My partner and I were looking for games to play together; she's very much aesthetics first, so Cult of the Lamb naturally drew her attention with its cutesy look, fun shenanigans, and "sex" marketing. Gameplay wise, it's a bold decision to mix basebuilding and roguelite dungeon elements, and I'd say they managed to strike a good balance.
We beat the game in 15 hours. She took care of the basebuilding part of the game (which I refuse to touch) and I did the dungeon runs (which she disliked). We came to this game off playing Hades, and in terms of gameplay comparisons, Cult of the Lamb's can't compare. Instead, it supplements the game with a basebuilding section similar to Don't Starve and Valheim.
That being said, I stopped playing games like Valheim because:
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While I love basebuilding, I wanted to pretty up the place with torches. Turns out the torches in Valheim extinguish and you need to collect new fuel and then manually add it to each and every torch.
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The base I was building kept degrading. Which meant I needed to then manually go to each and every building tile and fix it up with a hammer.
So while I am a mommy 😏, I refuse to be anyone's mother. Any game with upkeep elements makes me feel like I'm doing emotional/mental labour (like telling someone to do the laundry or wash their dishes). Cult of the Lamb has this in SPADES. When I played the demo two years back, I got to this point in the basebuilding
And I'm like, LMAO NO, I'M OUTTA HERE. Clean up your own poop. This is also why I bounced off Don't Starve.
But my partner loves Don't Starve and so she really enjoyed the basebuilding part (even cleaning up the poop). There's a clicker aspect to it too, since you need to manually collect your devotion and resources every single time.
If you're fine with it, then this might be the game for you. If not, then maybe just go back to playing Hades instead. In terms of difficulty, Cult of the Lamb is an incredibly easy game if you've got experience in anything similar. The upgrade system doesn't change how you play the game so once you've mastered the core loop, it's easy to blaze straight through.
I beat every boss first try and the final boss only took me two attempts.
To help you make a decision, here are some things my partner said while we played this game:
"Yeah, they don't like me, but I'll just brainwash them, no worries." 🧠🧠🧠
"I always sacrifice the elderly since they're a drain on my resources."🗡️🧓👴👵
My partner, after making her in-game wife bang another cult member to have an eugenics child: "Oh, so this is how you make higher tier babies to sacrifice."⭐👼
In the end, it's a cute game where you get up to fun shenanigans. For a super in-depth roguelite, look elsewhere.
