

The presentation here is good, but isn’t without its flaws. The game is technically 3D, but all of its individual elements are in 2D, with the game using hand-drawn artwork for its characters and much of its scenery, with a somewhat crude art style and animation that works with its cutesy elements. However, despite how simple this game is on a technical level, I still noticed occasional issues with framerates and outright frame drops, at times so severe that it interfered with the gameplay. What’s more, the nature of the game’s 2D characters in a 3D environment made it difficult to distinguish whether or not a melee attack would connect, making this element of the gameplay less than satisfying. This is all backed by by an interesting if somewhat unsettling mix of odd vocal and simple instrumental melodies, which is distinct and works well with the game’s offbeat overall tone.

The gameplay here is split between Roguelike Action-RPG sections and Management Simulation sections, and these all have their strengths and weaknesses. The combat in this game has some good variety, and feels fairly fluid, but it suffers from the hit detection and framerate issues I mentioned above, and while it’s not outright bad, it doesn’t reach the same heights as the other half of the game.

When it comes to the Management Simulation elements, Cult of the Lamb’s approach to the genre feels really refreshing, as you’re trying to build up your facilities and gain resources while also managing the members of your cult themselves. You’ll be ensuring that they have adequate food, cleaning up after them when they poop or die to ensure the remaining members don’t suffer from disease, assigning them to jobs to help around your facility, and also managing their level of faith, which can be sapped to further your progression through the various skill trees, enabling you access to more facilities you can build, empowering your character as they trek into the game’s Action-y Roguelike elements.

Unfortunately, you have limited resources in your cult’s home camp and must eventually head back out into the Roguelike portions of the game, and this is frustrating not only because this is the less-interesting part of the game you feel like you’re reluctantly trudging through, but also because time keeps passing while you’re out adventuring, meaning that your peoples’ food supplies will continue to dwindle until your cult members starve, and waste will build up with no one cleaning it.

If this game allowed multiplayer, I could see this making for a good division of duties as one players stays to maintain the cult while the other heads off to fight enemies and gather resources. However, no such multiplayer exists in this game, and as a result every time you feel like you have to tear yourself away from your facility, you may well be wishing someone else could be doing that while you continue doing what you were doing.

As a result of this, Cult of the Lamb feels like a somewhat unbalanced game. There are some very good elements here, wrapped in a distinct and memorable package, but the sub-par combat portions of the game and the performance issues on Nintendo Switch mean you’re probably better off going to another game that does just one of these elements well, such as Hades, or a game that mixes Action-RPG Roguelike and Management Simulation elements better but without the same sort of distinctive presentation, such as Moonlighter. There’s still a lot of good to be found here, but I feel like the flaws in this game rob it of the opportunity to be on the same level as games like those.

tl;dr – Cult of the Lamb is an Action-RPG with strong Roguelike and Management Simulation elements, in which players take the role of a lamb charged with managing a cult to worship an ancient deity, while heading out to gather resources and slaughter enemies. The presentation and Management Sim parts of this game are original and quite enjoyable, but the Action-RPG sections of the game are less successful thanks to issues with unclear hit detection and this game’s performance on Nintendo Switch. While there’s still plenty to enjoy here, I feel like there are other games that manage to do the individual elements of this game better, even if there’s nothing else that offers quite the same overall package.

Grade: B-

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