Can you become the ultimate lamb god?
Start your own cult in a land of false prophets, venturing out into diverse and mysterious regions to build a loyal community of woodland worshippers and spread your Word to become the one true cult. Collect and use resources to build new structures, perform dark rituals to appease the gods, and give sermons to reinforce the faith of your flock. Explore a sprawling, randomly generated world, fight off hordes of enemies and defeat rival cult leaders in order to absorb their power and assert your cult’s dominance. Train your flock and embark on a quest to explore and discover the secrets of five mysterious regions. Cleanse the non-believers, spread enlightenment and perform mystical rituals on the journey to become the mighty lamb god.
Cult of the Lamb is a mixture of a roguelite dungeon-crawler with a cult management simulation thrown in. You will rescue followers from being sacrificed as you progress through the randomly generated dungeons or even fight demonic bosses that revert back to normal animals and can also be indoctrinated into your cult. You will earn random perks and weapons through each run or “crusade” as it is called, but you’ll need to overcome a dungeon a few times before getting the chance to take on one of the 4 “Gods” who killed you at the beginning of the game and are holding your master hostage.
Cult management itself works well. You will need to perform sermons, rituals for your flock which give you upgrade tools and perks, while you can gather resources and get your followers to do this too in order to build all manner of cult objects, such as statues of worship as well as normal things to keep them all happy such as beds, outhouses and of course, you’ll need to feed them. You can send them out on fetching quests with a % chance of success, while they will die over time either naturally through old age or through sickness if you’ve been working them too hard.
Cultists can also become so unhappy with you that they begin to dissent, either resulting in them leaving and taking a chunk of resources with them or begin to sway others to their cause. You can rectify this with a number of ways including shoving them in stocks and re-educating them till they revert back to normal or you can always just decide to sacrifice them if you don’t think they are worth the hassle.
The game itself works great for the most part, but it currently is on the glitchy side at times. When a day ends and the next begins, the game freezes for a few seconds and you cant help wondering if the game itself has crashed or not. Sometimes crusades will glitch out during a room transition and you’ll need to either close the game or if you can escape to the main menu, but either way will make you lose your day’s progress. There’s also a current bug with floor textures that you can place in your cult HQ, but these oddly overlap causing a weird looking effect. It’s not the worst glitch ever, but it is a bit frustrating to see.
These issues aside, the visual style is superb. There’s a real dark nature to the game as you can imagine, but the cartoony animal designs do lighten it up a bit, making it amusing and twisted at the same time. The soundtrack is also impressive, while the framerate is mostly consistent but it does drop sometimes during transitions from days ending/beginning or leaving/entering rooms in dungeons.
The Verdict
Cult of the Lamb is a great blend of roguelite and simulation with a decent story to boot. The combat is fluid, the cult management is well handled and resource gathering is addictive too. A patch to fix some of the issues mentioned will definitely be nice but regardless, it’s still one hell of a game that deserves a look. I command you!