Rate top gamesA fun, gorgeous, immaculately produced game with some issues surrounding difficulty.
Everything in this game is gorgeous, from the extremely cohesive character designs, world design, effects, interface, just everything. Not a single thing in the game is missing a transition, and it all adds up to something that just feels great.
Audio is similarly beautiful—a bevy of quirky and fun songs keep you motivated to manage your cult and run through the combat levels. The characters that inhabit the world, including your own cult members, sound-off with delightfully quirky and amusing emotes, adding to the fun and surreal nature of the game.
Difficulty is where the game begins to lose focus. I played on hard difficulty (3/4) and it was all over the place. Sometimes enemies and bosses were so easy I found myself relaxing as I easily went through the patterns, only inconvenienced by the amount of time it was taking. Worse yet, difficulty peaked on the third boss, which left the rest of the game feeling like a bizarre denoument. The final boss was simply easy, leading to a really bizarre narrative disconnect.
Overall it's a fantastic game, especially with a partner, but the wildly fluctuating difficulty is a big problem. Hopefully there's a sequel that rectifies this and refines the formula to a mirror sheen!
Everything in this game is gorgeous, from the extremely cohesive character designs, world design, effects, interface, just everything. Not a single thing in the game is missing a transition, and it all adds up to something that just feels great.
Audio is similarly beautiful—a bevy of quirky and fun songs keep you motivated to manage your cult and run through the combat levels. The characters that inhabit the world, including your own cult members, sound-off with delightfully quirky and amusing emotes, adding to the fun and surreal nature of the game.
Difficulty is where the game begins to lose focus. I played on hard difficulty (3/4) and it was all over the place. Sometimes enemies and bosses were so easy I found myself relaxing as I easily went through the patterns, only inconvenienced by the amount of time it was taking. Worse yet, difficulty peaked on the third boss, which left the rest of the game feeling like a bizarre denoument. The final boss was simply easy, leading to a really bizarre narrative disconnect.
Overall it's a fantastic game, especially with a partner, but the wildly fluctuating difficulty is a big problem. Hopefully there's a sequel that rectifies this and refines the formula to a mirror sheen!
«Better with friends»
«OST on repeat»
Other reviews9
TL;DR: An addicting jack-of-all-trades that's aimed at gaming newbies (but has several difficulties), and is the opposite of an engine builder.
I tried this game from a Steam Family and after ~25 hours I'm working on what is essentially the epilogue. This game hooked me immediately with its satisfying combat, good UI, and straightforward but fun basebuilding.
I'm also a big fan of its unique, colorful aesthetics and all the decorations you can customize your base with. I can't wait to start Woolhaven, which is supposedly much more challenging and deepends several of the gameplay systems.
However, the way this game handles rescources is really weird. Unlike most base-building rescource-gathering games, Cult of the Lamb *starts* with giving you an extreme surplus of materials. Basically every needed resource is thrown at you like candy during the first ~15 hours of the game. The only way you can mess this up is if you neglect to build stone and wood mines early.
Then, towards end game is when you have more and more followers that start really going through your supplies. This type of reverse engine-building is liable to turn off a lot of players at first glance, because it feels like being strategic with your resource gathering is useless at first.
I mean, it's clear it's easy at first to hook in players who have never touched a farming sim/base-builder before. The tutorial for combat also does something I've never seen before, which is to slow down time for the first few encounters and prompt you to dodge if you're about to get hit. Clearly, the devs want to help players new to combat to help build up muscle-memory.
There's also serveral game difficulties you can choose from and can change at any time. As far as I can tell, they only affect how much health you get and don't affect how much base resources you get or consume. The difficulties are a bit weird too, because if you're experienced at all with combat from other games, the default normal difficulty is going to feel incredibly easy for 3/4 of the game. After that 3/4, the game will feel "slightly easy." Related to that, boss difficulty is weird too. All the bosses are very easy imo, except the third one. But after the third one, the bosses go back to being basically cakewalks. But even so, I think that games should always have multiple difficulty modes, and I think the "teach you how to dodge" mechanic is ingenius.
There's a lot of things to unlock in this game, and at the start it's a bit tedious because every time you unlock something, a whole, 5-second-long animation plays where it dramatically shows you the thing you unlocked and where it is out of your whole collection book.
Despite the slightly odd difficulty settings, Cult of the Lamb is a colorful, good game for those who are new to top down combat and base-building, and the optional difficulties and new Woolhaven DLC can make it harder for experienced gamers as well. It's absolutely become one of my favorite games.
I tried this game from a Steam Family and after ~25 hours I'm working on what is essentially the epilogue. This game hooked me immediately with its satisfying combat, good UI, and straightforward but fun basebuilding.
I'm also a big fan of its unique, colorful aesthetics and all the decorations you can customize your base with. I can't wait to start Woolhaven, which is supposedly much more challenging and deepends several of the gameplay systems.
However, the way this game handles rescources is really weird. Unlike most base-building rescource-gathering games, Cult of the Lamb *starts* with giving you an extreme surplus of materials. Basically every needed resource is thrown at you like candy during the first ~15 hours of the game. The only way you can mess this up is if you neglect to build stone and wood mines early.
Then, towards end game is when you have more and more followers that start really going through your supplies. This type of reverse engine-building is liable to turn off a lot of players at first glance, because it feels like being strategic with your resource gathering is useless at first.
I mean, it's clear it's easy at first to hook in players who have never touched a farming sim/base-builder before. The tutorial for combat also does something I've never seen before, which is to slow down time for the first few encounters and prompt you to dodge if you're about to get hit. Clearly, the devs want to help players new to combat to help build up muscle-memory.
There's also serveral game difficulties you can choose from and can change at any time. As far as I can tell, they only affect how much health you get and don't affect how much base resources you get or consume. The difficulties are a bit weird too, because if you're experienced at all with combat from other games, the default normal difficulty is going to feel incredibly easy for 3/4 of the game. After that 3/4, the game will feel "slightly easy." Related to that, boss difficulty is weird too. All the bosses are very easy imo, except the third one. But after the third one, the bosses go back to being basically cakewalks. But even so, I think that games should always have multiple difficulty modes, and I think the "teach you how to dodge" mechanic is ingenius.
There's a lot of things to unlock in this game, and at the start it's a bit tedious because every time you unlock something, a whole, 5-second-long animation plays where it dramatically shows you the thing you unlocked and where it is out of your whole collection book.
Despite the slightly odd difficulty settings, Cult of the Lamb is a colorful, good game for those who are new to top down combat and base-building, and the optional difficulties and new Woolhaven DLC can make it harder for experienced gamers as well. It's absolutely become one of my favorite games.
«Blew my mind»
«Can’t stop playing»
A nice combination of city building, cult management, and rougelite.
Date Completed: 2024-02-02
Playtime: 20h
Enjoyment: 8/10
Recommendation: Yeah
I bought this on steam because I thought it would be a good one to play on the laptop and I kind of regret it. The performance is okay but feels a bit stiff. I’m not sure how much of that is the game and how much is the fact I’m playing on an old Mac. That’s my only initial criticism though. I absolutely love the look and vibe of the game.
First Impressions: I love the animal crossing portion of the game. Building up my cult has been so fun. The game is super funny in a dark kind of way. The dungeon roguelite side of the game is so so. It’s fine, but there doesn’t really seem to be that much to it. I think I partly feel that way because I’m playing on steam.
I’m really liking CotL. Both aspects of the game have continued to improve. The crusades have been better and are a bit more dynamic and challenging. Building up my cult has been super fun though.
I really binged this game hard. I found the base building aspect very addictive. The crusades aren’t bad but they aren’t what is drawing me in. With a better crusades system this game could easily hit an A- as the atmosphere, humour, and style is all top notch.
Beat it. The final boss is underwhelming. I wish you had to go through a normal run to fight him rather than immediately fighting his minions then him. Still I think my final time was around 21 hours and all of it was pretty damn enjoyable. Ends a mid high B+.
Final Score: B+
First Impressions: I love the animal crossing portion of the game. Building up my cult has been so fun. The game is super funny in a dark kind of way. The dungeon roguelite side of the game is so so. It’s fine, but there doesn’t really seem to be that much to it. I think I partly feel that way because I’m playing on steam.
I’m really liking CotL. Both aspects of the game have continued to improve. The crusades have been better and are a bit more dynamic and challenging. Building up my cult has been super fun though.
I really binged this game hard. I found the base building aspect very addictive. The crusades aren’t bad but they aren’t what is drawing me in. With a better crusades system this game could easily hit an A- as the atmosphere, humour, and style is all top notch.
Beat it. The final boss is underwhelming. I wish you had to go through a normal run to fight him rather than immediately fighting his minions then him. Still I think my final time was around 21 hours and all of it was pretty damn enjoyable. Ends a mid high B+.
Final Score: B+
This game is nothing short of a masterpiece. Just to get it out of the way - there are a few bugs, at least on the PC version, and some of them will force you to reboot the game occasionally.
That's pretty much the only downside to this awesome game. Literally every other aspect is insanely good. The art style is cool, the NPCs are super cute, the sountrack is really immersive, almost no HUD to speak of that for maximum depth of the experience.
The gameplay would've inevitably been too grindy if not for its diversity. This game does include grinding and farming, don't get me wrong, but the ratio is just right and there's so many different and fun mechanincs that you're unlikely to notice it at all. The roguelike progression in dungeons works suprisingly well with an idle-tycoon style camp management.
Definintely worth a try. A game with such a clear vision, tasteful design and fresh mechanincs is an extremely rare and welcome sight these days.
«Blew my mind»
«Can’t stop playing»