Players will need to defeat Kallamar, from left, Heket, and Shamura in order to free the One Who Waits in "Cult of the Lamb." (Devolver Digital)
Devolver Digital is no stranger to edgy but inventive games. It has published titles such as “Genital Jousting,” which is about as NSFW as you would expect, and “Card Shark,” which was a brilliant but flawed take on card tricks, gambling and the intrigue of 18th-century French aristocracy.
The company’s latest release, “Cult of the Lamb,” falls in that vein. As the name implies, players take on the role of a Lamb that start its own religious sect after surviving being sacrificed by the Bishops of the Old Faith. An imprisoned god called The One Who Waits spares the acolyte and gives it the powerful Red Crown. But the deity also gives the humble Lamb a task: Foster a cult to power up the acolyte and use that devotion to destroy the leaders of the Old Faith. That would free The One Who Waits, who has been imprisoned.
Players are leading one religion to destroy another. That’s basically the Crusades except in this stylishly crafted video game, it’s one Cthulhu-inspired faith battling another one. The developer, Massive Monster, takes the edge off the dark Lovecraftian subject matter through its ingenious character design. By making the protagonist and the followers cutesy zoo animals, it highlights the absurdity and humor of running a fanatical religious sect.
TWO SIDES OF THE GAME
“Cult of the Lamb” is divided into two parts. The first focuses on village building, and the success of that lies in indoctrinating followers and keeping them loyal. The Lamb can rescue new recruits from Old Faith cultists or run across them during adventures.
Once recruited, players essentially build a commune. Think of it as “Animal Crossing” on acid, as members build the basics such as a temple, sleeping quarters and kitchen. They’ll have to send their faithful to harvest stone and wood. Players use these resources to build farms to grow food to feed the burgeoning population. They’ll also have to build hospitals, outhouses and janitorial sites to make sure disease doesn’t spread through the hamlet.
If players do this, they can slowly use their followers’ devotion to construct more advanced buildings to increase efficiency. It can be a grind doing chores around the village by harvesting crops, cleaning up their poop and repairing broken facilities. The beauty of the more advanced projects is that players can delegate villagers with work.
DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
That gives the Lamb more time to tend to the faithful, and using their zealotry, the protagonist powers up abilities that will help him through the second half of the game: the rogue-lite dungeon crawl. If players can maintain followers’ loyalty, they can earn power-ups for the Red Crown such as more health, better weapons and powerful curses.
The Lamb takes those advantages into procedurally generated dungeons full of monsters and Old Faith cultists. This is where players can gather some of the rarer resources for higher-level projects. It’s also how players advance the campaign as each trip through the four dungeons brings the Lamb closer to defeating the bishop deities Leshy, Heket, Kallamar and Shamura.
Combat is straightforward and requires players to read enemy patterns and dodge attacks in order for them to counter. The Lamb’s diving roll makes the protagonist invincible for a few seconds and it’s key to surviving the fire, poison and swordplay from foes. Fighting isn’t too difficult but it does require patience to read a foe and attack with the blade in hand.
Players also need to learn the weapons and curses because each one has its own strength and weaknesses. The hammer takes a long time to strike but it’s powerful. Meanwhile, curses such as ichor can splash foes with poison, but this temporarily taints an area. Part of the fun is mastering the combat so that players can handle any combination of swords and sorcery they run across. All weapons they run across are randomly generated.
The two halves weave together cohesively and it’s similar to one of the gameplay loops in “Stardrew Valley.” Players run through the dungeon, and if they die along the way, they start over. The One Who Waits keeps the Lamb alive, and players can use their experience and the upgrades from the faithful to start with more powerful gear when they enter a dungeon.
Along the way, tertiary characters show up and they can help players earn more gear or more money to fund their religion. (Hey, running a cult is costly.) Other allies unlock new rituals, which help boost religious fervor so that the Lamb can get some dungeon diving done without babysitting the followers.
Despite the predictable plot, everything else about the “Cult of the Lamb” is enjoyable. It starts off well and sucks players in with the village building and the quirky sense of humor, but toward the middle of the game, it turns into a grind as learning the finer points includes a lot of trial and error. Players may run out of a vital resource for a needed building, or, by dungeon diving too long, a village can turn rebellious with dissenters, and that leads to the need for prison and re-education.
Although it can be burdensome, the setbacks never stop players from forging ahead. The one frustrating problem I ran into was the constant bugs that crashed the game. “Cult of the Lamb” breaks down with glitches toward the finale, and that forced me to do one or two dungeons repeatedly and some boss fights several times. Sometimes an enemy needed to clear a room disappeared or my character would run endlessly and the game would stop responding.
These problems mar an otherwise entertaining experience worthy of worship.
‘Cult of the Lamb’
3 stars out of 4
Platform: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and Series S, Xbox One, PC, NIntendo Switch, macOS
Rating: Teen