Cult of the Lamb Review – Fanatic Sheep Attack

You may remember the slightly odd Happy Tree Friends cartoon that once aired here on an unnamed music TV channel, or you might have stumbled upon it online. A series in which unpleasant frank things happened to cute animals. A bizarre combination, which, however, worked to a certain extent, and today this project can be called a cult in certain circles.

Anyway, that’s how I reacted to the announcement of Cult of the Lamb. At first glance, a very cute title, but it operates with not very pleasant themes of cults and fanaticism, which together make a rather unpleasant, but definitely interesting combination that I immediately knew that I needed to play. So I played and now you can read how much I liked the final product. And I can say right away that I was definitely not disappointed.

• Platform: PC (Verified), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and NiIntendo Switch
• Publication date: August 11, 2022
• Developer: massive monster
• Genre: Simulator roguelite / cult
• Czech localization: Not
• Multiplayer: Not
• Data to download: 1.09 GB (PC)
• Game time: 12-16 hours
• Sales version: Digital
• Price: EUR 22.99 (approx. 570 CZK)

A pleasant sight with an unpleasant undertone

So you wake up on a Monday (or any other unpleasant day of your choice) bound, helpless, ready for defeat and accompanied by a gang of fanatics to four evil bishops who want your death. An unpleasant situation in which even the sheep hero of this title found himself. Even then, however, there may be a glimmer of hope. Or maybe more curses in this case. Immediately after the fatal decapitation, you will be called by an ancient creature with the abilities of the aforementioned four bishops. That is why he will bring us back to life, endow us with “supernatural” abilities, and at the same time entrust us with important missions. Create a fanatical cult (you can call it, of course) that will gradually give you additional powers to give to evil bishops. And such a proposal is not rejected.

You will gain the power to give it to the evil bishops.

This will be the start of our roughly twelve to sixteen hour sessions that will be in the vein of a mix of cult builder sim and roguelite mechanics. However, before we get into the gameplay itself, it would be nice to dedicate some of the text to what stands out the most in the game at first glance – the visuals. This, perhaps, is most reminiscent of Don’t Starve, but without a dose of depression and doom, but with a fair amount of cuteness. Well, quite simply, it looks incredibly good. However, due to the fact that such a look is combined with really dark themes, the result is a very unpleasant combination, which, I confess, did not quite suit me at times, although it completely avoids any overtness. It’s quirky, it’s weird, but it adds up to a great cool vibe that will permeate you throughout your playthrough, backed up by upbeat music.

Village full of minions

But now play. Of course, the aforementioned cult cannot function on its own, when every good fanatic needs his flock of “sheep” who would carry out his will, work, and from which he would draw his strength in a certain way. But such associates (they can be easily configured) must live somewhere, so you need to start building your own settlement. So, you find a suitable plot of land and gradually begin to build different buildings, each of which serves a specific purpose. However, the central structure will be your main shrine and temple. Because in the sanctuary your wards will pray, generating devotion, for which you gradually open other buildings, which goes hand in hand with further expansion, and in the temple you will perform rituals (they have different effects and consequences), proclaim teachings (they unlock rituals, possibly passive properties/features) and preaching (gaining energy that opens up more options in combat). But there are also various embellishments to make it all beautiful.

You build various buildings and take care of the wards.

However, your wards do not function only on oxygen, so you have to make sure that they are not hungry, not sick, and most importantly, that they are faithful to you. So you have to build a place for them to sleep, sometimes cook for them, sometimes comfort them a little, bless them, and sometimes do some minor task for them. When you eventually take good care of them, their loyalty will also increase, and followers with more loyalty will offer access to better outcomes, such as during their sacrifice. However, the cycle of life is inexorable, which means that they will also grow old and die (not only by age), so it’s good to constantly replenish your ranks.

Anyway, this piece made my little manager/builder heart sing as the title offers quite a few different options to go crazy in this regard and build your dream village. But at the same time, there are not so many options so as not to get confused. This shows that the authors make the work as accessible as possible, so there is basically no deeper micromanagement here. Individual actions are quite automated (you can assign roles to wards, but this is not necessary and artificial intelligence will decide for you), which may not suit someone, but in this particular case, I welcomed this. But personally, I have to say that I didn’t feel comfortable building on a diamond map, as it prevented me from creating the horizontal lines that I would have liked.

Fast action

But for all this construction, you need to somehow extract raw materials. You can generate them right in the settlement, but the vast majority of them will be obtained through quests, during which the game turns into a roguelite business, reminiscent of the now cult The Binding of Isaac. This means that each quest takes place in several randomly generated locations within one of the four biomes, where individual locations consist of sub-rooms in which different enemies are either hiding, the great variability of which constantly keeps you on your toes (separate types are exclusive to different biomes), but also just a bunch of raw materials or other NPCs offering additional options and bonuses. So each such quest is a sort of “run” that always ends with a boss fight, where if you die during it all, you will return to the village (unless you have a special ability unlocked) with the remaining resources you received, only slightly reduced their number.

Fights are responsive, fast, fun.

And this side of the game is definitely a success. The fights are very responsive, fast, fun and most of the time they don’t bother you when you can’t do without constant jumps and good timing of attacks. You will then do so with one melee weapon and one curse, which is an additional special ability mainly used at a distance or for a larger area. And while we can find a relatively blessed amount of curses in the game, weapons in particular deserve a bit more variety. In total, we find here five pieces (claws, sword, dagger, hammer and ax), where there are various additional variations with additional effects, but they still behave the same. But I would also maybe focus a little more on overall balancing. In addition to curses and weapons, you’ll also find, collect, and draw tarot cards in the game that serve as bonus modifiers, granting either better lives, extra abilities, or better skills. All this is then randomly generated for each pass, when I very soon began to notice that some combinations or even individual elements were perhaps too strong compared to others. So one time I practically cut it all out with my nose finger and another time I had to twist a lot to get it to play. However, you can always change the difficulty level in the settings (there are four to choose from), which in turn helps with more accessibility, which games of this subgenre often lack (for better or for worse, I’ll leave it up to you) .

I’m not going to sleep yet

In any case, the combination of these two levels creates a really immersive experience, enriched by a couple of mini-games that kept me up late at night (or early in the morning?) as I kept repeating to myself one more quest, one more village improvement, and I’ll go sleep. And you think I went? However, I must admit that in the later stages, I began to notice a feeling of slight repetition (mainly in terms of the environment), especially since the path to the final boss contained a light portion of the grind. However, this may be somewhat specific to my play style and you may want to avoid it. Besides, the sense of fun still far outweighed him. But it’s certainly disappointing that the game doesn’t have a significant endgame/postgame yet. Once you beat the base campaign, you will no longer have the motivation to continue playing as most of the items will already be unlocked and you won’t have any new challenges.

The combination of the two levels creates an extremely immersive experience.

However, I have good news on the technical condition. On a PC with an old RX 580 with 8GB of VRAM and a Ryzen 3600, the game runs pretty smoothly most of the time, the only significant FPS drop is when loading the next day, which doesn’t bother anything at all and can be figured out. In terms of bugs, the only thing that made my life miserable was that the boss didn’t show up in one run, so I left without catching him. But otherwise, I did not notice any special jambs. That is, except for the missing text for one of your minion’s mini-quests, but that should be unique to the version I tested without the final patch. But I would definitely recommend a gamepad for the game because the combination of keyboard and mouse wasn’t ideal due to the nature of the game. But this can be done.

Devolver did it again

So I’m definitely happy that this year for the third time I can say with a smile on my face that Devolver once again made me happy. Once again, a project has appeared on our screens that has great potential to firmly tie you to a sofa / chair for several hours with its really very exciting, and most importantly fun gameplay, this time complemented by well-chosen stylization and a world that, combining not very beautiful elements with endless amount of attraction, can penetrate the skin.