I loved Animal Crossing: New Horizons in 2020, but its premise wasn’t enough to keep me engaged over time. I had a lot of fun designing my island and keeping all the villagers happy on it, but after a few dozen hours I was craving a new type of gameplay that was consistent with what I was doing every day. Cult of the Lamb, a mishmash of adorably cute animals, creatures and creatures and macabre cultisms, remedies tied to an expansive action-combat dungeon system. I just wish his base building provided the same satisfaction as his combat. When I wanted to focus on making a cult aesthetic, I found that the game pushed my hand to focus on resource management and killed what fun I was otherwise having. Building your cult from scratch and designing its headquarters is fun, but you’re soon pushed to using your cult as a means of producing in-game currency and resources, and that sometimes gets in the way of how my cult actually feels to give what it feels like home.
The premise of Cult of the Lamb is simple – you are a lamb sacrificed to four gods. Upon death, however, you discover a fifth god, one of whom is locked away from the others. They grant you a second life; All you have to do to get it is create a cult in its name. And this is where my journey in Cult of the Lamb began. Nearly 20 hours later, I was rolling credits with a cult of 20+ followers of The Pearl programmed to keep me, their leader, happy, powerful, and anything I needed. The story that fueled my time in Cult of the Lamb was enough to keep me going, but it takes a backseat to everything else in the game. There’s lore from clashes with the gods you’ll encounter in the middle of the dungeon, and NPCs will also reveal some backstories, but gameplay reigns supreme here. And for a good reason.
Combat is refined and crisp, with each attack bearing weight as you battle your way through randomized dungeons. A room could be crammed with skeletons, spiders, killer caterpillars, and disguised assassins. My Lamb’s dodge roll allows me to evade incoming projectiles and dagger slashes, then counter with my blade, which also has a chance to heal me if I kill an enemy. I close the dungeon with combo-heavy claws against a boss, relying on the weapon’s randomly assigned Necrotic ability to hurl dead enemies back at the boss as projectiles.
Weapons, like the rooms I found them in, appear randomly and keep the fight fresh. Curses, magic-like attacks that usually equate to a projectile or melee area of effect damage, are also random, but I’ve relied on them much less for success in the game’s four main dungeons. Curses have limited utility as they require Alacrity dropped by enemies to use. However, towards the end of the game, between pick-up tarot cards that grant special bonuses and other Lamb-specific traits, I rarely worried about running out of curses. But I also rarely used curses because I found them to disrupt my flow state more than not; Instead, I relied on basic attacks and my dodge roll to succeed in combat.
I also had to refine the progression of my base where my followers worship me and work for me, all to make my lamb stronger so my next dungeon run or crusade as it is called in game would be easier. My base started small, with just a shrine for gathering worship and a temple for cult-boosting sermons and beneficial but risky rituals. Over time I’ve learned that my base requires a lot more to be successful. Everything builds on each other, and each system works because a different system happens in the game, so I started to think of my cult as a machine whose purpose was to worship, empower, and empower me, rather than a place to where I could express my inner cult designer. The importance of resource management, as well as the stress of managing the cult members’ happiness by feeding them, completing their quests, and ensuring their loyalty, often stole time from each day in the game. This left little time to make my cult aesthetically pleasing, something I would have liked to have had.
And that was fine – it’s clearly what developer Massive Monster intended with this mechanic – but with so many cosmetic items thrown into the formula, I was disappointed by how rarely I was given the time to look at it to focus them. I wanted my cult to look and feel like mine, but the pull of resource management often got in the way.
I started the game by naming each pendant and making them look like one of my dogs, a cat, or even my friends. But after a dozen hours or so, I was less concerned with the simulation aspect and decided to stick with the default trailer designs and focus more on completing the next dungeon and upgrading the next building in my cult. Still, running through dungeons and leveling up my cult compound was satisfying, and I found Cult of the Lamb to be a lot of fun as a result, even if I felt more like a ruthless boss than a leader.
In the post-game cleanup, I’m only now dealing with the aesthetic aspects of Cult of the Lamb. I’m finally making my cult look like mine and not one that I’m sure every other player will eventually make to cultivate as many resources as possible. I only wish I had felt that earlier in my 19 hour journey. Still, everything I’ve done before that, from the fast-paced dungeon battles that never got boring to the factory-like base building that nailed the stress of resource management, was enough to keep me engaged and indoctrinated.
