How would you fare as a cult leader? Shepherding your flock to appease your all mighty god. Making the hard choices that no one else can. Making sure they remember who’s in charge… it’s your god, right?
Cult of the Lamb
Developer: Massive Monster
Price: $24.99
Platforms: PC, Switch, PS4/5, Xbox
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
Cult of the Lamb on its surface can be described like how I pitched it to my girlfriend: “Satanic Animal Crossing.” It hits all of the hallmarks of collecting cute animals to live alongside and building your own space as you want, but also you can sacrifice said cute animals to an old one while you and your friends look on in joy.
It’s this very contrast of hyper cute artstyle against hyper dark material that Cult of the Lamb builds its metaphorical and physical church. You play as an adorable lamb, hunted down by jealous gods because of a so-called prophecy in which a lamb will be their undoing and bring about an ancient chained god. Of course, the prophecy is true and you are tasked with making a cult for said god and doing whatever you want with their cute trusting eyes. Sacrifice, brainwashing, poop feeding, cannibalism, nothing is off the table as long as it goes towards appeasing and freeing your god.
In some ways, it harkens back to the ancient internet series The Happy Tree Friends, which was a collection of short animated videos about incredibly cute animals dying in horrible and gory ways. Highlighting but also somewhat masking how truly vile some of this all is under a layer of carebear style big eyes and bright colors.
The Cult of Hooters begins
It’s a wonderful artstyle that really elevates everything around it. It also really pushes you to try to collect all the different kinds of decorations and species of cult members you can collect so you can really make your cult feel personalized and as goofy or horrible as you want.
From a gameplay perspective Cult of the Lamb is broken into two halves. Base building/Cult management and a roguelike light. Both are disappointingly a bit light on normal difficulty. The base building and management is simple, you’re making buildings to collect resources, feed your cult members, and collect devotion, with a few extra buildings for bonuses in the roguelike area. Most of this is based around further expansion for construction and just keeping your members happy.
There is also a chapel where you can upgrade your lamb and perform rituals for a variety of bonuses at your cult like: keeping happiness at max for a few days by feeding them psychedelics or making them fast for purity. All of these have very fun animations based around them that are great to see, but they don’t really serve too much purpose. Most issues with happiness and food can be solved by just feeding your members or just talking to them. Especially as the game goes on and your cult starts to become more and more self-sustaining.
This is true for most of the building upgrades too. You start out with a pretty big upgrade tree, but by the middle, you’re more or less just upgrading the same building you already have without too many exciting or weird new ones.
The combat sequences are pretty basic. Called crusades they work on a roguelike system where you drop into a randomly generated Zelda-like dungeon and you work towards killing the big boss in the area. Along the way, you can collect resources, new cult members, and tarot cards. Tarot cards work as modifiers like in most roguelikes. Giving you a random edge for the run you’re currently on. It plays really well but is a bit basic in comparison to a pretty flooded market of isometric roguelikes like Hades.
Thankfully each run is short, usually, sub 10 minutes so it’s easy to pop in and out. The four different areas you crusade to all look fantastic and visually distinct. You start in an area that looks like it’s in a permanent state of fall, to an area that looks like it’s underwater. The enemies also change with each location, each with great designs respective to their environments. This all culminates with some incredible creature designs for the bosses. Gross monstrous and Lovecraftian creatures that take up big portions of the screen and look incredible. Of course, like the management, it’s not nearly as deep as you would hope and the unlocks get a bit disappointing as you go on.
All that said, if you’re looking for a game with an incredible art style that you can easily drop in and out of whenever Cult of the Lamb is phenomenal for that. The game has a problem with diminishing returns, but the visuals and overall vibe of the game make up for most of that. Sometimes style does win out over substance, and Cult of the Lamb has style to spare.
The Final Word
Strong satanic style outweighs nearly everything else even if the gameplay is a bit flat.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
Gameisseur
February 25, 2023 at 3:28 pm
Game is mad gross.