Cult of the Lamb Review – A Welcome Sacrifice
Life is often about sacrifice. After all, it’s a basic rule of existence that to get something, you generally need to pay some kind price. We all have to find ways to balance the things we need with those we want and our available resources. Thus, there’s really no more fitting protagonist for Massive Monster’s debut title, Cult of the Lamb, than the titular lamb, the pinnacle symbol of sacrifice.
The developers are more than aware of the imagery and themes they’re playing with here; these elements are key to what the game is asking: how much are you willing to sacrifice to reach your goals, and who are those sacrifices actually serving? The world of Cult of the Lamb is a frightening one, where the vast landscape of gods has been pared down to just four who hold a vice grip on things, their rule guided by selfishness and fear.
Your character’s life ends at the hands of these gods when you start the game, but their forsaken brother, the god of death, The One Who Waits (TOWW), intercedes in the afterlife. His siblings locked him away long ago, and he wants to be freed. To achieve this end, he instead converts you into the vessel of his power and brings you back to life. Your task now is to form a cult in his honor and build enough power to murder the other gods and free him. In an instant, you go from lamb to the slaughter to lamb of slaughter.
Thanks to TOWW’s Red Crown, your lamb can summon various weapons and use supernatural abilities while engaging in conquests through the lands of your enemies. These sections consist of roguelike dungeons where you battle enemies and collect tarot cards to gain different advantages. There are four dungeons you need to conquer to free your banished patron, each with their own theme based on the god who rules there. As you traverse these areas, you can gather additional resources and upgrade your weapons and curses to new ones.
To unlock more and better versions of these combat skills and items, you need to build up your cult by recruiting followers and making sure they stay relatively happy and healthy. This means cooking them meals, building decorations so the camp looks nice, keeping things clean and sanitary, and conducting religious services like sermons and rituals. Should these factors slip, their faith in you will as well, which reduces your power and makes the already difficult life of an up-and-coming cult leader even harder.
Cult of the Lamb does an excellent job of balancing its dungeon crawling and management sim elements. They go hand in hand, the conquests providing opportunities to gather resources like food, building materials, and even additional followers, at the cost of leaving your flock to their own devices while you’re away. Every day is all about sacrifice, deciding where you’ll spend your time, and if your followers can manage on their own without you. This does get easier as you go on; cultists begin to be able to fend for themselves more and more as you upgrade your camp, but they’re still reliant on you for daily doses of both food and faith. Leave either of these factors unaddressed for too long, and you’ll have a mess on your hands via either a camp-wide plague or a mutiny.
This might sound a little overwhelming or stressful, and it can be, but that’s part of the joy. Cult of the Lamb asks players to show what they prioritize and punishes accordingly if they’re too focused on one element of the game alone. Your power comes from the group, you can’t advance without taking care of them too. Though Cult of the Lamb encourages you to use and exploit your followers as you see fit, they have their own fair share of power over you as well.
While the give and take between you and your cultists is the key to success in this game, it’s not the only thing you should focus on. Cult of the Lamb features all kinds of extra areas and small details that are worth investigating and playing around in. The game will reward you with fun little secrets (here’s one for free: you can pet the dog cultists) if you dig into the details that are baked into almost every aspect. Being curious and willing to say “what happens if I do this” will enrich your experience while you attempt to put The One Who Waits back on the throne.
The richness of its relatively small world gives Cult of the Lamb depth and makes it feel as though this is a land that is living and breathing, even if only in shallow, fearful gasps. Those who don’t want to live under the heel of the ruling gods may not have it easy, but they haven’t been stamped out. Despite the celestial conflict this world and its people have gone through, there are still folks out there trying to carve out a life – proving that, even with all this going on, people are still people. Some are greedy, others need help, and everyone is doing their best to get by without giving up too much.
The journey is absolutely what makes this game worthwhile. Cult of the Lamb’s story is going exactly where you think it is. It’s predictable, but that’s honestly not a bad thing, given the trajectory this story takes. If you want to survive, the path forward becomes abundantly clear. Reaching your goal is satisfying, but there’s definitely more fun to be had in managing your cultists, playing dungeons you’ve already cleared (they change), and exploring the map to find funky little experiences that give each day a little more meaning.
Score: 4.5/5
Cult of the Lamb for PC was provided to Gayming Magazine by Devolver Digital.
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