Gamers play as a lamb who is the founder of a cult for adorable woodland creatures, with gameplay involving collecting resources to further build up the cult, performing dark rituals, giving sermons, and fighting off non-believers. Steam reviews have called the game addicting, beautifully animated, and well worth its price.

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A Refreshing Mix Of Genre

Cult of the Lamb checks a lot of genre boxes that are not usually put together. It is an action-adventure, Roguelike, simulation, fighting, and strategy game, all in one. The adorable art style juxtaposed with the gore and dark rituals is reflective of how it crosses various genre boundaries. Its comparisons to Animal Crossing is due to the cute animal characters and the simulation aspect of upgrading the home base and tending to the NPCs. The comparison to Hades stems from its combat, its crusades against non-believers and otherworldly beings.

Like Hades, Cult of the Lamb is a dungeon crawler that randomizes its levels and items with each run-through. However, the dungeons are not as long as in Hades, taking about 10 minutes to complete. Most gamers have reported beating the game within 13 hours but loving it enough to come back and keep playing. There are four big bosses that have to be taken care of to beat the main storyline, and they each are reachable through the dungeon-crawling aspect of the game.

Most of the game is spent doing quests for NPCs and building up the cult. Followers have to be taken care of, so the player has to manage their hunger, faith, and cleanliness. There is a lot of cosmetic freedom at the home base, allowing the player to rename recruits, decorate, and change the appearances of followers. Outside of gameplay, the genre mix between the cutesy and the demonic is very well executed.

A Ton To Do

While the main story can be completed in 13 hours, there is a ton for a player to get caught up doing. The Cult of the Lamb has a world map with various players to visit that contains different shops that sell cosmetics, tarot cards, and has various NPCs to meet and do quests for. There are also minigames like fishing and dice-rolling. Places that have been beaten can be revisited with a higher scale of difficulty as well. Followers in the cult village can be assigned various tasks, and they can have positive or negative traits that affect how they act and react to the player. If followers are not well taken care of, they can dissent. There are also plenty of details and secrets to discover. For example, Polygon just reported that it has been discovered that the player can pet their followers, but only if they are dogs.

About The Developer And Publisher

The Indie game developer behind Cult of the Lamb is Massive Monster, and Cult of the Lamb is not its first game. It has dealt with a lot of cute themes before, as it made The Adventure Pals which is described to be an adventure platformer “fueled by imagination, friendship, and the dark side of hot dogs.” Another cute title it made is a physics game called Unicycle Giraffe.

The publisher, Devolver Digital, often works with indie developers and has published games of all sorts of genres for all kinds of platforms, such as Weird West, The Plucky Squire, Trek to Yomi, Olija, Death’s Door, and Carrion. Out of its current games, though, it does seem to be the Cult of the Lamb that is getting most showered with attention.

Cult of the Lamb is now available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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