I saw bits of this here and there, and I was pretty interested. It was definitely billing itself as a Binding of Isaac alternative, with a lot of similarities gameplay-wise and, in a way, visually. I was pretty interested in trying it out. So I bought it last week when it came out and… finished it. Hmm.

Well, let’s talk about it!

Developer: Massive Monster
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Release date: August 11, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version played)
Genre: Action roguelite

Review

You play as a lamb, who is about to be sacrificed (as a lamb would) in the name of some religion. But he is saved by a totally-not-evil god known as “The One Who Waits”, who saves your life and gives you the Red Crown which gives you some portion of his power, ordering you to build a cult, and fight the current religious cult leaders so you may liberate him from his shackles. So you have 4 dungeons to go through (4 times each minimum) and a boss at the end of each run, and then you get a choice for the ending. There’s not really much story beyond that, a bit of very minor lore details here and there.

So the game is split in what is basically 2 gameplay styles. There’s the dungeons that have combat, and the “town” where you built up your cult and interact with your cult’s followers.

The dungeon segments are played in a roguelite style, which is where the similarities to Binding of Isaac start, and end. Basically, the dungeons are set in multiple floors, which are shaped like, basically, Zelda dungeons. There’s a starting point and an end point, with some side-paths. Most rooms have combat, some don’t. Once you finish a floor, you get to a selection of floors, with each floor being connected by a line to other floors. Each floor has an icon, where you get a normal floor, or a normal floor with different conditions (like different rewards from combat), or a special floor such as one where you can get new followers, or food, or tarot cards and such.

Combat is fairly simple. You have a few options in battle. You can attack, which is different based on the weapon you’re using (different attack speed, range and AOE). You also have a special attack (takes a bit of MP, which you recover by. At the start of a dungeon there’s a randomly selected combination of a weapon and special attack, though you can find different ones in the dungeon. Then you can dodge roll. Hitting enemies knocks you back a little bit so you can’t just stand there and attack, but you basically wouldn’t want to do that anyways as that usually makes you unsafe. Some enemies have windup for when they’ll attack, some have range, you know the stuff. It’s pretty damn straightforward. Avoid attacks, get hits in. You can be fairly aggressive and it’s pretty fast-paced.

There’s a few upgrades you may find in the dungeon. There’s a blacksmith that gives you a choice of 3 weapons (either melee weapon or special attacks), almost always a level higher than what you’re currently using. Then there’s the medium, who makes you pick from a selection of Tarot cards. Those give you pretty basic upgrades to your stats or some special effects. Things like extra attack power, faster attack speed, faster movement, or special effects like crit chance, poison, chance to heal when you kill, stuff like that. The weapon and special attack upgrades have the biggest effect to gameplay, though you’ll probably find ones you prefer pretty quick (the axe for me).

If you die or finish the dungeon, you’re brought back to town. When dying you lose a pretty small percentage of the resources you got in the dungeon as punishment. That’s really it for dungeons, you go in, get resources, maybe beat the boss to advance, get back to building. It’s fun but not deep.

In your cult’s… land? You can build stuff, and take care of all sorts of chores. You’re tasked with basically making your cult a nice, happy place, and also support your followers’ lives because they’re all idiots. Talk  to your followers, give them gives, build things, farm, clean up your followers’ poop and vomit, cook food, murder, ordering followers around and such other fun, cult things.

You can set up areas for buildings to be built, farms to grow foods, sleeping bags for followers to sleep, mines, lumberyards, and of course all the usual cult things you may need like a temple to give sermons, a statue to worship, a prison, graves, propaganda speakers and different ways to produce fertilizer. When you set up a building, it puts a square on the ground and going on it enables you to start building. Followers tend to help build things which is nice, though you provide more speed in tasks than followers.

When you get new followers, you get to name then, change their appearance and then they go out into the world to do stuff. Namely you’ll generally give them an initial order (unless they’re old/hungry/sick followers you’re getting from a quest), and they’ll do their best to help at that. If you tell them to cut wood, they’ll work at any available lumberyard or cut down any tree that might pop up. You can get them to worship the statue (which gives you resources to learn more buildings), mine rocks, clean the place so you don’t have to worry about poop and vomit as much, and getting a few to help farming is definitely good as well.

As the cult leader, you do have to do a few things. Your cult leader abilities include giving sermons, which allows for various upgrades when you get enough of that type of EXP (mostly dungeon stuff like higher-level weapons or more special attacks). If you get tablets you can power up your cult in a few different categories. Once you choose a category, you get a choice of 2 similar things to choose from that are semi-related. It may be traits or new rituals. For example, the first Afterlife doctrine makes you choose between Belief in Sacrifice (gives faith to followers when you perform a ritual sacrifice), or Belief in Afterlife, which reduces the amount of faith lost when a follower dies in any way. Sometimes it’s abilities like the ability to kill followers in their sleep. Finally, the temple allows for rituals. Those require resources (mainly the bones of your dead enemies) and they have various effects. Some are ritual sacrifice, some are feeding everyone without having to make food, some are forms of brainwashing (like using drugs to lock their faith at max for 2 days), some are taxes. A ritual needs to cool down after being used, of course.

Just a few last things here. The worshipping aspect gives you you these points you can spend in a “skill tree” of buildings. Buildings can be upgrades to current ones (like better sleeping quarters that break less), some that give you new abilities (like prisons to punish people who start disbelieving you, or ones that turn corpses into fertilizer), some give followers things to do (offering plates, smaller statues to worship, a janitor station so a follower can clean the puke). And yeah some of your followers sometimes start to disbelieve. It’s completely random AFAIK, since I tended to keep overall faith high (through sermons and rituals). Putting a dissenter in prison means you can re-educate them while they’re imprisoned, or you do have ritual sacrifice if you want an easy way to get rid of them. Though I’d rather keep ritual sacrifice as an options for old followers, because followers only last a specific amount of days, and when they’re old they literally do nothing. Of course if you can revive followers which changes things, but I didn’t get that ability.

So the town-building, overall, is fine, but feels like just a ton of chores that get in the way of the fighting. The fighting is pretty basic, but it’s certainly funner than cleaning poop. There’s a few other things I didn’t mention like quests (sometimes followers walk up to you to ask for specific things), some of which are given by NPCs in areas surrounding the cult. There’s a pretty shit fishing minigame, and there’s a pretty meh dice minigame that is just luck whether you win or lose.

Glitches. The game is absolutely covered in glitches, or at least was when I was playing it (possible that they were patched since, but looking at all the patch notes, nope). They’re random moments where things just randomly don’t work. You might come out of the temple after a sermon, just to find all your followers unable to move, stacked at the door. There’s moments where I couldn’t talk to the followers. There’s moments where I couldn’t do actions like farming. None of the glitches end up being permanent, at least in my experience, but having to reset the game because it randomly decided it didn’t want to work anymore, multiple times, can be a bit annoying. There are some issues that were fixed too, such as followers not farming while you’re in dungeons.

Overall

I thought it was good, but this whole “this is the next Binding of Isaac” shit you’re seeing from reviewers is incompetence at its finest. While it does have a single similarity, it’s also nothing like Binding of Isaac. BoI is a basically infinitely replayable roguelite with a shitload of possible upgrade combos and a crapload of content (hidden or otherwise). Cult of the Lamb, on the other hand, is a 10-13 hour one-and-done kind of game. There’s no real reason to keep playing after you beat the final boss and there’s no variance in the dungeons and gameplay since the power-ups are fairly minor (unlike BoI which can play like a whole different game based on which upgrades you get). You beat the game, you did all there is to do.

But what it does, it does pretty well. The combat is pretty fun, the base building starts out interesting, and it features very cute ritual sacrifice and other such fun cult things. I think it’s a pretty interesting game and one I had fun playing through. I don’t think it does either of its 2 gameplay-styles perfectly, but they combine into something decent.

I’d give this a mild recommendation. It’s fun, but it’s also short and has no replayability. It’s a quick weekend game for sure.