When I started Cult of the Lamb, I didn’t expect to end up raking through so much junk. It’s a true basic management game in the guise of an action roguelite, but it balances this unexpected mix of genres with grace. Its attractive art style and surprising amount of side activities imbue the relatively linear structure with personality. The combat segments aren’t deep enough to make you want to come back after the credits roll, but it’s a dark ritual that I’m very happy with. Done.

Cult of the Lamb puts you in the fluffy hooves of a cult leader who has just been resurrected by a captured god called The Waiting One. It’s up to you to free your master by recruiting new followers to the flock, building a base for them, and waging a bloody crusade against the supernatural beings who captured him. This loop of gathering supplies, tending to cultists, improving both your character and your home, then going out and doing it all again is very satisfying with an appealing art style and expressive animations that give every relentless player a little joy. The corners that encounters bring.

Cult of the Lamb is a roguelite dungeon crawler that randomizes the level layout and the items you encounter on each playthrough to become progressively more powerful, but that’s a bit misleading, as it would be to directly compare it to similar games like Hades and Rogue Legacy. Each crusade is random and repeatable in the same way, but it’s very short, lasting only about 10 minutes in total in most cases. You can also choose one of four separate areas to fight in at the start of each run, and at the end of each run there’s a boss waiting to be defeated to complete the story. In other words, Cult of the Lamb has familiar areas that lack roguelike tension. Here you can see how far you can get through the gauntlet every time.

These short trips aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but it did mean that most of the 13 hours it took to earn the credits was spent building bases and completing little quests for NPCs instead of swinging around a weapon. Despite sharing some DNA with games like Dead Cells, it’s fair to say that Cult of the Lamb is just as closely related to management games like Oxygen Not Included. It was certainly in good company, and I enjoyed how my hunting decisions were often influenced by the needs of my hard-working followers back home, rather than always the other way around.

Chop Chop

But that doesn’t mean the combat itself isn’t fun. It’s not overly complicated, with just one attack button, a special “curse” power, and a dodge roll, but each of these elements is tweaked to the edge of effectiveness. Dodging in particular is very agile, allowing you to quickly avoid foreshadowed enemy attacks while slicing through rooms full of cultists and monsters. The different types of weapons, curses, and tarot card-based buffs you find along the way also help to spice up each new outing even more as you near the end of the campaign.

The only major downside is that you get a random weapon and a random curse at the start of each crusade, but unfortunately you have no control over which ones appear, and the choices are far from even. While the standard sword and the more powerful hitting axe are certainly better, the frustratingly slow hammer and gloves (which only do most of their damage on the final hit of an attack combo) are ill-suited to the rather mobile enemies of the Worship of the Lamb. Similarly, some curses can satisfy area-of-effect blasts, while others leave piles of ineffective slime. With runs this short, you often don’t even have a chance to find a valid replacement before it ends, and patience has definitely paid off many times when trying to take on a boss hampered by a bad roll right at the start.

But while you don’t get ample opportunities to choose your attacks, you do have ample chances to affect your kit through tarot cards during your run. These power-ups provide a variety of benefits, from extra health to adding projectiles to melee attacks to making enemies drop fish when you kill them. It’s a bit disappointing that most of these are simple stat upgrades like a 20% increase in weapon damage, meaning they didn’t really shake up my playstyle much in my particular run, but even if they did, I was lucky. I found a rare tarot card that allowed me to fully double my axe attack speed, and it was still a lot of fun when it happened.

Of course, coming across such a powerful card can also make boss encounters on standard difficulty easier. These fights are creative both in the visual design of the horrifying and creepy monsters you face, and the almost hellish attacks they throw at you. However, if you’re even remotely familiar with roguelike action games, you’ll want to crank the difficulty up to hard from the get-go. I barely had to do more than spam the attack button to beat each boss on my first try. This doesn’t give their clever design the attention it deserves.

Field of Screams

Despite the fearsome appearance of the Lamb’s greatest enemies, many of them, once defeated, will happily transform into your beloved friends, who you can recruit to your cult back home. While the action sections drive a relatively simple plot, the real mechanical progression occurs with the building of your base. As you convert people you find in the field, you can task them with tasks such as gathering resources like wood and stone, worshiping your face to generate a resource called devotion, or cleaning up the dung they use in great quantities to pollute the edges of your camp.

At first, you’ll be doing much of this work yourself, but as you recruit more followers, it’s very satisfying to watch your base grow, both technologically and visually. Your base and the Lamb each have technology trees that you can tap into to unlock new structures and discover new abilities and weapons. This means that tasks like watering your farm by hand will eventually be done by new recruits, gradually opening up more interesting options like sending followers on expeditions for resources or even turning them into demons temporarily to help you in combat.

There’s a lot to explore here, and I enjoyed the balance of managing my followers’ faith, hunger, and cleanliness, but I wish it was easier to keep track of followers individually. When cult membership reaches double digits, it can get very hard to tell who’s doing what kind of work, whether they’ve already “blessed” themselves with the day’s XP boost, or are just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Fortunately, you don’t have to worry too much about these things to cater to their desires, especially after you’ve unlocked better facilities for them, but Cult of the Lamb makes optimizing my business very important to me, so it was frustrating when I couldn’t do this.

It offers a welcome level of control, in that it has more cosmetic options than functional ones. You can easily move buildings around your camp, change the look and names of your newly recruited followers, and cover every nook and cranny with unnecessary cosmetics that you have to earn and unlock as you progress through the game. You don’t have to delve into all this if you don’t want to, but it gave me a kind of control over my cult and made me more involved. I also took special care to play favorites among my followers; the best of them, and mourn them when they eventually die of old age, or when I sacrifice them.

In that sense, a big part of what makes Cult of the Sheep so memorable is how it relies on the silliness of its subject matter and the fantastic aesthetics that accompany all of that mayhem. It strikes a nice balance between cute cartoon vibes and demonic settings, and there are dozens of adorable animal figures to discover, including elephants, giraffes, unicorns, and the odd spider. The soundtrack is also probably one of the catchiest I’ve heard in a long time, a vibrant yet creepy mix that’s hard to get out of your head.

There’s also a lot more to do than I expected. The entire world map contains distinct (albeit small) locations you can visit, each with its own shop where you can buy new tarot cards and cosmetics, as well as characters you can meet and complete quests with. There’s a fishing minigame, a dice minigame, and a side quest that takes you back to places you’ve already conquered with a bigger challenge. There are also some secrets to discover, and the quirky character designs are all top notch, no matter what corner of the map you visit.

Still, Cult of the Lamb feels like a roguelite that I nearly finished in 13 hours, about half of which I played on Hard Mode. I reached the end of both progression trees about two-thirds of the way through, and completed nearly every side activity I found. If you want to play Cult of the Lamb like a traditional roguelite, you can revisit levels you’ve already completed in Endless Mode, which has an ever-increasing difficulty, but doesn’t offer as much variety in weapons, tarot cards, or straight card layouts to play through. It was fun until I saw the end credits, but ultimately it felt more like a linear campaign than the roguelike section would suggest.

Verdict

Cult of the Lamb is an eclectic mix of genres and themes that is as well-matched as it is fascinating and unsettling. While the combat is very satisfying, its brevity and relative lack of variety keeps it from having lasting appeal compared to other action roguelikes. Also, building your own cult base and cultivating a band of followers was just as much fun as smashing with an axe. Now that the credits have rolled, you may not play it again, but Cult of the Lamb is something completely different and incredibly fun to play.