Cult of the Lamb Review: A Misbegotten Roguelike with Shades of Animal Crossing

Massive Monster’s Cult of the Lamb plays like an inventory of half-understood mechanics from other games.

Cult of the Lamb
Photo: Devolver Digital

Massive Monster’s Cult of the Lamb begins with your ovine protagonist trudging toward death. As the last lamb of your kind, you’re slaughtered at the behest of four fearsome gods, hopefully removing any avenue of escape for another god imprisoned below the surface of the Earth. But your death doesn’t stick, because the outcast god, The One Who Waits, resurrects you to be his avatar and gifts you with a crown that doubles as a transforming weapon for use in the run-based “crusades” through enemy territories.

With a cartoonish style that channels the cutesy, the crass, and the blasphemous, Cult of the Lamb most overtly recalls The Binding of Isaac, as your crusades find you fighting through randomized, Legend of Zelda-esque, and similar-looking rooms that are displayed on a minimap. The combat, though, is more reminiscent of Hades, with players having to focus less on changing weapons mid-run than sticking to whatever items spawned at the start of a run. But where Hades keeps things interesting by making you constantly choose different abilities, Cult of the Lamb just hands you a couple of tarot cards to boost health or weapon speed.

The defining trait of the best roguelikes is their powerful and distinct combinations, which players discover organically through everything from logic to reason to experimentation. But if variety is the spice of a roguelike, Cult of the Lamb’s combat sections are a flavorless affair. Sure, there are slight differences in range, speed, and aim between your various equipment, but in practice they rarely force you to change your approach in the slightest.

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The game’s cult-management elements don’t ask for much more strategy either. Over time, you indoctrinate animals to help you build things, gather resources, or offer prayers toward the next unlock. Each animal technically functions as an individual entity, with separate levels of faith and specific traits that affect their work efficiency, as well as the ability to speak out against you. But even here, there are hardly any options to weigh, or any compromises to be made. In the end, Cult of the Lamb’s resource-gathering goals are so rigid that you’re more or less moving up a linear skill tree with a handful of branches to give the barest hint of agency. All the while, the menus and progress bars constantly fill and wiggle around, trying to obscure the monotony with insistent reminders that you’re accomplishing something.

As if to acknowledge how inconsequential most of your options are, the game’s menus don’t even give you enough information to make informed choices. For one, you won’t know how much a new building costs until you’ve already committed to unlocking it, and each time you spend a resource to “upgrade” the cult’s doctrines, you’re locked into the first category that you choose, with no option to back out and assess the alternatives. From the pause menu, you can see the cultists’ progress bars, but you can’t see their individual traits or where they live because, in the end, where you assign them isn’t really that important. It’s all just busywork, where efficiency matters less than the fact that someone is doing it at all.

Certainly, Cult of the Lamb isn’t the first game to rely too heavily on a drip feed of shiny new things. But it speaks to the game’s broader lack of imagination that it can’t even get those shiny new things to feel particularly desirable, whether they’re new buildings or stat-affecting rituals or just the shrug-inducing cosmetic decorations for your camp. In mashing together roguelike elements with a crummy “evil” version of Animal Crossing, Cult of the Lamb only ever plays like an inventory of half-understood mechanics from other games, the indie equivalent of a corporate product that’s been focus-tested into sludge.

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This game was reviewed using a code provided by Devolver Digital.

Score: 
 Developer: Massive Monster  Publisher: Devolver Digital  Platform: PC  Release Date: August 11, 2022  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Blood, Violence  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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