First Impression: Cult of the Lamb (Switch) ~ Praise The Lamb, Thy Lamb.

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I enjoy playing unique games quite a lot. When I came across Cult of the Lamb on the Nintendo Switch eShop, I was interested. I marked the game on my wishlist, so I could find it back when I was hunting for new games. A few weeks ago, I went on a family trip and I wanted a fresh new game to play. Cult of the Lamb was on sale together with all its DLC, and I thought: “Let’s buy this and see what happens.” Now, when I started playing this game… I had some expectations, but I got something completely different. Did this game turn into a game I really like and drew me in, or did this game turn into something I regretted buying? In this article, I want to talk about my opinions on the game, while I invite you to leave a comment in the comment section down below with your thoughts and/or opinions on the game and/or the content of this article. So, let’s dive right into this game and let’s create our very own cult.

Cute horror

When I started playing this game, my younger 8-year-old niece who sat next to me was saying: “Aren’t you getting too old to play this children game?”. Oh boy, don’t let the cute characters of this game fool you. I’ll talk more about the visuals later, but the story is anything but child-friendly.

You play as an unnamed lamb being sacrificed to avoid a prophecy of getting fulfilled. Yet, during your execution, you get sent to “The One Who Waits”. He wants you to make a cult in his honor without giving you any say in the matter. You get reborn with new powers so you can take revenge on the old Gods that executed you. Now tell me, this sounds like this game isn’t too child-friendly anymore, no?

There is not a lot of voice acting in this game besides your usual grunts and babble. A lot happens in text dialogue and the writing is excellent. Since the Gods that executed you are from the “Old Faith”, the writing of some characters is also sometimes in that old English style, and I love it.

If I’m really honest, the story overall isn’t the strongest point of this game. While it’s decent, it’s a bit predictable and an amazing way to set the atmosphere of the game. But, I feel that it stays too safe at certain moments. I noticed moments of expanding the lore and fleshing everything out, but sometimes these moments fly underneath the radar. Especially since some story bits happen during a hectic run and your mind is set on something very different.

If you want to enjoy the story of this game, I’d recommend that you take note of what the characters during your runs are saying instead of mashing through it. I made that mistake a few too many times, and I feel like I’m missing some lore here and there. Sadly enough, there is no “lore book” or history page you can look up things.

Now, thankfully, this game is still quite strong if you don’t pay too much attention to the story. There are various lore video’s out there if you want to relive the story. To me, the story in this game is more something to help set the tone of the games’ world and give it that unnerving layer underneath its cute and charming vibe that the game is giving off.

Stark contrast

This game consists out of two main gameplay mechanics. You have your base building, and you have the rouge lite dungeon crawling “conquests”. Both are quite important, since both mechanics lien on each other in very interesting ways.

If you have played a game like Rogue Legacy or We Who Are About To Die, you know that in those games you explore a randomly generated dungeon or fight random fights. In between the fights, you are in your base camp, where you can buy upgrades to improve your next chances in your next run. Well, in this game, that base camp is expanded into a town simulator. You have to care for your flock by cooking them food, providing them shelter, curing them when they are sick, going on various mini-quests for them… If you are a good caretaker, your flock generates devotion, which you can use to upgrade your base and your abilities in your run. When you are a bad caretaker, they will die and/or even steal from you and leave the cult.

It’s quite important to know that your cult doesn’t sleep or get inactive when you are conquesting. As soon as you go out for one of the four dungeons, your cult goes through their daily routine and things can go quite wrong.

Now, in theory, you can never go conquesting and only focus on the base building alone. Then, you still have an amazing game to play, but let me tell you, you do lose out on quite a lot of the game. Also, some things become quite impossible to do, and you are sort of forced into going into the dungeon. Now, the punishment for death or escaping the dungeon isn’t that hard, depending on your difficulty settings.

Speaking about those, if you put this game on easy… This game is a cakewalk. You can change the difficulty setting quite easily, but the dungeon becomes a bit boring if you play it on easy. The normal setting is quite balanced and provided me with a lot of challenge. There is no punishment for playing on easy or switching, so if you want to lower or higher the difficulty setting, go ahead.

While the base building has a rather creepy-cute ascetic like a children horror movie, the light gore elements come more into play during the conquesting sections. Overall, the game is rather tame with its gore, but if you start reading into the story and the visuals a bit more, things can become quite creepy indeed. Also, depending on the choices you make when you upgrade your cult. Depending on those decisions, you can make the game more “creepy” or more “charming”.

Now, let’s talk a bit more in depth about the conquests you can go on. At first, you can only access the Dark Woods dungeon. The more followers you have in your flock, the more dungeons you can unlock. Each dungeon has its own theme and unique resources you can find in there. Sadly, it’s not always clear which resources are found where, so mental notes can be quite handy. At one hand, the buildings you can create in your base sometimes give very good hints. Since, they are separated into categories and their materials are sometimes the best hint.

During each conquest, you go through small maps where you go from room to room fighting enemies. At the start of the conquest, you get a random weapon and a random second attack. We get a whole range of weapons like knives, swords, axes and hammers. They are also in various categories like vamperic or toxic. This first roll decides quite a lot. The weapon I hated the most is the hammer, since it’s quite slow, and it only damages when the hammer has landed. Not something you need in a fast-paced combat system.

Overall, the enemies telegraph their attacks quite well. Only when they go off-screen and flew in suddenly, I felt that the game cheated me. Thankfully, this happens so infrequently, I’m not even seeing it as a problem. The combat in this game is quite fast-paced. Standing still and not using your dodge roll are two death sentences in this game. The difficulty curve in this game is amazing for the combat. They slowly introduce the new mechanics, and you have time to get used to them. While the game can be unforgiving with barely dropping any healing items, you need to get lucky. But, learning the combat system is essential.

You can also find tarot cards, here you have another random roll. Most of these cards give you a nice buff or change up a game mechanic. Like, there is a tarot card that changes the reward chest of beating a room from gold coins to fish, which gives you more food to feed your flock. These draws are always random and can safe or break a run.

Now, after a certain amount of rooms, you go to the exit of the map. Then you come across a diagram towards the boss room. You have to decide which path to take. Now, you need to decide this carefully. Since, you can go back, and you only follow the lines drawn on the diagram. So, if you are going for a new follower run, take that path. But, do keep your resources into consideration. If you see food, stone or wood in that other path, and you really need that, do consider that path too.

There are also relics, in most cases these relics are sort of “screen nukes” basically. They either apply an effect to all enemies in the room or on screen, give you a really strong temporary buff, or just kill all enemies. Sometimes these relics are a one time use, and sometimes you need them to recharge by either having your flock pray for you or defeat more enemies.

Now, the amount of control you have over your character is perfect. The controls are extremely responsive and makes me feel in control while I’m going through my conquest. Even when I take a short break from the game, it’s not hard to figure out the controls again, since the first room is always a safe room. Or I could try them out in these special rooms where a character talks a bit about the lore, or where I can draw a new tarot card or in very rare cases even heal.

At the end of each conquest tree, you will encounter a boss room. That’s your destination. Defeating that boss guarantees you a safe return without loosing any resources you gained from that run. These boss battles are quite a lot of fun to play. They are always different depending on your weapon, your secondary attack, your tarot cards… Defeating three bosses in the dungeon will cause the old God of that area to challenge you. When you defeat all four of these old Gods, you will be able to go to the final boss. But, even if you have defeated the old God of an area, you can still go and run their dungeon. And if you then destroy a devotion statue, there is a big chance a red portal will spawn to refight them, giving you an option for a quick escape if you have a terrible map.

Praising how close we were

Now, in the previous section I have talked quite in depth about the conquest mechanic in this game. Let’s now focus our attention to the village building and the other mechanics of this game.

Like I talked about earlier, visually this game looks quite charming. Even in the dungeons, this game looks quite charming if you don’t think too much about what’s actually going on. The game looks cartoony and quite colorful and lures you in with it’s adorable charm to sometimes slap you with a villager request of being scarficed themselves.

Building out your village is quite a lot of fun. You really have to decide to use your resources well, since some buildings can be quite important and even optimize the game for you. For most tasks, there is no way to automate them apart from a very select few.

For example, if you build a morgue, your flock will bring dead villagers to it instead of letting them rot in your base camp. But burrying your death villagers is still a task you need to do and the morgue has only so many slots. Another great example is, you can appoint villagers to tend to the farms. They will plant, water and put fertilizer but actually picking the crops is on you. Update: I turns out I am wrong, I thought I built farm houses level 2, but mine are level 1. The level 2 farm houses do also gathering of crops. Now, the supplying of seeds and fretiziler is still on you.

And the final example I’ll give is, you can build a villager kitchen and they will cook every meal you provide the ingredients for. If you are out of ingredients you have put in, for max of 30 pending meals, you will have to resupply it.

Wood and stone quarries will break after a certain amount of time, so you will have to rebuild them. Also, when you want to upgrade some buildings to their best form, you will have to build their weaker form first. The base building is quite in depth. And on top of that, several important things to keep high. First of all, we need to keep the belief in the cult high. The lower that belief goes, the higher the chance you have of deserters. And the more deserters you have, the slower you can upgrade your abilities for the conquests and let me tell you, you need those upgrades for sure. Besides that, you have hygiene and food to worry about. The lower those meters are, the more chance you have of your villagers getting sick and risking death.

While you are playing this game, I’m going to give you one piece of advice for the base building. Something that’s quite overpowered is the fact you can inspire your villagers every day. This always garantuees devotion and makes sure you level up your villagers and makes sure you unlock the needed items for those upgrades. That way you don’t have the risk using certain rituals to lift the belief up. And why not risking these rituals, well let’s just say that villager requests are timed and they are sometimes shorter than the cooldown time of the ritual.

The day and night cycle of this game is quite important as well. Let your villagers sleep during the nighttime. Also, use the nighttime to your advantage. Critters are running around that might give you that additional piece of food you really need if you catch them. Also, you can go to other places to play mini-games or do additional side quests for more decorations for your base. Besides looking extremely well, these decorations have no real impact to the game.

Something that can have a very minor impact to your game is the form you choose of your followers. Since some types of animals have a pet option that rises their experiece/devotion meter by a really small bit. Experiment with all the different forms since I’m convinced that there are other things that I have missed in there. Their designs are also adorable and charming. Also, you can create some funny looking villagers as well with certain colorschemes.

Now, the music and sound effects in this game are amazing. The soundtrack of this game is calming when it needs to be, but rather intense during fights. Since I started playing this game, I can’t tell you how many times I listened to the soundtrack during work. The soundtrack is created by River Boy and let me tell you again, it’s amazing music in game and outside of it as well.

The sound effects in this game really communicate to the player when for example an attack is happening or a certain action finished. The sound effects feel like they have impact and are really memorable. I have no complaints there at all.

The pacing of this game is something you decide yourself. While this game can be beaten in 14 hours or so, I have been playing this game for way longer than 14 hours. I’m enjoying myself so much with this game, I’m really taking my time with it and going at it slowly. And it’s something that I also love about this game. There is no rush looming over us.

Sadly, while I have been mostly praising the game, I’m said to say that there are some issues as well. Mainly in the base building. These issues mostly come from some nasty bugs that can hinder the experience. Most of these bugs I have experienced where in the base. Thankfully, it’s not always a guarantee these bugs will appear for everyone… and sometimes they fix themselves thankfully.

The first one I expierenced is that sometimes the game has very bad slowdown for just a moment. Especially when we go from night to day. I have a theory why this is, since I didn’t notice this while I’m conquesting. My gut feeling is telling me that when you are in the camp, too many things need to be updated like the crop cycle, waking up the villagers, re-enabling events that you can do only once per day, remove the nighttime critters… And that’s a bit too much for the Switch to handle. I notice that it’s especially bad when I’m at my farms since it needs to redraw all the crops.

The second one I experienced is that the game crashed on me trice. Thankfully, when I moved the game from the SD card to my internal storage, the crashes went away. Now, it’s quite rare for games to crash on me on the Nintendo Switch, but still… Thankfully, the autosave is very generous and you won’t loose too much progress when the game crashes. And if it were to crash in a dungeon run (which I never had happen by the way), those are always around 10 – 15 minutes long in the first place.

Another one I experienced is the infamous morgue glitch. For some reason, it’s possible that when somebody dies in your flock and the villagers bring that body to the morgue, you’ll be unable to pick it out of the morgue. The issue here is that this “ghost body” is permanent and occupying a slot in the morgue. Sadly enough, I have two of these ghost bodies. Meaning, when I get a 3rd, my morgue is filled and I get a permanent hygiene penalty.

In very rare cases, I saw how the game was optimized for Switch. When villagers are off screen, they loose all their animation. Sadly, in very rare cases you can still see it at the edges of your screen and it’s looks quite funny. Another very rare case as well are the glitches where you can’t cut a tree in your base. You somewhat get stuck into the animation. Thankfully, mashing buttons gets you out of that.

But one of the most annoying bugs/things in this game to me is how unrealible the mission length is. You can send a follower on a mission to get new followers or resources. Now here is the thing, they say it will take X amount of days or time for them to get back. Sadly, this is anything but a guarantee. It’s even possible that it takes them two or even three days longer for you to return.

Now, apart from the morgue glitch, all the bugs I experienced you can work around. Thankfully, they don’t appear too often so you don’t feel like this game is unpolished. Since this game has quite a lot of polish and it shows. Since, apart from these bugs, I really have a hard time finding negative things to talk about in this game and if I find them, they are somewhat nitpicky as well.

Things that I found annoying or negative in this game are for example, there is no way to fully harvest all your crops in one go. If there is one, I haven’t found it and it’s not clearly explained to the player. But, it’s a nice and relaxing night time activity so, I don’t mind it too much.

Another example is when somebody dies at day time, it’s always a pain to prepare the body when it’s in a group of grieving followers. The issue here is that they barf on the ground, giving your hygiene a big hit. But, they disperse quite quickly so you can move the body after that.

Sometimes, when a lot of things are near to each other, some hitboxes can be really finicky. You’ll need to stand in the exact spot and face the exact angle for it to register or count. Also, why can you not gather the devotion of shelter when a villager is sleeping in it? You only get the option to talk to that villager.

Like I said, apart from some bugs, the negatives are quite minor in the grand scheme of things in this game. Since this game is filled with strenghts and it shows. Like how easy the UI is to navigate and how many options you get to tweak this game to your liking.

It’s no wonder that I have been playing this game almost exclusively since I bought it late last month. I can recommend this game to everybody who enjoys rougelike games, action/adventure games and to a certain extend even horror game fans. This game really hooked me quite bad and I’m loving the ride. This game is addictive. This game lures you in with it’s cute and charming atmosphere but will sometimes remind you that it might be a wolf in sheep clothing and show it’s true cult colors.

While I can totally understand that some people expected more about this game, is just another thing about this game. It shows the potential this game, this formula has. I’m hoping we are going to see a sequel or even a DLC that adds new mechanics since I’m over half way in beating this game and I’m convinced that after beating this game, I’ll still be hungry for more Cult of the Lamb content. Maybe I’ll even try a run on the hardest difficulty… Since the replay value of this game is out of the roof. Or I might turn into a base building player and use the excellent photography mode… Who knows?

And with that said, I have said everything about this game I want to say for now. I want to thank you so much for reading this article and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope to be able to welcome you in another article but until then, have a great rest of your day and take care.