You don't like Jehova's Witnesses, but what if one day you could be a leader of one? Well, curiosity doesn't always kill a cat. No, they kill his followers in his name. In each sacrifice, they grow stronger. Becoming the ultimate cult leader to take down all heathens and anyone who's betrayed their master.
Cleaning up followers poop, using sermons to empower yourself with new unlocked power traits, go out to the arenas to attack on the false gods, while stealing resources and finding new followers, and occasionally by choice, putting dissent down by punishing troubling followers slowly becoming detractors. All part of the job if you want to lay down your law and retrieve as much power as necessary.
It's an over-encompassing list of video games mixed together with a dash of rogue lite gameplay, cult managing, and arena battles. There's so much new stuff to discover, and more reasons to keep playing in order to progress your cult, and usurp the usurpers. Devolver Digital is with this one again, and it might take the spot for this year's GOTY.
A simple prologue starts off with our lamb protagonist getting sacrificed before saved at the last minute by this great being, who makes a binding contract with this god before getting resurrected and escapes his way, slaughtering anyone who comes to stop him. And with his escape reached, he starts taking help from various figures across the game, lending him a hand, and showing him the rabbit hole of this brand-new world he's in.
To sum up Cult of the Lamb, your followers are lost, feeble critters who need guidance, they can't do much for themselves, so you have to be the responsible one. Build up your village, use your followers worship to build up your strength, and create order as a proxy god. And, yes, you can sacrifice them too. Think of it as a cute Animal Crossing mini-game, except stuff gets pretty brutal.
It's heavy-handed work, but what's to stop us from doing the god's work to receive his gifts? From scourging thine wrath against their enemies to submitting their flock to whatever doctrines you set up. But it's more fun if you're also adamant on feeding their own feces for sustenance. Yeah, you can do that too. But better if you leave that as fertilizers.
The flocks are not very intelligent beings, they're driven by simple behavior and various upside, downside characteristics. So, I usually just read the pattern and try to think of what to do next based around that. It does get kind of difficult once I've reached a certain point because of tougher battles, and that will put anyone in a tilt, but getting balance back didn't require me to do much. Although, I wish the game taught me more from the start instead of learning all this in such a lengthy pace. It takes a while to figure all this out.
Managing your village based on a day cycle is important, you have to build different structures for different reasons like healing centers, effigies, lumberyards, outhouse (this is important to deal with pooping crisis), farmhouses, etc. They also need places to sleep, and food to eat, so building both nets and farms makes a good loop to guarantee their satisfaction. Or just do a ritual where they fast for the next 3 days.
Playing through the dungeons, you'll stumble on a lot of philosophical pedestals across your journey, talking to you in riddles or murky truths, making you ponder what it really all boils to, where you hold the silver lining? So many different character interactions will bring you there, adding these depths of layer in its world building.
The game acts like such a big metaphor for dogmatization, that you'll also have to deal with these guys, who loses faith in you and starts calling you out. You could re-educate them, or do something else like putting them in a prison to teach them a lesson. Or just for giggles, feed them poop. Or worse, just sacrifice them too for more power. They're really annoying to deal with at times.
It's a rogue lite game too, since each level you explore has generated levels and enemy encounters. There's a progressive tarot card system where you find tarot cards and get bonus stats like increased damage, temporary health, poison attacks, damaging enemies while dodging and so on. And here's where it gets interesting, the more rooms you go into, the higher these tarot cards rank go, with increased stats.
It's a simple matter of dodging enemies, attacking with your main weapon and using your cursed weapon too. There are a variety of them, but the interesting ones are the cursed weapons; depending on how many max points you have on the meter, you spam these launching tentacles, projectiles, throwing acid bombs on the ground, such similar examples make the game more interesting as it adds more fun to the carnage you want to unleash.
Each room you go to not only has enemy encounters, but you'll meet certain people selling you rare items, a follower to save and convert, resources to get, they'll give you new locations to travel for new quests to do, you get the idea now. The game has things upon things to do. It's a lot to work up, but the engagement factor does really keep you invested.
If you played Hades, it feels similar to that without the isometric camera angle. But has its own unique properties to keep it very interesting, as well as being, well, fun. I mean, it should be fun to use your followers as puppets for the grand scheme of wars against gods. But you can sidetrack and do other interesting things too, there are bundles of mini-games and quests to finish, if you're up for playing this really long enough.
Combat in this game is hectic, especially the boss battles, but they're not super difficult if you're used to hack n slash games overall. Though, that depends on the difficulty, because the devs know some of you are a glutton for punishment and your mileage will vary with that one too. The boss battles are tight, they keep you glued to the screen, trying not to die. That'll be easier to avoid, if you've done enough sermons and have more followers to give you enough strength to survive even the toughest of battles.
Becoming the ultimate "proxy" god requires arduous work and sacrifice, that would pit you against the worst kind of enemy. The one who has way more to lose than you do, and will do everything in their power to stop you. There's no good and bad kind of story, it's super gray.
So to sum up, yeah, Cult of the Lamb is the zaniest game I've played. It holds little back in terms of hedonism, it sucks you into its Eldritch aesthetics, and constantly has you dabbling in moral conundrums. But it isn't that you don't have a choice, you do. In the long run, you are what you preach.
