🔰SHREDVIEW🔰 - From someone who actually plays and finishes the games before reviewing.

🔷 ABOUT THE GAME & LORE: 🔷

Cult of the Lamb tosses you into a twisted yet oddly charming world where you play as a possessed lamb saved from death by an ancient god known as "The One Who Waits." In return, you get to start a cult in their name, spreading the influence, and eliminating rival gods.

The story blends dark themes with absurd humor and cute creatures and wraps them in drawing like animation visuals. You’ll build your cult from the ground up, recruiting followers, indoctrinating them, and managing their loyalty while exploring randomly generated dungeons to slay enemies and gather resources.

The game thrives on its juxtaposition of cute visuals with its darker subject matter. One minute, you’re performing a gruesome ritual to increase your power, and the next, you’re decorating your cult grounds with charming aesthetics. It’s all wrapped in satirical and outrageous acts.

🔷 THE GAMEPLAY: 🔷

👉 GENERAL:
Top-down classic roguelike adventure point of view, similar with amazing known titles such as: Hades, Binding of Isaac while still a little on its own lane. Point is to exploit the many ways of handling a cult and adapting to random procedural generating dungeons & combat. The more you play, the more you know and the more you know, the easier it becomes. Besides a basic morale/needs system for your followers, you also get building mechanics and make your base as you please.

▪︎ The main storyline is linear and easy to follow. The main goal is to manage and constantly maintain the cult, whether constantly refreshing members or taking good care to preserve your oldest most loyal followers.

▪︎ Resources are a majority of the loot in the game, what's left is gold coins for currency and power-ups / weapons but these are more like collectibles, each being indexed in a catalogue when discovered first time. Loot will be found in chests, drop from enemies and also world clutter. You can smash stuff to bits in each dungeon room and some of them give resources as loot. Resources are also necessary for running rituals.

▪︎ A run is a dungeon entry, you go in dungeons to gather loot, currency, rare drops, finish quests, find followers and what not. Point is you have to do it, many times. The run starts when you enter and ends upon death. Equipped weapons, tarot cards, relics are lost upon dying in the dungeon along with a part of the gathered resources.

▪︎ Procedural generation is what keeps every run fresh. There's many sections in a run to choose from, these have different symbols and are selectable in a path feature. When you ascend an area, you get to select a path.

▪︎ Most important thing is followers as every objective you come across relies on them. There’s few ways to gain followers, including purchasing them from NPC's or free them while randomly encountered in dungeons, quests. Every main story/area boss will turn into a follower once defeated, these have special looks.

▪︎ There are NPC's around the map that you can purchase stuff from, get quests from or even get some rare upgrade loot.

▪︎ Your followers have needs, hunger, sleep, loyalty, hygiene and different bonuses or minuses that they can bring tot he cult. You must make sure to maintain those needs or loyals can turn deserters and influence others too, there's many ways to interact with them, being both the helper and the oppressor.

▪︎ An important factor is how skilled you are or become while playing. You get better and better weapons the longer you stay alive, if you're good with roguelike mechanics, its a comfy challenge.

👉 NAVIGATION SYSTEM:
Very easy to master after a few quests & runs, just enough to understand the very simple navigation. There's a map with 5 locations where NPC's reside, your base and the dungeon entrances area, 4 doors, one for each Biome if we can call them as such.

👉 PHYSICS & MECHANICS:
It flows, it glows and it shows an amazing use of combat mechanics. Everything is super smooth, stable and easy to master. If you get the grip on when to dodge, check for enemy animations, learn attack patterns, when to strike, what upgrades to pick for building up efficient strength and how to handle followers, you're going to get cozy. Sounds like a lot but it really isn't.

👉 GRAPHICS & OPTIMIZATION:
You don't play Cult of The Lamb for Graphics necessarily, unless you really love to see this drawn "Don't Starve" but colorful type visual. It is beautiful and very well made for the genre but definitely not eye candy or realistic. Again, beautiful nevertheless. No frame drops at all, it would be dubious with such simple graphic design.

👉 ACHIEVEMENTS & COLLECTIBLES:
Fairly challenging, of course the purpose of achievements is to make you experience everything a game has to offer, as it should be. Nothing here is missable but will require grind and time to spend. Luckily I really liked the game and even though it took me a while, I can't complain. There's nothing missable. Try to do them, they are good practice for your gaming reflexes.

🔷 CONCLUSION: 🔷

Cult of The Lamb is a weird, controversial, outrageous sandbox roguelike where you get to shape the ways of a cult, sounds about right, yes? I would recommend it to anyone for the challenge and the beauty of it, gets quite fun the more you play it. I've sure spent some time here.

🔷 PROS & CONS:🔷

✔️ PROS:
- Engaging, interactive yet simple.
- Easy to master combat and core mechanics.
- Great random factor, what the hell will happen next?!
- Beautiful to look at, not tiring at all.
- Do-able but challenging achievements.

❌ CONS:
- Grindy, requires time to beat all content.
- Can be repetitive for some, I was fine with it but it does get there.
- Colony management system is very annoying sometimes, too demanding.
- No post game content, if you don’t chase achievements you're fine.
- Everything you unlock is mostly about the optics.

🔷 SHORT REVIEW & STATS: 🔷

• PLAY STYLE:
🔳 PVP
✅ PVE
🔳 ONLINE CO-OP
🔳 Online Multiplayer
🔳 SPLIT SCREEN
✅ SINGLE PLAYER

• GRAPHICS:
🔳 Fire the designer.
🔳 Fairly old game, what you expect?
✅ Not great, not terrible.
🔳 Great
🔳 Exceptional

• REPLAYABILITY:
🔳 YES
🔳 EVERY NOW AND THEN
🔳 NOT SURE
🔳 RARELY / ON MAJOR UPDATE / DLC RELEASE
✅ NO

• STEAM ACHIEVEMENTS:
✅ YES
🔳 NO (WTF MAN)

• GAMEPLAY:
🔳 WTF IS THIS ♥♥♥♥
🔳 TERRIBLE
🔳 DECENT
✅ ENGAGING
🔳 HAD A BLAST

• DIFFICULTY:
🔳 DARK SOULS
🔳 BAFFLING
✅ CHALLENGING
🔳 MEDIUM
🔳 WALK IN THE PARK

• STORYLINE:
🔳 A WHAT? WE WRITE CODE NOT BOOKS
✅ GOES FINE WITHOUT ONE
🔳 DECENT
🔳 ENGAGING
🔳 SHAKESPEARE AINT GOT S**T ON THIS

❗ NOTE - This is a review based on personal preferences and opinions. I always suggest you try the games for yourself before letting others decide for you. Even though we're all gamers, we are sure not the same.

The dream sim for everyone who ever wanted to be a cult leader. You can run your cult as you like.
The art is super cute but the ideology behind the game is super dark. Play this and explore your inner darkness.

Must TRY - 10/10

It is a fine game to kill some time, but overall it suffers from very shallow mechanics. Base building revolves around collecting very few resources and levelling up the same buildings. Cult management means to perform the same rituals over and over. However, the individual cult members are NPCs without any personality / differentiating traits. The dungeoning / rogue-like part might be one of the most boring rogue-likes I have played. There is very little variety across runs. The weapon currently held determines your playstyle, since there are no items that change any aspect of the current weapon. This game tries to accomplish too many things, as a result of which it falls short on all of them.