Cult of the Lamb - Be a baa-aa-adass cultist

BIYF!

Switch apparently has a bunch of performance issues. (read top comments in this thread)

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/wlv1uk/comment/ijvgead/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

That’s kind of what I was afraid of. I managed to play through the slowdowns in Hades without much issue, but still, very on the fence here. Maybe it’ll get patched. . .

I love this one so far after about an hour. All the little systems come together and make a pretty good whole.

One tiny nitpick is that the instructions for Knucklebones are wrong. It’s a simple game but the ‘How to Play’ should read something like:

When dice of the same number are placed in the same column, you’ll earn bonus points as follows:
2 of a kind → add the pair together then multiply by 2
3 of a kind → add the three together then multiply by 3

Game ends when one player fills their board and then you compare scores.

I only played around 100 minutes of Cult of the Lamb, and my impressions is … that is a good game. Cool concept of colony sim + action roguelite, even cooler theme of demonic cult, polished, great visual style, briskly paced. Good game, not great, mind you.
As some have indicated in their reviews, you can notice that is 2 games in 1, and therefore suffer in how deep and good is each part. In special the action dungeon crawler part, the basics of hitting stuff and rolling to avoid are competent, but it really suffers from poor weapon variety (they barely differentiate themselves by being slow but high damaging or quick but low damaging, in addition of one trait like ‘vampiric’ or ‘venom’) and poor perks ("+20% dmg", “+10% critical hits”, etc. I sleep).

I think the reasons some people are loving it (instead of liking it) is fairly simple : it has lots of progression bars! Both explicit and implicit. You level up your followers, you level up yourself with faith, you level up your base and get new buildings, you accumulate more resources, you increase the total amount of followers, etc, etc.

A big of part of it for me is the little details & humor involved. Like the way the lamb’s eyes bleed for certain events, or if you do the ritual of the feast, everyone’s just going to town on the food but lamb opens its eyes and takes a peek at the others while they eat, to measure the impact its having. Great stuff.

My kid and I both like it. I was a bit nervous about the twitch combat gameplay as I sucked at Isaac, but this one is not as tough for me, and there is quite a bit of non combat stuff to do so that is a big plus.

Humor, management, quick combat….it’s very good so far after a few hours.

hahaha

Ugh. Seems like I’ve encountered the fog wall bug.

Really enjoying this so far. Digging the lovely art direction and a morbid tone. The cult management is certainly meatier than I expected. Thought the non-combat part would take up maybe twice the time it does in Hades (where you decorate the house and fix/build relationships), but it’s more or less the core with crusades adding progress and resources to it.

I had to restart because I needed wood but I had no lumber mill and had no more trees in my area and could not leave because of the black fog since I had a quest to finish before I could leave but the quest needed 15 wood and I had NONE. So annoying.

I restarted two more times, and got stuck on each after the first sermon.i had no quests to complete, but couldn’t leave camp, either. Sounds like this bug is pretty common, so I’m going to shelve this until it’s patched. Which will hopefully be soon because I am digging the game.

Ya…me too. I really enjoy it and will just leave it be for a bit.

I have the fog wall bug after the first sermon too. Playing on XSX. Seems this is pretty common. I’d imagine they’d patch something like this pretty quickly. Enjoyed what I saw of the game so far.

I’m enjoying the game, although it doesn’t appear to be very challenging at all on the recommended difficulty. I’ve on the third “world” and I’ve maxed everything out in my village already without my village ever being in any real risk. I don’t feel like I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time taking care of my village before adventuring either. I think there should be more inadvertent calamities or events that hit the village that could open up more opportunities for comedy. Right now the worst that can happen to your village is the occasional questline that results in you sacrificing a villager before they are due (optional) and the occasional boss curse. It is trivial to bounce back from any faith loss.

My only real complaint with the adventuring piece right now is that it takes just as long to clear a room of breakables (grass/bones/world uniques) than it does to clear it of enemies. Sometimes longer. That pacing is weird and noticeable. I at least feel like I have to do it as well for resources (anything other than grass is fairly useful).

Thankfully, I didn’t encounter the fog wall bug on PS4/5 and was able to complete the game. I encountered a handful of weird village bugs where workers would just refuse to refine materials or harvest farm goods and even once had all faith-related buildings disappear. But closing and reloading the game always fixed the issue.

I really enjoyed the game, and was glad that it was short. Make it through the four biomes four times each to clear the bosses and (structure spoiler) just beat a final boss rush, no additional biome to clear.

I had most of the unlocks and about half the buildings constructed without feeling like I ever had to grind. Well, except when I needed 20 cult members to get through a door and a whole crop had died of old age. I had to make a bunch of 2 minute trips through the forest biome to pick up like 9 additional members.

Is there an effective way to turn a skeptic other than the prison? (Which I have not unlocked yet.)

The re-education interaction on its own seems pretty useless because you can only use it once a day - and what little it does is gone by the next day. I had 3 skeptics so far, and I ended up sacrificing them.