The Iterative Collective is both an indie games incubator and a publisher, but what does…
Cult of the Lamb
Cameron’s Pick: Cult of the Lamb
Cult of the Lamb puts you in the fleece of a wooly cult leader; resurrected by the deity called The One Who Waits, it’s now up to you to free your master, recruit new followers, build a base, and go traverse through biomes in order to recruit, collect for and grow your cult. Bouncing between two main gameplay loops, players will find themselves traversing a roguelike dungeon crawler to progress the story, discover followers and collect resources before returning to your base to perform sermons, build command your followers to eat poop. Yes, you heard me, you can make your followers eat poop.
I want to mention that Cult of the Lamb does very well to balance a lot of its content. Adorable followers feel complementary with the demonic choices of ritualistic sacrifice and such. The gameplay of a dungeon-crawling roguelike with the cute cozy nature side of its management side sim never feels out of place, and the time I spent in each felt right. There are a ton of things to do as well, with the ability to traverse four different biomes in your dungeon crawling (although admittedly with a limited selection of weapons), as well as manage the faith, hunger, and cleanliness of your followers. As time progresses and you upgrade your base, more buildings and cosmetics become available for you and you can very much let your base manage itself quite well.
All in all, I immensely enjoyed my first few hours in Cult of the Lamb. However, when I started to grow my base past the 20 followers mark, a lot of issues started to rise for me. Framerate dropped dramatically whenever I returned and unfortunately I lost access to my temple, leaving me unable to perform sermons and progress further. A reboot fixed the temple but my framerate in runs became unplayable. I’m hoping that these issues are quickly fixed, as before I had reached this I felt this cute indie was a strong contender for game of the year. Maybe the game is truly just trying to test my faith.
Would I recommend Cult of the Lamb? Of course, but I would wait for some patches to address these issues to have the best experience possible with the game. It remains cute and in the front of my mind, but the last thing I want to do is start a new game for the same hiccups to force me to start over.
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