Video Game Review: Cult of the Lamb

Developer: Massive Monster

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Genre: Hybrid Town Manager and Roguelite

Reviewed On: PlayStation 4

Also Available For: PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Series S/X, PC

Sometimes, letting a game sit with you for a while can be very helpful in forming an opinion about it. Once a gut reaction to something settles down, you might find that you end up appreciating certain aspects of it far more than you initially did – though, more often, you’ll probably end up cooling off on less phenomenal aspects. Unfortunately, Cult of the Lamb, the hybrid roguelite and town-builder game about cutesy animals performing blood sacrifices, falls into the latter category.

As I first started playing Cult of the Lamb I was quite enamored with it. The game places the player in the fleece of the eponymous Lamb, the last of their kind and the one prophesied to bring about the return of “The One Who Waits”, an evil god sealed away by his equally evil siblings long ago. After being successfully sacrificed in the opening minutes of the game as an attempt to stymie this prophecy, the lamb is resurrected by The One Who Waits and told to start gathering followers for their own personal cult so that they may speed the prophecy along to its inevitable conclusion. To this end, the Lamb takes on two distinct-yet-connected spheres of work; managing their commune and diving into dungeons.

Dungeon runs play out in fairly standard rogue-lite fashion: the Lamb has access to a melee weapon and a projectile curse they must use to slaughter their way through hordes of devotees to enemy gods until they eventually reach the enemy gods themselves. The curse gains charge up to a limit from killing enemies or dealing damage to bosses. Dungeons are broken up into different nodes making up branching paths to the goal, each of which can consist of either a series of combat rooms or a random event ranging from a free full heal or windfall of resources for the commune to a curse from an enemy god which strengthens enemies. Even if you should be unlucky enough to stumble across the last of those possibilities, the enemies in question will likely not pose much threat, as the dungeon crawling is very easy on the whole. Frankly, the far greater frustration is a lack of explanation for what a lot of the symbols on nodes mean until you actually enter them. The dungeon crawling is honestly not that interesting – it’s a bit too simplistic, even aside from the lack of challenge it poses, to really hold my attention.

Which brings me to my other big complaint about Cult of the Lamb, which is that it is entirely too easy to get utterly wrapped up in the cult simulator aspect of it to the point of doing basically everything there is to do on that front while neglecting the roguelite aspects entirely. I will grant that the cult building is compelling on its own, consisting of a solid feedback loop of needing to keep your flock happy so that they’ll produce more faith for you which you can then use on things that will make them even happier and thus produce even more faith. Faith in this game manifests as two separate resource bars, one of which is used to expand and upgrade the Lamb’s combat capabilities and the other of which is used to unlock new buildings and amenities for the cult’s commune that allow for increasing degrees of automation within the cult and/or make keeping the flock happy easier.

(One of the few things you can’t streamline, though, is having to hold down the button to gather up all your faith from the big shrine in the center of your commune, a small detail that nevertheless drove me nuts whenever it came time to collect.)

Ironically, the cult simulation aspect of the game is far more successful at producing that “just a little bit more” feeling than the roguelite side of things. The villagers the lamb recruits to their cult are for the most part randomly generated, each one given a name, a small selection of attributes that make them better or worse for the cult, and a randomized appearance taken from a pool of woodland creatures available in both natural and technicolor flavors. When first recruiting a villager, the lamb is given free reign to customize their appearance and name as they please, even the few villagers that are not randomly generated and are instead taken from the service of enemy gods after defeating them as a mid-boss. Managing the villagers’ health, hunger, happiness and loyalty to you are just as important as constructing buildings for the commune if you want to grow your cult to its full potential, and in doing so some players will likely grow attached to a few of their obedient supplicants. I myself developed a certain fondness for my dear followers Thebrety, Jorts, and Sanic II, among others, though as I got further into the game and my numbers continued to swell, I eventually hit a point where even keeping track of everyone felt like too much effort, and I started to phone it in a bit.

Many times did I spend several successive in-game days puttering around my commune (and the rest of the non-combat zone, which includes a fishing area) trying to squeeze in another cult level or two, another building, another doctrine declared, while completely neglecting the dungeons. In fact, I did this so much that by the time I had unlocked nearly everything on the cult manager side of things I wasn’t even halfway through the dungeon crawling side, which is less than ideal as the game is designed such that the two are supposed to inform and feed into each other much more evenly. Even when not looking at it from the perspective of balance concerns, this made it feel like I’d kind of run out of things to do with the cult well before I was done with the game as a whole, and it subsequently lost a considerable amount of the magic.

Cult of the Lamb is also, at least on the ps4 version, rather unstable. Far too often did my game crash or freeze in such a way that forced me to quit to menu and lose fifteen minutes of progress on managing my commune. Beyond that, framerate drops and stuttering were shockingly common, which is a particular shame because the game’s presentation is a delight when it’s working as intended. The bright, colorful, and smoothly drawn visuals complement the dark tone quite well, even during the more gore-tastic moments like watching a member of your cult get dragged to hell by a bunch of tentacles. Even aside from that juxtaposition being the entire point, I have to give the art team props for managing to not make the dissonance outright jarring.

Ultimately, Cult of the Lamb is one of those games where you get out of it what you put in, and unfortunately, it can be difficult to want to put a lot into it. I suspect many players will not form any particular attachment to either their cultists or to the more structural development of their commune even before they run out of things to do, and for them, I would not recommend this title. Even for those who would, my recommendation is still tentative, colored by the caveats that it is a structurally flawed game with some very hit-or-miss aspects and more than a few performance issues. Though Cult of the Lamb certainly has its charms, when comparing it to other roguelikes I’m doubtful it will draw many long-term devotees.