Chinese Singaporean immigrant in the UK. Writer. Nintendo enthusiast. SF Giants fan. Ailuromaniac. (Other animals are ๐Ÿ’–.) Bibliophile. Anime-niac. See the link for my TTRPGs out on http://itch.io


Cult of the Lamb is a good example of when the aesthetics of a game are cute, but the contents are anything but cosy/wholesome.

The game seems to be somewhat buggy on release. I ran into a softlock bug that I only managed to clear by finishing off some quests in my queue - fortunately they were ones I could complete without needing to do more dungeon runs, as those were locked off by the bug. If I had needed to be able to go into a dungeon, I'd have been stuck completely. There were also times when the game froze up on me, and I had to restart it. Most notably, one of my favourite followers died of sickness and couldn't be ressurected afterwards without the game freezing up.

You might either want to wait for the bugs to be fixed, or at least be aware of them before you start playing.

Having said that, it's a very more-ish game, and I found it hard to put down once I started it. You can adjust the difficulty of the combat in the game. From what I've read elsewhere the normal setting is generally easy for experienced players, so anyone wanting more of a challenge might want to set that on high or the highest level. You can also adjust difficulty as you go, so you can try out different settings to see what works best for you. I mainly wanted to focus on building my cult, or the management/sim aspects of the game, rather than combat, so an easy difficulty worked well for me.

It's in managing and developing your cult that you'll be faced with some of the more toothy moral decisions in the game. Do you carry out rituals to sacrifice your followers? What will you say if one of them asks you to feed another one a bowl of poop as a "joke"? (Your followers can eventually take on some of the chores at your camp, but you'll always have to cook for your cult.) Declining requests will cost you faith, but serving up a poop dish may result in harmful disease. And anyway, it's a mean thing to do. Do you want to give your followers a belief in the afterlife that will comfort them when one of their compadres dies? Do you want to build a fight pit where you can force them to fight each other to the death?

It's possible to try to create a relatively benign cult, but even then the doctrines you have to choose from can still feel sinister. You have to choose between different ones in order to advance up that "tree", so unless you forego a certain amount of progression, you will have to make some choices that may feel troubling. For instance, choosing between a Loyalty Enforcer or a Tax Enforcer still results in your enforcing something.

Besides that the game will sometimes make you do some horrifying things. Without giving detailed spoilers, it's impossible to get through some of the dungeons without harm coming to your followers. You can try to mitigate that, or reverse some of it, but some of it is also unavoidable.

I think all of this is about right for a game that sets out to be satirical of organised religion. You can try your best to be "good", but the situation itself will push you towards being dictatorial in some way.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this game. The music is very good; I've had some of the tunes stuck in my head for days. The gameplay loops of taking care of my followers, building up the cult and then doing a bit of dungeoning to have more resources, or to meet follower requests - all of that was very moreish. I did get attached to certain followers. You will likely go through very many of these in the 15-20 hour playtime in which you're going through the story, as followers have a limited lifespan. I named all of mine after Game of Thrones characters, because I realised I was going to need very many names along the way.

Depending on the choice you make at the end of the story, you can go on building your cult afterwards. I did hang around for some time in the new game+, to do a bit more cult management, if that gives some idea of how much I became fond of my little band of poop-obsessed weirdoes. ๐Ÿ˜‚

On the whole it's a very good game if you enjoy that mixture of management/sim and dungeon runs, and if you can appreciate its sinister take on religion.


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