Cult of the Lamb

 

Release: 11 August 2022

Developer: Massive Monster

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Gameplay Stats: 24 hours, 37/37 achievements

Aesthetics- I have to say I believe this is the strength of the game. The graphics are cute and look hand drawn, the music has some lo-fi feels to it that are perfectly suited to the game. I think everything looking and sounding so good makes it easy to lose yourself in the game for its relatively short runtime. There isn't too much enemy variety or boss variety but I think that's okay in a short game like this. Nothing felt stale to me during my time with the game. A lot of games have a soundtrack and I'm not sure why, but this one I'm actually tempted to buy. It's really good and I want the creator to know they did an excellent job.

Plot- It's about what you would expect if you think about the title a bit. You are a lamb led to slaughter until you are saved by a banished god and begin your own cult to free said god. There are small story loops in each of the game's biomes but it only so slightly fleshes out the characters from 1 to 1.5 dimensional. I think the plot here is more McGuffin than anything else and that's okay.

Gameplay- You split your time between an action roguelite and a base management layer so I think it's fair to critique each part separately. The base management side really shown in my eyes, this is where I had the most fun. Which isn't what I expected! But building and setting up a base so your followers could take care of themselves while you're away really was satisfying. It felt like looking after pets. Maybe your flock? There were some minor annoyances, like how I had to continuously rebuild the lumber/stone generating buildings. I would've liked a way to set a spot as continuously for that purpose so I didn't sometimes return from adventuring to find that I wasn't generating stone at all. A way to check how much of each resource is left would also solve that problem. I was also a little annoyed that I needed to check a dozen places to pick up all of the resources generated by my followers. There is a singular chest introduced at the start with the stated purpose of catching all the resources from your followers but it doesn't quite do what it says on the tin, and that kind of annoyed me.

On to the adventuring layer! With everything looking really pretty and hand drawn comes the usual annoyance, weird hitboxes. Some attacks from me wouldn't hit enemies even though it looked to me like they should. Sometimes I would think I was approaching an enemy after they attacked only to take damage. These things weren't properly communicated in my eyes. Additionally some of the later levels were really busy, so much so that it was a little hard to parse what was happening on screen. More commonly than I would've liked there were a dozen enemies on screen all doing their own thing, mana dots popping out of everything that I was attacking, and projectiles coming at me all at the same time. I think there was potential for more meaningful choices here too. Generally when upgrading a spell/weapon on a run you were only presented with one option but a lot of the weapons/spells felt generally worse that others despite being an upgrade. But if you skip an upgrade now you might find yourself underpowered when you face the boss. I'm not sure what the best solution is here. More balance? Me being more comfortable with all the options? Limited rerolls? There is potential for improvement regardless.

Noteworthy- I think this game presents itself as a whole remarkably well. Despite having two very differently playing parts they feed into each other wonderfully. The farther you get on your adventures the more resources you have to upgrade your colony, the more you upgrade your colony the stronger you are on your adventures. The way they tied these two disparate playstyles together is really well done.

I really enjoyed my time with this game. I think the game is flexible and accessible enough that I wouldn't really have qualms recommending this game to anyone. It was simple but with such a lovely presentation and didn't overstay it's welcome.