Cult Of The Lamb is an adorably gross mash-up of some of indie gaming’s best ideas
Who wants to run a cult? Sacrifice some followers? Or … maybe just feed them some poop?
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Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
I’m thinking, not for the first time, about the pitiful state of video game nomenclature—and specifically video game genre nomenclature. No other medium has to suffer through this abysmal shit, to weather the indignities of, say, calling one of its most quickly growing genre branches a “roguelike”—and then having to explain that the Rogue in question is a 42-year-old Unix game that a vanishingly slim number of living people have ever even played, and that it doesn’t actually share all that many similarities with the “roguelike” games in the first place. (And the less said about that unholy portmanteau Metroidvania, the better.) Every artform steals from itself, true, but at least film and TV and music have the decency to do so with a modicum of elegance.
Anyway: Cult Of The Lamb is the new Frostpunk-ish roguelike Don’t Starve-a-thon from Devolver Digital and studio Massive Monster. It’s pretty good!
Sorry, sorry, that was maybe a bit too glib. But in a world where so much of indie game design can feel like developers are playing Legos with a variety of workable and trendy gaming parts, it’s interesting to see such a strange and unlikely chimera come to life. And that’s not even reckoning with all the other parts in play in this dark and bloody little package, which pulls a bit of the ol’ Happy Tree Friends trick, too, by taking very cute cartoonish designs and then running them through an explicitly Lovecraftian ringer.
The basic premise is simple: You are the last lamb (as in, a fuzzy little sheep), your kind hunted to extinction because they’re prophesied to resurrect an exiled god. Which is exactly what you set to doing, once your eldritch patron brings you back to life to exact some revenge—and form a cult of cheerful little animals to worship in its name. From there, gameplay is split between two major branches: Cult management, where you build temples, lead rituals, and, uh, “deal with” dissenting members; and crusades, wherein you venture out into the world to kill your way to righteousness.
The cult side, not surprisingly, is where the Frostpunk influences slip in; although Cult’s resource management elements aren’t anywhere near as brutal as 11 bit studios’ ultra-grim apocalypse sim, you’ll still find yourself forced to strike a balance between keeping your people happy and keeping them alive. (Even more explicitly, you’re repeatedly offered a series of binary choices that will shape the ways you develop your flock—although Cult Of The Lamb dispenses with any of the moral elements that made Frostpunk so deeply depressing at times.)
Meanwhile, the crusades will be familiar to anyone who’s spent much time in the roguelike world over the last 10 years: procedurally generated levels, melee combat that’s built around keeping track of all the little enemies zipping around the screen, and a series of randomized upgrades to keep you ahead of the power curve. The gameplay is satisfying enough, but this is a crowded genre, and Cult’s fighting, on its own, would leave it as little more than an also-ran.
The fascinating part, then, comes from how the two sides influence each other: Crusades generate resources that allow your cult to thrive, and the stronger your cult, the more spiritual power you can fleece from your followers in order to make your bloody work more successful. It’s an extremely satisfying loop, made only moreso by the glee with which the game presents is cute, gory world. It’s also nice to see a game so willing to really come to terms with its own darker impulses: “Human” (deer, rabbit, whatever) sacrifice is a perfectly viable and accepted way to handle HR problems in this particular organization, and if one of your cultists comes to you politely asking to be served a meal made of, I don’t know, actual feces that you’ve cleaned up off the ground? Well, who are you to judge, especially if it keeps their Faith meter nice and high? It’s less gross than calling a video game a Frostpunker or a Soulslike, at least.
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Yup, still playing…Hitman: World of Assassination Trilogy.I’ve got over a hundred hours in this, which is odd, I suppose, for a game that’s not some time-sink, well-padded open-worlder. It’s the handcrafted nature of the game that keeps drawing me back. Every stage feels unique – which is a strange thing in video games, where the engine tends to define the aesthetics and the gameplay mechanics breed familiarity. There’s artisanal fingerprints all over this. The game is one of the few that can balance both systems and scripts, with freeform murderin’ just as acceptable as the tightly-scripted mission stories. It’s a game that definitely begs replaying as much as I have. For one, it satisfies the basic tenents of game design: both the world and gameplay must be worth in isolation, and IOI have built upon that in a ton of layers. One NPC caught me climbing a drainpipe recipe and quipped about parkour being passé – an obvious dig at Assassin’s Creed, that inferior assassination game. Never caught that before. The game is fully of tiny little incidentals, and in that way, it feels like a proper video game, not an acting simulator. This is a real (virtual) world they’ve tried to create, and you can interact with it. There’s still some stories and challenges I’ve yet to nail, and it’s a testament to the game’s design that these are the first set of achievements in any game I’ve ever wanted to attain.I’ve just realised I’ve been playing this series for 22 years – christ – and it’s amazing run. Few things made me smile any more than the bit of incredibly tasteful fan service in “The Farewell”, the penultimate mission of the Trilogy. That was something worth waiting over two decades for. 47, for being the blankest of characters, has been given an amazing amount of depth, nuance, and humanity – more than most other game protagonists. And Diana…well. The fact that IOI managed to hold onto the IP, and it didn’t get buried in a lawyer’s filing cabinet like so many great IPs (RIP No One Lives Forever) when SquEnixEidos ditched IOI is a major miracle, and the fact that the IP has stayed with the same creators is something gaming needs more of. Interestingly, this trilogy functioned as what (I assume) is the best damn portfolio for the upcoming James Bond game – the Trilogy nailed the tone of the Craig Bond films even better than the film did most of the time.A hundred plus hours. Twenty-two years. I suppose all good things must come to an end sometime.But that ain’t for a while, I think.
I guess I’ll take “roguelike” or “Metroidvania” over blandly uninformative labels like “action-adventure” or “adventure game”. I think most big AAA releases are such a dog’s breakfast of game mechanics–open-world/sandbox, RPG, crafting, stealth, platforming, shooting (first or third person)–that any label but “AAA game” seems inadequate.
I like “map-marker game” for a lot of the modern AAA stuff (though it feels in some ways like an evolution of the old-school collectathon).
It’s the process of consolidation, as games take more resources to developer, and shareholders demand that games appeal to the broadest possible base in order to maximise the returns. Part of those things are fashion – what their market research tells ‘em will sell – like open world. It’s a box to tick.Crafting mechanics are cheap padding for gameplay: they’re incredibly easy to develop, and gamers like to mistake them for depth, when really, it’s just a lot of really shallow mechanics that, stacked on top of each other, can appear deep. A + B = Item Z…want more depth? Oooh, how about A + B + C = Item Z, eh?RPG mechanics are often used to flatten the difficulty curve over the game’s length: sure, the enemies are twice as tough at Level 5 compared to Level 1, but then again, you now do double damage.
I am kind of surprised at how resilient the idea of “open world” gaming has been, because it’s been a solid 15 years since I worked in the industry but even then I’d have discussions with programmers and producers about how it’s just as easy, if not easier, to shoot yourself in the dick with an open world as it is to do something cool with it.
Still playing Xenoblade 3 lol. I’m 25 hours in and the story still doesn’t feel like it’s fully formed yet. Hopefully I’ll finish it before Splatoon 3 comes out next month
Going by your description, it kinda sounds like “colony game” is the term you’re looking for.Btw, it’s “wringer”, not “ringer” 😛
I didn’t know this game existed until yesterday, but I guess it’s been one a lot of people in my circles have been anticipating. I watched a bit of the gameplay last night in between household chores, either catching people in the middle of a town-building segment or in the middle of a crusade, but never enough of either really get a sense of how the one influenced the other. I dig the art style, and I suppose I’ll probably be seeing it around Twitch for at least a couple weeks, so I guess I’ll decide later if this is one I want to throw on my Steam wishlist.The next game up on the ol’ queue for me is Crypto of the Necrodancer. I am very late to the party here, but that’s the point of spending some time working through the old end of my backlog. I appreciate that I’m getting to it immediately after a major update that added, among other features, a bard character who operates purely on a turn-based system and ignores the whole rhythm game mechanic. I played through the first area as said bard to get a tutorial sense of the enemy patterns, basic flow of getting through a floor, and which pieces of equipment were worth their cost. I’m now ready to spend whatever free time I have this weekend dying to basic-ass enemies because, once the music starts, I’m sure it’ll feel like I’ve learned nothing.
Well, now I’m going to be playing nethack all weekend because I’ve spent decades on it and I STILL haven’t ascended…
Been playing off and on since the early 90s. Only ascended once.
I suspended my distaste for savescumming for a spell back in the 00’s and STILL haven’t ascended.
This kind of “management sections alternating with combat ones” makes me think more of something like Actraiser, or more recently Sakuna. I might have to give this one another look.
I wish there was a better term for Tetris-like puzzle games. The closest we get is “Match 3″, but that only really applies to Bejeweled clones. It leaves out great games like Puyo Puyo, Lumines, Intelligent Qube, and of course, Tetris. “Puzzle Game” used to be good enough, but now that seems to apply to a much wider range of games from World of Goo to Myst. I first came up with “block dropper”, but that’s just as exclusive as “match 3″. I don’t know. “Action Puzzler” maybe?Anyways, I’m chugging along with Neon White. I have 21 main levels to go, plus whatever side quests remain. I’m gunning for Ace medals and gifts on all levels and nothing more. My shooting skills are too inaccurate for top-level play. I’m also proud of myself for discovering a bit of cheese at the very beginning of Resident Saw I (Violet’s penultimate sidequest). If you stand on the back of the starting platform and hug the wall, the rightmost trip wire of death safely passes you by. No shooting necessary. Between that and saving the first Godspeed card (so you can skip the final room) made that stage Violet’s easiest sidequest by far. Usually hers are the most frustrating.I also started Returnal and I’m enjoying it a lot more than I expected. Lately I’ve realized I have no time for janky controls (even intentionally janky ones like in The Outer Wilds), but the controls here are smooth and engaging. For instance, I love how the adaptive trigger makes it easy to switch between your weapon’s 2 functions. Progression is very slow for me at this point—I’m not the most adept in 3D environments (see comment about shooting in the paragraph above), and powering up isn’t as often as I would like. The game is no Hades, but it’s still solid.
I’ve heard “collapse game” for Tetris/Bejeweled/Candy Crush, but I don’t think it’s caught on.
It’s an improvement.
I’m enjoying Immortal: Fenix Rising. If I had paid full price I’d not be so keen on it but it was like $10 on sale for Xbox last week and for that price a very blatant Breath of the Wild clone is fine. The voice acting bad humor are pretty cringy but the game world is pretty and the combat is good so I’m enjoying my time with it.
I’ve already seen a couple satanic-panicky “Don’t Let Your Children Play Cult of the Lamb!!” FB posts… it teaches them about demon-worship, etc., etc…
I mean, it’s still a ridiculous thing to be concerned about but for once they’re not wrong. Unlike D&D or Harry Potter this game actually is about devil worship and sacrificing people.