Cult of the Lamb is an exciting little hack-n-slash mixed with base building game that I’ve been playing a lot of recently. The game opens up with your protagonist (the eponymous Lamb) being sacrificed to prevent the resurrection of an Evil God. Turns out killing the Lamb just sent them straight to Evil God instead, who resurrects the Lamb and tells them to kill all the False Gods who stand before them. From here the resurrected Lamb is handed a sword and some magic to start going nuts, as well as a few servants to build up a cult and become ever more powerful so they can slay their enemies and presumably resurrect the Evil God in turn.

I haven’t finished the game but I assume once you resurrect the Evil God, everything is smiles and happiness forever and the Lamb just retires to running their cult. There’s no way the Evil God is actually the final boss you’ll be killing at the end.

Anyway this game isn’t anywhere near the kind of thing I usually play, fast paced hack-n-slashers just aren’t my forte, and playing one with a mouse and keyboard probably brands me a heretic in most people’s eyes. Still, it’s a very enjoyable experience with an easy-to-use dodgeroll and a variety of enemy patterns to keep the game interesting. You can cancel sword attacks using the dodgeroll as well (though infuriatingly, not magic attacks) meaning most combat arenas turn into me rolling around like Sonic the Hedgehog on cocaine, hacking and dodging all the while. I actually learned that I get better at the game by taking things a tad slower though (your weapon has knockback and often cancels enemy attacks), so this isn’t always the best strat.

Anyway when you’re not dodgerolling through the cultists of the False Gods, you’re managing your own cult to gather the resources needed to improve and expand your abilities. The two sides of the game (cult running and hacking/slashing) are actually way more disconnected than they seem, the combat bonuses you get from managing your cult are rather modest, but it’s definitely a fun way to take a break in between the hyperactive combat sections. Your cult is made up of cultists you randomly capture or save during combat sections, and as per usual they all need to eat, sleep, and stay healthy, and in return they will believe in you more which unlocks higher tiers of weapons and magic later in the game. But besides these very modest combat benefits, running the cult feels mostly like playing an entirely separate game. That’s not a terrible thing mind, because it’s still a fun game, it just doesn’t have as much combat benefits as it at first seems.

The cult itself includes the usual Rimworld-eque activities of getting food, building beds, and making sure everyone is happy. I’m sure Rimworld wasn’t the first game of this type but it’s the first one I played and so everything reminds me of it. The unique selling point of this game though is that since you’re running a cult, you can make all sorts of arbitrary rules and regulations to make it more efficient or just torment your little cultists. You can hold feasts, you can appoint a tax collector, you can unlock the ability to murder any cultist you want (good for removing dissidents). All these rules can make your cult run just a bit more smoothly which lets your cultists level up more and will allow you to unlock those modest weapon upgrades for the combat I was talking about.

To go back to combat, the last big selling point is the cards and weapons randomizer to keep the runs fresh and interesting. Each time you go on a “crusade” against your enemies, you will enter a dungeon with a randomly selected weapon and magic attack. They all have unique properties so two runs can feel entirely different depending on whether you get the hammer (slow as molasses but deals huge damage) or the dagger (quick strikes, lower damage).

In addition, each weapons can have one of several unique bonuses such as stealing health, poisoning, or unleashing ghosts. You may then randomly find weapon shops in the dungeon where you can exchange your weapons for 1 of 3 others. But in addition to all this you will find card shops that will let you select 1 of 2 random cards for a separate benefit. These cards range from poisoning anyone you hit, to getting some extra health, to swinging your weapon faster or more strongly.

The randomness of which weapons you’ll get combined with which cards you’ll get adds a huge layer of replayability to any run ensuring that no two crusades feel the same. And since you unlock higher level weapons and new cards through the cult, they form the major way that the two areas of gameplay interact.

So the game is really two separate games that are both fun in their own right, but which somewhat combine to become greater than the sum of their parts. If I do have any quibbles they are minor, but for completeness sake:

• I don’t like how choosing the rules of your cult locks you into that rule and can’t be changed. I also don’t like how you don’t get to see all the possible rules before you pick. In my first playthrough I chose a rule that locked me out of being able to murder cultists on demand, which later became a problem as I had a few dissidents running around and not enough wood to build jail cells to contain them. I then found that I had chosen another set of rules which didn’t actually synergize that well with each other, and that I’d prefer to have picked the “murder anyone” rule because it synergized pretty well with the “cultists gain faith when old members of the cult get murdered” rule as well as some others. I decided that even though it’s against the spirit of these types of games, I’d have a lot more fun by just restarting and choosing different rules
• Speaking of restarting, I don’t like how the game has unskippable intros and tutorials to start off. Maybe there’s some option to skip them but I didn’t find any, so I had to rewatch the opening cutscenes and replay the opening tutorials before I could get back to where I wanted to be. In a game all about high-octane combat, starting a new game should put as few barriers as possible between you and the “good stuff” so it’s disappointing that this game has so much unskippable faffery to start off with. It’s not that the first sections of the game are bad mind you, they should just be skippable on repeat playthroughs.
• The story is passable, which is both good and bad. Actually I guess it’s mostly good, since in less than a minute it sets up who you are, your goals, and your enemies, but still it isn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off but then it isn’t trying to.
• I guess every game now wants to let you customize and name your little Rimworld-esque cultists, but to be honest I’ve never felt so disconnected from them as in this game. In Rimworld and other games, the cultists (colonists in Rimworld) are your main asset and avenue of gameplay. What they do IS what the game is about, so customizing them and watching them grow, level up, and die is fun and tugs on your heartstrings. Here the cultists are mostly devoid of personality and unique attributes, and there aren’t even good ways to wrangle them in the ways I’d like to (you have to talk to them individually to give them specific jobs). So customizing them does nothing for me, I’d much rather customize the Lamb (your protagonist/Avatar of Destruction) and give them a unique name and character model, but alas that’s the one character you can’t change.

Anyway with all that said, it’s a fun little game that’s retailing for the equivalent of 2 shares of Ford ($F) common stock. So if you have 2 shares of $F go ahead and sell them to buy this, because it’s honestly a better use of your money.