I fell in love with the Cult of the Lamb as soon as I saw the first trailer and gameplay of the game. A hand-animated video for the intro in the style of Gravity Falls, dark humor, gameplay at the intersection of the beloved Don’t Starve and The Binding of Isaac, stunning visual style and expressive rich animations – “Grandfather needs this,” I thought. And the demo before the first boss only raised expectations.
But according to the results of the first playthrough, everything turned out to be much more ambiguous.
Ridges of Madness
Overall, the plot of Cult of the Lamb is the least important aspect of the game, so let’s quickly figure out what’s going on with it. And everything is fine with him: formally he exists and copes with his task perfectly – he provides an excuse for everything that happens on the screen. Doesn’t stick out, doesn’t lead you by the hand through a bunch of side quests, and generally doesn’t push you unnecessarily – as a result, we have a pleasant time in the atmospheric and, in a good way, crazy world of the game.
Call from outside
What about our gameplay??
I’ll start with the good. Cult Of The Lamb plays nicely. Everyone has already said that this is The Binding of Isaac + Don’t Starve, but the gameplay is more like Hades + Oxygen Not Included. The entire gameplay is divided into two parts – raids into the lands of the old gods (bagel) and setting up your own cult (funny farm). There is also a map of several locations where local NPCs live, but this is a trifle in which you will spend at most 20 minutes out of 20 hours of passage, receiving and turning in the same type of find-and-bring quests.
The roguelike is a sequential clearing of procedurally generated levels from a set of rooms. The levels themselves are located on a kind of road map of your race, and you can choose which of them to go through and in what order. There can be quite a lot of enemies in the rooms, some of them launch projectiles, so you need to be fast, react correctly and constantly dash, avoiding taking damage. In some rooms, instead of enemies, you will find upgrades for your lamb, which are given out by a local Tarot card reader. These upgrades are in the category of “+10% movement speed, +10% damage, when you dash you will spawn a bomb underneath you”.
This suggests a comparison https://playjango-casino.co.uk/mobile-app/ with Hades rather than with Isaac, where items can change a character radically. Once you get the hang of the local mechanics, chopping down followers of enemy cults will be a real pleasure.
The second part of the game is the creation and arrangement of your cult. All this action takes place on a designated plot of land, where at first trees grow and huge boulders rise, but over time you will clear this entire area and begin to build your own buildings here. It is to this place that the little animals that you can find in your raids through the lands of the ancient gods go. After the indoctrination ceremony, they will become your faithful followers and you will have to satisfy their needs – feed them, maintain their faith and keep their base clean.
The main building of the base is your statue. Cult members pray to her, leaving devotion points. Devotion here essentially acts as an experience. Having reached a certain value, a level-up revelation becomes available to you, which you spend on researching a new building. There is formally no level counter, but the system is painfully familiar to every avid gamer. The technology tree is quite extensive and is divided into “tiers”. In the first third of the game, many useful buildings open up, so leveling up your cult is interesting at first.
The second most important building in your base is your temple. There our lamb reads sermons and performs rituals. In addition to the fact that this maintains the level of faith of followers and gives some one-time goodies (for example, there is a ritual that instantly brings all the plants on farms to the last stage of growth), there is a parallel system of leveling up for points another faith collected from the flock. These points also reach the leveling level and allow you to upgrade weapons and spells that you will encounter in raids – open new ones and improve old ones. You can also choose doctrines in the temple – passive skills of your cult. For example, little animals will not worry so much about the loss of their brothers because of their belief in an afterlife, or they will increase the level of faith of the cult when they see new buildings, etc. d. Also in the same temple there are openable lamb capes, but more on them later.
Over time, farms open to grow food, mines to extract resources, altars for offerings, altars for turning followers into demons, altars for additional faith points, thousands of altars!
In general, the first 3-7 hours of the game are incredibly addictive and worries at the base smoothly flow into raids and back. But under a thin layer of early game lurks a terrible ancient evil..
Shadow over Innsmouth
The longer you play, the moreOthe slightest shadow of doubt has to be driven away in order to maintain one’s sympathies for the project.
Let me note in advance that I took the Cult of the Lamb on hard.
The first and most important problem of the game is that one half of it really doesn’t want you to play the other. We’re talking about a happy farm, of course.
You want to fight enemies, farm minibosses or rare resources that are found only in raids. Or recruit more followers. And then, halfway through the level, a message arrives that someone at the base has died of old age. What does it mean? That unsanitary conditions begin at the site of the corpse, cultists begin to get sick and the overall level of faith quickly drops. And if you don’t start speedrunning the location, you’ll return to a settlement where everyone is sick, and even hates their messiah.
The same thing with hunger – even if you feed the entire flock to capacity, already on the second raid in a row you will start receiving messages that someone is starving. And there is the opportunity to conduct raids in a row without going to the base – this is one of the features of the location after killing the story boss. The game does not allow you to store food: dishes left on the ground are eaten as soon as the follower’s hunger scale drops to a value at least slightly below full. That is quite quickly.
Well, okay, let’s say the game is not about a roguelike, let’s say the developers conceived a balance, observing which we will reveal their creation for ourselves most fully. After all, we’ll reveal it, yes? Well, not really.
At the base, you need to not let three indicators fall – faith, hunger and purity.
Conducting daily services in the temple and periodic rituals, it is very difficult to allow the level of faith to drop. The consumables needed for rituals (bones) are always in abundance and begin to accumulate from the first minutes of the game. And when the construction of tombstones opens, it becomes simply unrealistic to drop the level of faith. Gravestones cause passing followers to mourn the dead, granting +5 faith per visit. I accidentally placed a graveyard behind the toilets, and as a result, every time someone went to relieve themselves, they restored their faith level. You can go further and place a cemetery between the sleeping area of the base and the workplaces of the cultists – and then the daily traffic of grieving animals will allow you to do any obscenity with them with complete impunity. That is, the exploit lying on the surface completely eliminates one of the key mechanics of the game.
Filling your hunger scale is a chore. The game features a dozen food recipes, each with its own buffs and debuffs. The food is prepared using a mini-game, which by the tenth hour of the game begins to become quite annoying: you need to press a button when the slider passes through the colored area. The steeper the dish, the smaller the area. When the first and second farm are built you will just need to approach and force play this mini-game. Time after time. Insanely tiring.
The level of purity is somewhere between hunger and faith. Until the toilets have been explored, you need to methodically run around the base in a circle every day to clean up all the poop after your followers, which they carefully leave for you in random places. But when latrines and cleaning stations open up, this mechanic also falls away from the gameplay. Unless once every couple of days the toilets need to be cleaned and their contents taken away for fertilizer.
To diversify the gameplay, the developers added mini-quests for the cultists. There are several types, but they are always the same: give and bring, accept new minions, perform a ritual, build decorations. Again, in the first third of the game it looks interesting, but the constant requests of the sectarians of the same type over time distract and irritate, giving nothing in return except a small number of loyalty points for pumping up technologies.
And all this splendor is designed in such a way that automated processes do not work in raids. So you can put up at least 20 graves with monuments along the way the animals go to work and back, but if someone dies, this will not save faith in you and your cult. As is the health of followers.
Maybe Cult of the Lamb is a decent roguelike? Even though we are not allowed to immerse ourselves in it for long? And here too by. At first, when you just discover new weapons, spells and tarot cards, everything looks interesting. But very quickly you realize that the depth of the gameplay is sorely lacking.
What we have at our disposal?
Weapons: dagger, sword, axe, gloves and hammer. They spawn with a random effect: poison, lifesteal, crits, a chance to spawn an attacking ghost in the enemy’s place, etc. d.
Bladed weapons are classic, just different attack speeds and corresponding damage. With gloves you need to deliver a series of blows in order to cause significant damage to the latter. Situational thing, but quite playable. But here’s a hammer… A hammer is a weapon that you need to swing for a second before hitting. Just a second. In a fast game with constant dashes and bullet-hell elements. I think any comments are unnecessary here. If you started with a hammer, congratulations, you’ll spend the next 10 minutes in pain until you die or a better weapon drops.
Spells are mostly usable. There are projectiles, walls of ice/tentacles/ghosts, blast waves around the main character, bombs flying in a parabola and leaving a poisonous puddle on the floor. Combinations with weapons, although they do not bloom with variety and synergies, but feel quite cheerful.
Tarot cards slightly enhance weapons and spells – increase damage by 10%, reduce mana consumption, increase attack speed. If you are lucky enough to find cards that improve the same aspect of the character, you can talk about some kind of “builds”, although it is unlikely that a build for attack speed + crits + damage can be called deep gameplay. Yes, and this is not an assembly, but just pure randomness.
Well, the most amazing thing is the lamb capes that open in your temple for completing NPC quests. In theory, this is endgame content, at least I opened them last on a high level of difficulty. There are only five of them, but only one of them can be called useful – replacing all red hearts in the raid with 1.5x blue hearts. And then, it doesn’t replace all hearts – scripted health spawns can still give you red ones instead of blue ones. The rest of the capes are not just garbage, they complicate the game and make it worse. For example, a cape that gives 4 tarot cards at the beginning of a run without a choice, and then blocks the appearance of new ones at levels. This is despite the fact that on average you pick up 5-6 tarot cards per run, usually to choose from two. In repeated races the number of tarot cards can easily exceed 10. Why limit yourself to four is not clear.
Another cape increases spell damage and reduces spell mana cost. But halves the damage from normal weapons and your health. Despite the fact that mana is knocked out of enemies by this very weapon in close combat.
Another cape gives +10% weapon damage for each enemy killed. Cool, yeah? Only when you receive one poke, the entire bonus disappears, and with this cape you lose twice as much health as usual.
And the last outfit gives a black heart for each tarot card. Only hearts don’t stack, and all the loot obtained in the raid will be lost in case of death.
Overall, this looks like show-stopping content that no one will actually use. Like half the high-tier buildings on the base – turning followers into demons or sending cultists on suicide missions is not worth the effort that goes into them and does more harm than good. It’s better to let your flock gather food in the garden or pray to your statue – the benefits from living followers are many times greater. There is also a fishing mini-game and a dice mini-game with approximately the same impact on core gameplay – no. Little good food is made from fish, and one donation ritual brings in 30 times more money than a three-minute game of dice with the most experienced opponent, which you can also lose.
And on top of that is the poor technical condition of the game. Over the course of 20 hours, I was softlocked in a room several times because I knocked an enemy off the edge of the screen. Or the enemy was invisible, invulnerable, but caused damage. It was possible to understand where he was only by sound, but this was of little use.
After a couple of hours of continuous play, the application begins to lag and freeze, the FPS on the base drops to indecent values for i7 and RTX2070 of 20-40 fps. If you play for more than three hours, it becomes impossible to conduct battles – constant freezes prevent you from reacting to enemy attacks, the game turns into a slideshow.
Sometimes followers stop seeing the statue, farms and mines and just stand around doing nothing. Assigning them a job doesn’t help the situation at all.
And sometimes you can return to the base and find that there is simply no one there, although the population counter shows your 27 dummies.
All these bugs can be fixed by re-entering the game, but this is not the experience you expect from a 2.5D indie roguelike.
In summary, although the game looks amazing, and its visual style can make you fall in love at first sight, when tested, the game turns out to be empty and unbalanced, with no potential for replayability, with mediocre technical condition and optimization.
It’s a shame that the developers didn’t reach a decent level of content, making such a beautiful and attractive wrapper.
6 sectarians who died of natural causes out of 10