The members of Blue Öyster Cult once famously told their listeners not to fear the Reaper, but I’ve never thought they explained that viewpoint very well. Now, a new game from Massive Monster and Devolver Digital known as Cult of the Lamb seeks to demonstrate why you shouldn’t fear the Reaper if you’re brave and cunning enough to make a deal with him. Let’s take a look at the game, shall we?

Within Cult of the Lamb, you play as a lamb who’s about to be sacrificed by the four ruling Bishops of the game world, known as the Lands of the Old Faith. You’re the last of your kind because the Bishops have already hunted down and slain all your brethren. They’ve done this for the same reason they’re about to sacrifice you. They are convinced that doing so will render some prophecy impossible and prevent the resurgence of a (presumably) evil being known as the One Who Waits.

You step forward and prepare to accept your grim fate. Just as the Bishops’ executioner’s blade makes contact, however, you suddenly find yourself intact and standing in an ethereal realm before the One Who Waits. The One explains that in killing you, the Bishops thought they were preventing you from reaching your fate, but all they have done is deliver you directly to your destiny. The One Who Waits offers to resurrect you in exchange for you promising to use your new lease on life to start a cult of those who will worship this otherworldly being.

You agree to these terms, and so the fateful deal that sets the stage for the game’s events is struck. Upon your resurrection, you rather easily fight off some cronies of the Bishops and wander through the forest for a moment or two before encountering a friendly fellow named Ratau. Ratau was once a chosen vessel of the One Who Waits, just as you are now, “but those days are lost to the winds.” Ratau was sent to guide you because the One Who Waits knows that you’re deep in the Lands of the Old Faith and therefore are in grave danger.

Ratau instructs you to continue making your way through the forest in which you’re currently located, as the path to safety is nearby. The game takes this opportunity to introduce you to the basics of its combat system. Whenever you decide to leave the sanctity of your cult’s home base and venture into one of the four Lands of the Old Faith, you’ll always at least have some form of weapon equipped. With this and your ability to dodge roll as frequently as you’d like, you’ll go far in terms of excelling at the game’s combat mechanics once you’re more comfortable timing strikes and dodges.

That brings me to what I see as the first point in the game’s favor. I truly believe that fans of games like The Binding of Isaac and especially Hades will feel fairly at home with Cult of the Lamb’s somewhat simplified combat. There are several different types of weapons you can equip like swords, daggers, and axes. Each bring their own specific “feel” to your ability to slay those foolish enough to stand in your way.

Later on in the game, you’ll unlock the ability to equip so-called “Curses” in addition to your standard melee armaments. Curses kind of function like differing types of ranged weapons crossed with spells that even have their own finite source of ammunition. Even if you’ve never played anything like Hades or Isaac, though, I think the majority of players will have little to no trouble getting the hang of combat in Cult of the Lamb.

There will be times every so often when you’ve got quite a few enemies on screen, despite a finite amount of health. Even so, I’m sure you’ll be fine once you’ve grown accustomed to timing your strikes and making frequent use of the dodge button whenever necessary. Dodging allows you to move through enemy attacks and ranged particle effects unharmed, which I’ve found can come in quite handy for getting in close to get some blows in when the time is right.

After you’ve swung your first sword and used it to slay a few squads of enemies, you and Ratau encounter your first potential cult follower. Since you just rescued them from being sacrificed by the Bishops of the Old Faith, they willingly join your cult in return. Personally, I wouldn’t say you so much “rescued” them as “sent them through a demonic portal back to your cult’s home base,” but that’s neither here nor there.

Once you reach safety at the edge of the forest, Ratau explains your next steps. The mythical Red Crown you wear that was bestowed upon you by the One Who Waits will allow you to use certain symbols you find on the ground to teleport yourself between certain points. The first of these destinations is a nearby temple that has fallen into extreme disrepair. This temple will serve as your base of operations from here on out.

Once you teleport yourself to the temple, your work (and the core gameplay loop) truly begins. You must start by indoctrinating the follower you “rescued” from the forest. The indoctrination process is virtually the same for all of your followers. If you wish, you can optionally change almost everything about each follower you recruit. You can assign them a new name and alter their physical appearance, for example. I never do this because I don’t see a need for it, but the option is there if you want it.

The only aspects of each follower over which you have no direct control are a set of traits that you can see explained when you first indoctrinate them. These traits can be either helpful or harmful to the follower or to the cult as a whole. For instance, a recruit may have a beneficial trait that makes them recover from illnesses more quickly. Alternatively, they might possess a detrimental trait that decreases the overall Faith of the entire cult for a while once they’ve joined until you can counteract this negative effect.

Once you have at least one follower, you can start putting your cult to work for both your benefit and its own. I began by ordering my first follower to harvest resources from the surrounding area. The first two resources you’ll commonly use are lumber and stone. After you and your followers have collected a sufficient amount, you must begin the process of building the facilities necessary for your cult to thrive. The first of these is a cooking fire, which becomes a permanent fixture after you build it.

As you might expect, the cooking fire allows you to prepare meals for your followers using the ingredients you find in the Lands of the Old Faith. Presumably, because you’re the vessel of the One Who Waits and are given supernatural abilities as a result, you do not need to eat or sleep, so there’s no need to concern yourself with that. Your cult members most assuredly do have such mortal needs, however. It falls to you to provide them with almost everything they’ll need, at least in the beginning.

When you’re not tending to the needs of your cult and its existing members, you’re expected to return to the Lands of the Old Faith and work toward slaying those infernal Bishops. Each Bishop is in charge of one of the four chains that bind the One Who Waits to the realm below that of the living. By slaying the Bishops, you bring the One Who Waits increasingly closer to freedom, and that prophesied resurgence the Bishops technically killed you to prevent.

Of course, it’s not like the Bishops are just standing around waiting for you to come chop their heads off. They’re going to make that process as difficult for you as they can. Beyond that, when you’re just starting out, you’re probably going to be too weak to fight any of the Bishops head-on as it is. Until you’ve upgraded your cult and your abilities enough to accomplish that, you’ll work on eliminating the creations and the lieutenants of the Bishops in dungeons.

The game refers to this dungeon-crawling mechanic as “crusading.” You’ll probably want to do it frequently because it’s a good way to earn gold, harvest additional construction resources, forage for food, and rescue new followers. At the start of the game, the only one of the four Lands of the Old Faith to which you’ll have access is called Darkwood. The other three domains are locked off to you until such time as you accumulate certain numbers of followers.

I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me as though each dungeon you’ll tackle is procedurally-generated, even if it’s in the same Bishop’s domain. Furthermore, many paths in each dungeon can lead in multiple directions. It’s easy to tell what’s ahead and plan your route accordingly thanks to the icons present on each portion of the dungeon map. A sword icon indicates you’ll face a combat encounter, a berry bush icon means that location is good for foraging for food, and so on. These icons are quite straightforward, so you shouldn’t exactly need a map key to figure them out.

You’ll face a boss when you reach the final stage of any dungeon. Emerging victorious against these bosses will usually be highly rewarding, whereas dying in battle will obviously have consequences. Should you fall in combat, you’ll get a pep talk from the One Who Waits before they resurrect you again and send you back to your cult. The main downside of dying while crusading is that your death makes your followers think you’re weak, thus reducing the overall Faith of the cult until you restore it. If your members’ Faith falls too low, they’ll grow unhappy and eventually leave the cult.

Restoring and topping off the cult’s Faith in the general cause and in your leadership can prove difficult until you build a Shrine and a Temple. With these, you can deliver daily sermons and perform rituals that will play a significant role in ensuring that your followers will obey your every word. I would suggest that you do everything in your power to keep the cult happy, well-fed, and faithful until you unlock and construct these additions to your base, lest you be left with no remaining followers.

Overall, I find that I enjoy Cult of the Lamb. I’m honestly not sure that I should enjoy a game about building and maintaining a cult, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact that Cult of the Lamb feels like a fusion of aspects from other games that I greatly enjoy is just one reason I like the game as much as I do. No matter how much inspiration this title takes from other releases, I don’t feel like it’s just trying to mimic what those games do or ride their coattails to fame and prominence.

I don’t think Cult of the Lamb’s core gameplay loop has ever asked too much of me at any point. I got the hang of it pretty quickly in fact. It’s essentially a matter of “tend to the cult’s needs, acquire and spend any available research/upgrade points, go crusading, repeat.” Despite how that may sound, at no point have I thought this loop became monotonous either. I’ve also never felt like I had any forced downtime, which I consider to be a point in the game’s favor.

That’s not to say that I felt like I had to keep playing because there weren’t any opportune places to stop and take a break. I just kept playing for as long as I did because I really wanted to. That is a hallmark of whether or not I truly enjoy a game or just think I like it in passing. I’m quite impressed with Cult of the Lamb, and I think many of you in our audience will be as well if you’re willing to give it a chance and aren’t deterred by the whole “it’s a game about building a cult” thing.

A PC review key for Cult of the Lamb was provided by Devolver Digital for this review.

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Cult of the Lamb

$24.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• Simple, Yet Engaging Core Gameplay Loop
• Interesting Story
• Helpful Tutorials that Don't Hold Your Hand Too Much

Cons

• Concept May Prove Unsettling to Some Players