From the pause menu, you can see the cultists’ progress bars, but you can’t see their individual traits or where they live because, in the end, where you assign them isn’t really that important. For one, you won’t know how much a new building costs until you’ve already committed to unlocking it, and each time you spend a resource to “upgrade” the cult’s doctrines, you’re locked into the first category that you choose, with no option to back out and assess the alternatives. All the while, the menus and progress bars constantly fill and wiggle around, trying to obscure the monotony with insistent reminders that you’re accomplishing something.Īs if to acknowledge how inconsequential most of your options are, the game’s menus don’t even give you enough information to make informed choices. In the end, Cult of the Lamb’s resource-gathering goals are so rigid that you’re more or less moving up a linear skill tree with a handful of branches to give the barest hint of agency. But even here, there are hardly any options to weigh, or any compromises to be made. Each animal technically functions as an individual entity, with separate levels of faith and specific traits that affect their work efficiency, as well as the ability to speak out against you. Over time, you indoctrinate animals to help you build things, gather resources, or offer prayers toward the next unlock. The game’s cult-management elements don’t ask for much more strategy either. Sure, there are slight differences in range, speed, and aim between your various equipment, but in practice they rarely force you to change your approach in the slightest. But if variety is the spice of a roguelike, Cult of the Lamb’s combat sections are a flavorless affair. The defining trait of the best roguelikes is their powerful and distinct combinations, which players discover organically through everything from logic to reason to experimentation.

But where Hades keeps things interesting by making you constantly choose different abilities, Cult of the Lamb just hands you a couple of tarot cards to boost health or weapon speed. The combat, though, is more reminiscent of Hades, with players having to focus less on changing weapons mid-run than sticking to whatever items spawned at the start of a run. With a cartoonish style that channels the cutesy, the crass, and the blasphemous, Cult of the Lamb most overtly recalls The Binding of Isaac, as your crusades find you fighting through randomized, Legend of Zelda-esque, and similar-looking rooms that are displayed on a minimap. But your death doesn’t stick, because the outcast god, The One Who Waits, resurrects you to be his avatar and gifts you with a crown that doubles as a transforming weapon for use in the run-based “crusades” through enemy territories.

As the last lamb of your kind, you’re slaughtered at the behest of four fearsome gods, hopefully removing any avenue of escape for another god imprisoned below the surface of the Earth. Massive Monster’s Cult of the Lamb begins with your ovine protagonist trudging toward death.

Cult of the lamb publisher