Cult of the Lamb
By VHSKnight
10 September 2022
Roguelite / management
Two good games stapled together, and the staple mostly holds.
Cult of the Lamb is adorable, and it is about starting a doomsday cult. It never stops being about that, and the gap between the art and the subject is where a lot of the fun lives.
The game is really two loops sharing a body. By day you run a base: you recruit followers, feed them, keep them happy and loyal, build little huts, and clean up after them in ways I will not spoil. By night you leave to crawl through a roguelite dungeon, fighting to bring back resources and new recruits.
The crawler half is fine. It is fast and readable and the weapons feel good, but it will not surprise anyone who has played a lot of these. If you want the version of this loop that truly obsessed us, that is still Vampire Survivors. What makes this one special is the base.
Nothing else we played in 2022 made "keep everyone fed and happy" feel like a horror mechanic.
Where it wobbles
Late game the management can get fiddly, with a lot of little needs to babysit and some systems that feel bolted on rather than built in. It occasionally asks you to do chores. But the tone carries it, the art is gorgeous, and it is genuinely one of a kind.
If the "cute but cursed" thing appeals to you, Stray scratches a very different but adjacent itch, and we said more about the whole roguelite pull in this piece.
