I loved Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020, but its premise wasn’t enough to keep me engaged over time. Designing my island and keeping all the villagers happy on it is totally fun, but after a few dozen hours I crave a new playstyle that coincides with what I’m doing on a daily basis. Cult of the Lamb, a mixture of lovable cute animals, creatures and creatures and creepy cults, fixes the problem with an expansive action-packed battle dungeon system. I just wish its base building brought the same satisfaction as its fighting style. When I wanted to focus on designing a cult aesthetically, I found the game was pushing me to focus on resource management, taking away the fun I was having. Building your cult from the start and designing the headquarters is fun, but you’ll soon be pushed into using your cult as a means of producing in-game currency and resources, and this sometimes gets in the way of really making my cult feel like Home.
The premise of Cult of the Lamb is simple – you are a lamb sacrificed to four gods. When you die, however, you discover a fifth god, another locked up. They grant you a second lease in life; all you need to do to get it is start a cult in their name. And that’s where my journey in Cult of the Lamb began. Almost 20 hours later, I get credit with over 20 followers of The Pearl programmed to keep me, their leader, happy, powerful, and always have everything I need. The story fueled my time in Cult of the Lamb enough to keep me going, but it backed up everything else in the game. There are lore to gather from the runaways with the gods that you encounter between the dungeons, and the NPCs will also reveal some backstories, but the game comes first here. And for good reason.
Combat is smooth and crisp, with each attack carrying weight as you battle through randomly arranged dungeons. A room can be filled with skeletons, spiders, killer caterpillars, and cloaked assassins. Using my lamb’s dodge scroll, I can escape the incoming bullets and daggers, then counterattack with my blade, also has a chance to heal me when killing enemies. enemy. I closed the dungeon door using monstrous claws against a boss, relying on the weapon’s randomly assigned necromancy ability to hurl dead enemies at the boss as projectiles.
Weapons, like the rooms I found, appear randomly, keeping the battle fresh. Curses, magic-like attacks that typically deal damage with projectiles or close-range effects, are also random, but I rely on them far less to succeed in the game’s four main dungeons. play. Curses have limited uses as they require Enthusiasm released by enemies to use. Late in the game, though, between drawing tarot cards that offer special bonuses and other lamb-specific traits, I rarely worry about running out of curses. But I also rarely use curses, finding them to be more annoying than inappropriate for my flow state; Instead, I rely on my standard attacks and dodging to succeed in battle.
I also have to hone my base development, where my followers worship and work for me, all to make my sheep stronger for my next dungeon run, or the crusade as it is nested in the game, will be easier. My establishment started small, with just one temple to collect devotions and one to perform religious strengthening sermons and beneficial but risky rituals. Over time, I learned that my establishment needed more than that to succeed. Everything builds on top of each other, and each system works due to a different system happening in the game, so I started to treat my cult as a purpose machine that worships, empowers, and strengthens. me than a place to express my inner cult. designer. The importance of resource management, as well as the stress of managing the well-being of cult members by keeping them fed, completing quests, and securing their loyalty, often steals time of each day in the game. This little time left to make my cult aesthetically pleasing, which I enjoyed very much.
And that’s okay – that’s clearly what developer Massive Monster intended with these mechanics in mind – but with so many cosmetic items thrown into the recipe, I was frustrated that I rarely had enough. Time to focus on them. I want to make my cult look like mine, but the pressures of resource management often get in the way.
I start the game by naming each follower, designing them to look like one of my dogs, cats, or even friends. But, after about a dozen hours, I became less enamored with the simulation aspect of it, choosing to stick with the default designs and focus more on completing the next dungeon and the next building upgrade in my sect. That being a ruthless boss than a leader.
During the post-game cleanup, I’m now just getting into the aesthetic servicing aspects of Cult of the Lamb. I ended up making my cult like mine, and I’m not sure every other player at some point would do to hone as many resources as possible. I just wish I had felt this earlier in my 19-hour journey. However, everything I’ve done leading up to it, from the fast-paced dungeon battles that never get old to the factory-like base building that nails the stress of resource management, is enough and after Those are some to keep me engaged and inspired.
