A few of us my box been obsessed with lately cult of the Lamb, the lively new roguelike published by Devolver about a cult led by a lamb. Last week, my box‘s Sisi Jiang asked me a simple question about the game in Slack: “Are we the bad guys?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But I was way too busy with things like having fun to question whether or not the little lamb is the bad guy.”
Then I thought about the game’s resurrection mechanics for more than 0.2 seconds. I… probably should have focused less on having fun.
Released last week for consoles and PC, cult of the Lamb is a roguelike management sim – an odd-sounding hybrid of genres that works better than you’d expect – that casts you as the world’s last living lamb. A bunch of gods kill you. An ancient god resurrects you, considers you his champion, grants you the blessing (curse?) of immortality, and tasks you with rescuing him. To do this, you must kill the gods that you originally killed. Make the
Over time, like all beings sadly bound by a mortal spiral, your followers will die. But you can fix this ad infinitum if you have the resources — and the right skills.
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How to revive followers in cult of the Lamb
During the city government part of cultyou can run rituals, cooldown-based abilities that grant instant benefits to your flock’s dwindling happiness bars. As you play, of course, you earn bid stones. These allow you to unlock new rituals from one of five categories. Once you have reached the second stage of the life after death Category you have the opportunity to unlock the ritual of resurrection. It costs 75 bones (37 if you have them Cheaper rituals Skill unlocked), increases the loyalty Meter for all your followers and allows you to bring a dead follower back to life. Rough cooldown, though.
Why you should revive followers in cult of the Lamb
There are a number of reasons you might want to bring a deceased follower back to life. For one, you don’t have to rename and customize that follower like you would with a new one. Second, they come back to life on the same level they died on, which provides bonuses to their success rate missionary journeys– whereby a member of your cult will disappear for a few days before either dying or returning with a pile of flesh. And then, I suppose, there’s the question of sentimentality. For example, I named my first pendant after Puck, one of my cats. (That was before I realized members of your flock could die.)
Why you definitely shouldn’t revive followers in a thousand years cult of the Lamb
When a follower dies, you have two choices about what to do with the corpse. you can bury it Or you can harvest the flesh. Harvested follower meat can be used in a dish called Minced Follower Meat, which restores a minimum of a living follower’s ever-decreasing Hunger Gauge. I cooked the food just to see what would happen and then walked away. (If you cook food in it cult of the Lamb
I then resuscitated Puck because obviously. To be clear, I’m not exactly sure what happened next, but all signs point to Puck eating his own dead body. I didn’t see it happen in real time. But when morning broke cult‘s clock in the game, the court was gone. And Puck’s hunger meter was full.
So therein lies a potential feedback loop cult of the Lamb, one you could theoretically use indefinitely to keep your cult strong – if you don’t have a soul. Your follower dies. You harvest the meat. You revive her. You feed them their own flesh… until they die again. Rinse, wash (thoroughly, please), repeat.
Anyway, like I said to Sisi, yes, in cult of the Lamb, we are absolutely, definitely the bad guys. I just wish I had realized it sooner, before maybe feeding my cat to my cat.