Cult of the Lamb – Review

Among the many entries in the roguelike genre, there is one odd duck – or lamb, in this case – that stands out. Cult of the Lamb is a unique mash between dungeon crawling and management/base building, where you play as the proverbial sacrificial lamb, last of its kind. After being sacrificed in front of the four evil Bishops, the Lamb is resurrected by an ancient deity called The One Who Waits, and is tasked with raising a cult in his name and ultimately defeat the four Bishops.

The game was launched in 2022 and it quickly gained a small cult following (heh). The developers, Massive Monster have been continuously updating and improving the game, adding many new features to the cult, patches and even modes like two player co-op. At the time of writing, I have completed the trophy list at 100%, which includes the base game and three DLCs: Relics of the Old Faith, Sins of the Flesh, and Woohlaven.

As mentioned, in Cult of the Lamb you take control of an adorable lamb with a magical crown and are tasked with defeating the four evil Bishops of the land. The vibes and graphics of the game are both adorable and grotesque, with the lamb himself being the cutest little creature in the game with a very joyful vibe, while also happily and violently shanking any creature that dares cross his path. While the Lamb, his followers and the camp are cute and heartwarming, the beasts that are fought during the crusades are some of the most vile and ugly beings one could ever set their eyes upon, almost ripped straight out from a Lovecraftian story.

The game is split into two main activities: Cult management and Crusading.

Managing your cult is probably the part that will eat up most of your time and require the most focus. Following the dogma “every god needs followers in order to remain a god”, your main task is to convert various animals to your cause and manage them accordingly. Most of the NPCs are rescued from dungeons and then transported to your base. Once converted, they can be assigned to various tasks like gathering resources, farming, or most importantly, praying. Having your followers pray is crucial, since they generate the most critical resource of them all – faith. This “spiritual” currency is used to upgrade your base with more advanced buildings and technologies, which in turn will keep your followers happy and occupied.
So the classical religious circle “pray -> build -> assign” is key in order to have a fully functional cult.

Initially, you will have to personally herd your flock. The cultists are just silly, dumb animals that want to praise you, so you will start by cooking for them, building tents for them and will even have to clean their poop (nobody said the life of a pastor is pretty!). As you advance in your building skill tree however, you will be able to build more sophisticated buildings and assign jobs to your followers, so that they start doing all the work for you.

Just having the system running is not really enough, though; your followers need to be kept happy, or they’ll dissent and sabotage The Good Word of the Lamb. Thus, you’ll take them to the church and bless their ears with Sermons and Rituals. A sermon is a quick faith boost where you will get some Lamb upgrade points, required for abilities. Rituals are special ceremonies that award a significant faith and happiness boost. However, you must be very careful with the type of ritual you do, some followers will always appreciate a free meal ritual, while they surely won’t enjoy a ritual where they themselves become a meal for some eldritch tentacle monster. Each ritual gives different bonuses, and sometimes it’s worth using your followers as monster chowder if the end result is a rare resource that you need. 

Considering that you also have to find various hidden merchants, minigames, and side-quests, expect to spend most of your playthrough in management mode. Thankfully, this is also the most enjoyable part of the game.

Crusading is very simple in comparison. You select one of the four dungeons, with the first one being already available and the other unlocking as you defeat the bishops. At the start of the dungeon, you select one weapon, one spell, and off you go, trying to slay the bishops and their cohorts. Your weapons consist of either fast hitting daggers, slow but powerful axes, balanced swords and more, while the spells are designed to be of a support nature only and deal a lot of damage in exchange for mana. Moreover, in each of the random rooms you can get various boosts via “Tarot Cards” which will improve your run by boosting various stats, such as your damage during daylight, your speed, your health, or your item drop rate.

While the enemies are really varied, none will pose any significant challenge if you pay some small amount of attention. The true challenge will be the bosses of each realm, who can turn their fights in veritable bullet hell fights. They are big, ugly, hit hard, and will pose a challenge for even the most devoted Lamb. Of course, the biggest challenge is found in the four Bishops themselves, each with their own unique bag of tricks, and which will spare no expense in trying to turn you into mutton chops.

Even considering the varied enemies and bosses, the combat part was the duller of the two activities. I couldn’t wait to be done with the combat slog just so I could restructure my followers and give new sermons. The combat also has some small issues; for example, the game randomly deces to aim to a far away opponent, resulting in a mistimed roll or attack. Also the enemies have the bad habit of usually ignoring your attacks and dodges and… just hit you. 

Still, despite not being as great as the management system, the combat can be entertaining as well, once you get some good Tarot cards and get into the flow of the game.

At launch, Cult of the Lamb was also plagued with various bugs, which would become a pattern with each piece of content released. While not gamebreaking, most bugs were annoying, such as the enemies or the lamb himself getting stuck in the background, the rewards failing to appear after a successful crusade, or trophies refusing to pop. Thankfully, the developers were usually very quick to react and fix their bugs, and would always release patches as soon as possible.

Overall, Cult of the Lamb in its base form is a very cute hybrid between management simulator and roguelike, where most of the fun will be in rescuing and managing your followers. The developers would improve on the experience big time with the DLCs that were to come.

This DLC came out of nowhere, offering a lot of quality of life upgrades as well as new additions to the faithful cult that you are hearding. Farming is way easier than before, your cultists can also be healed more conveniently should they contract a disease, and there are also new upgrades in the skill tree.

However the biggest updates were added to the Crusading part of the game, where a new NPC that is simply called “???” tasks you with defeating all four bosses once again, and will reward you with various items used to further enhance your cult. There is also a special Purgatory dungeon which acts as a “survival” type of dungeon, where you have to fight for as long as possible with various debuffs added to the run. Finally, a new mechanic was introduced, the so called Relics. These are more potent spells but that can be either used only once, or have a huge cooldown attached to them.

Overall, this DLC offers just more free Cult of the Lamb content. The DLC launched with its own set of bugs, some NPCs were not spawning, but the devs were fast enough with patching the issues. If you liked the main game, experiencing this DLC is a no-brainer.

If Relics of Old Faith focused on the Crusading aspect, Sins of the Flesh adds more content to your Cult management. This free DLC brings a new resource named Sin, which you can harvest from your followers by making them perform various unsavory actions: dancing butt naked around the campfire, get “friendly” with each other and hatch eggs, or even a classic peasant riot where they set fire to the camp and burn things to the ground (not sure why you would like to do that but hey, whatever floats your lamb!). Since this is an adorable game after all, all these sinful acts are performed in a very cute and playful manner, you won’t get actual NSFW content with lambs and giraffes.

The generated Sin can then be used to further upgrade your camp, your temple, or even craft new costumes for both the lamb and your followers.

On the crusading side, not many updates were added, other than the new weapon Blunderbuss, who further trivializes this aspect of the game. This is where I honestly wished for some more exciting ideas for this part, because it is way more enjoyable to spend time with your cult dancing around the bonfire, than hunt for silly relics and shoot enemies in the face.

Another annoying part when the DLC launched was that while the devs had fixed a lot of the previous bugs, now the game suddenly slowed down to a snail’s pace, as it wasn’t able to process all the details on the screen anymore. At least on the PS4 I had to wait about five to six seconds whenever I wanted to load up my followers’ list to assign them tasks. At this point it felt like, for every bug fixed, two new bugs appeared. Of course, by the writing of this review, all bugs have been ironed out and the game works as intended.

Finally, getting all the trophies for the DLC is a chore. You have to level up 12 followers to max level, which takes a while. You have to find random pieces of paper in random locations which is about as fun as it sounds. Lastly, upgrading your temple to the maximum level 10 is a resource-hungry endeavor, and requires a lot of sin and gold to achieve.

While this DLC is also free and not necessarily bad, this is also where I started to get a bit tired of Cult of the Lamb’s updates that kept breaking things on consoles. I kept returning to the game just so I could 100% the trophy list, but it felt like the updates weren’t worth the time.

All that changed for me with the next and final DLC.

When I first saw Woolhaven announced, I groaned. Just how many updates is this game going to receive at this point? Apparently I should not have been so quick to judge, because despite being paid this time around, Woolhaven turned out to be a banger of a DLC. After playing it, I am convinced that the developers simply love their game and want it to be as good as possible.

Woolhaven is a new haunted village, with a monstruous sheep statue in its center that begs you to avenge her. In order to do that, you must explore the mountain Ewefall and combat the Cult of the Wolf, who is opposing your faith. Meanwhile, there’s a terrible secret under the mountain that you must also solve, an infection that afflicts everyone with Rot. This is a surprisingly complex DLC with lots of interesting lore bits, way deeper than the content previously added to this game.

In terms of dungeon runs, not much changed. You do have new enemies, the wolves being the biggest pains in the fluff you’ve met so far. You have a new flail weapon, some new resources that you can gather (wool, rot, two types of flowers and sparking shards). You can find new NPCs that ask you to do quests, some of them giving you either cosmetic rewards or “legendary weapon shards”. At this point, it’s a classic dungeon run, with slightly altered modifiers, so I hope you remember how to play this game!

The new bosses are actually pretty neat, too. They pack a serious challenge on Normal mode and you might have to retry several times. It doesn’t help that you also occasionally meet Marchosias, the wolf leader of the enemy cult, who loves to debuff you as you progress towards the top of the mountain. Fortunately, if the enemies are proven to be too much of a challenge, you can also switch to Easy, or even turn on invincibility mode, if you don’t care for any sort of challenge.

The biggest piece of mutton was dedicated to the Cult Management part. And hoo boy, did the devs add a HEFTY amount of updates there. No wonder they were asking for money this time around!

The newest mechanic added is The Winter. Normally you were in a perpetual state of Spring-Summer, but with Woolhaven, winter hits your little haven of debauchery and sacrifice. Crops die, your followers freeze to death, wolves attack, food shortage… pretty much a sucky event… and that’s only the first stage. At later stages, the winter can destroy your buildings, immobilize everyone due to blizzards and even rain lightning on your followers. The cult management can turn into a survival game quickly…

…if you happen to be unprepared. Thankfully, the game is kind enough to provide you with a new development tree for buildings that help you withstand this inconvenience. The first and most important is The Furnace, which warms your entire map and prevents your followers from freezing to death. It has to be fueled with rot, the resource you will farm from the new maps, and can be upgraded to add various effects, including dispelling the dreaded blizzard, probably your biggest inconvenience. Then you will have auxiliary upgrades like a Rot Mine that will supply you with resources, a device that shows you when winter starts, lightning rods, a carpenter shop that helps you fix damaged buildings… and new rituals and relics that can feed and warm your followers.

Winter also unlocks some silly activities. Your followers will try to catch snowflakes, do snow angels, snow fights and even ask you to build a snowlamb. With some upgrades, you can even animate the snowlamb so he can work for you during the winter. Now that’s religious dedication!

You now also have to manage Woolhaven on top of dealing with your freezing cultists. Fortunately, Woolhaven is a ghost town, which means winter doesn’t affect anyone there. You have to reanimate various ghosts of former inhabitants, which will then help you in your mission, as well as give you various quests in exchange for upgrades. These upgrades require a LOT of wool however, so be prepared for a slight grind for materials.

All these transparent inhabitants are funny and a little weird. They become A LOT weirder once you unlock their actual story, but overall they are fun to interact with. The highlight is the blacksmith that allows you to forge legendary weapons, the shepherd that gives you animals for your ranch and the scholar that teaches you how to play Flockade, a rock/paper/scissors type of game with some modifiers added to it. You can also improve the state of Woolhaven by planting flowers that you collect, yet again, from your Crusades.

You’ll have a lot to do either way, but Woolhaven overall feels like a more chill version of your Cult, since it doesn’t require that much micromanagement.

There’s one last thing I want to talk about, and that’s the Ranch. This is a specific building that got added, where you can take care of and breed animals. If you take care of them, these animals will give you wool along with other extra resources depending on the animal. You can breed yaks, llamas, tortoises, snails and spiders for some reason. You can show them affection, feed them, assign cultists to take care of them, even ascend them to heavens once they get to a “Prime” level. Also, you can sacrifice them in a gruesome way in order to appeal the cruel winter, because this is Cult of the Lamb after all. They can also be attacked by wolves during winter, so you better be around to fend the wolves… or lay down traps to do the job for you.

I actually liked this Ranch section. It really made me care for the animals and it was fun… and weird… to breed a llama with a snail. It resulted in another llama, which signals me that the Lamb doesn’t care much about genetics here.

I did not expect to enjoy Woolhaven this much. This really has been the best DLC the developers released thus far. Despite the resources being again a pain in the fluff to gather and the bugs-at-launch which seems to be a trademark at this point, the pure love the developers have for their own game is obvious here. And personally, I can’t help but only praise them for that.

In conclusion, I would say that Cult of the Lamb is a decent roguelike/management simulator. If you want to play something truly weird, with lots of content that reminds you of Animal Crossing and Happy Tree Friends (do not check that last one if you don’t know what I am talking about), then Cult of the Lamb is truly a good pick for you. Just prepare to invest at least 100 hours if you want to 100% the game and also for unavoidable bugs, should the developers release even more DLC.