Cult of the Lamb review

My progress toward slaying Persona 3: FES was somewhat delayed last week as I took another of this year’s indie darlings for a spin. And unlike last week’s Dredge, this was a rental so I had access to the full game.

Cult of the Lamb places you in the role of the last survivor of a species the four ruling gods of the world were hunting to extinction because a prophecy states that one of those creatures shall become the avatar of the long imprisoned fifth god and will set him free by killing the other four. It’s difficult to spoil the plot seeing as the game just tells you right at the beginning.

The very first thing you do in the game, like any good aspiring roguelite, is die. You have to set the expectations early, after all. But the story is kind enough to use this death to send you straight to your demonic master to receive the powers you could not in life. As, like any good prophecy, trying to avoid it causes it to be fulfilled. Death is but a temporary setback, and you will keep coming as many times as it takes to set the imprisoned one free.

But going through semi-random dungeons on the hunt for enough bosses to unlock the path to each area’s god is only part of the game. The other half involves empowering your combat abilities though running a cult, in a delightfully irreverent take on a town-building game. Imagine Animal Crossing, but you’re Tom Nook and all the jokes are true. And the rocks don’t grow back.

You can build up your cult membership by converting defeated bosses and rescuing random creatures you might happen to come across right before the followers of an enemy god sacrifice them in the dungeons. Once they arrive at your cult’s base (I called mine Camp Kit Kat and changed every member’s species to feline during their indoctrination because of course I did) you can put them to work to help build up and maintain it. You can also complete little side quests for them and harvest their devotion to clock the town’s research tree to make it more liveable and more productive. Each in-game day, you can hold a sermon in your hastily constructed temple to gain power to advance your combat capabilities, unlocking new weapon types to be added to the pool of random arms, and permanently increasing their minimum starting power. You also accomplish this with rituals which cost resources, but provide additional bonuses.

Time passes wherever you are (a little quick for my taste, but not so quick that it isn’t manageable). And as time passes your followers need to eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, get sick, age and die. Your character can go without all of these things, but they cannot go without followers. Keep them alive; you cannot continue on without their faith.

Eventually, you will unlock enough advanced buildings and recruit enough followers that the town can become self-sustaining and you can spend much more of your time going on crusades to smite the infidels and less of your time cooking, cleaning and hunting for materials. You will always need to come back to town for some tasks that can only be handled by you, fulfill quests and to keep their faith up.

At any given time, you will have one weapon and one special power that costs fervor, which replenishes from treasure chests or more commonly by smiting infidels. Each god’s domain will have you traveling through specific biomes with specific enemies, but there’s enough variety in it to keep things from feeling to same-y. Given you’ll only have two attacks and a dodge roll while the enemies have a lot more tricks at their disposal, you’ll need to play smart to stay alive.

Each one of your crusades starts you off in a combat zone, where you’ll travel though upwards of a dozen rooms in a randomized layout, though not every room will have enemies. You can run into rooms that have nothing but resources to harvest, stores, or NPCs who will open new non-combat areas for sidequests and expand the pool of power ups you can receive. These power ups, more than the weapons, provide the real meat of your random build for each crusade.

After your initial combat zone, you have a small map of branching paths to other destinations that can be additional combat zones or single-room enoughters that drop your straight on a follower, resources, stores, or NPCs. The final destination of each crusade is one more combat zone, but with a boss at the end. If you live, the crusade is over and you return to town with your rewards and loot.

Once you’ve killed enough bosses, you will instead find a path to that area’s ruling God and a much more challenging boss fight. You can still go back into the area after killing the God, but all the enemies will be tougher, there’s an optional stronger version of the God you can challenge, and at the end of each crusade you have the option of returning to town as normal or extending it for more rewards. You’re going to spend more than half a day of in-game time on each crusade, so it isn’t a good option until your base has a lot of followers, some good autonomy, plenty of faith and large outhouses.

And while I have not yet reached the end of the game, the writing is on the wall that the end goal will shift from freeing the fifth god to killing it, too, and taking their place. Which is fine. I’ve earned it. I spent more time on the base-building than the game’s flow intended, so I’m a little too strong for my point in the story. That being said, it didn’t slow down the flow because the game is very good about always giving you the next thing to do, regardless if you’re playing one half more than the other. Like the cult itself, it’s easy to get sucked into long sessions in which you said you’d do “just one more thing” 90 times.

The bottom line is that Cult of the Lamb is a very fun game. It has a dark story that doesn’t take itself too seriously even as its characters try to. Its two sets of gameplay are deep enough to stay interesting and keep you doing more without becoming overwhelming. I can see why a lot of people are up on this game and I’m glad I played it.