Really enjoyable roguelike with a really interesting concept that desperately needs to be expanded upon.
The positives are cooked in the concept alone, where you work on building and maintaining a cult that feeds itself into your dungeon exploring progression, and both systems loop into one another. However the execution leaves a lot to be desired, with the main issue being the main draw, your cult, feeling more like a tech tree with extra steps you see in similar titles all the time, and that stings since that's what makes the experience unique, as combat encounters in general are very plain compared to its contemporaries, where there's essentially little to no synergies or bombastic weapon and item combinations like you would find similar in Isaac or Gungeon. At best you'll have some fairly powerful spells, but nothing that can steamroll a dungeon run, which again wouldn't be a problem if the cult side of things came up stronger.
I did play on medium, so perhaps some of my woes can be circumvented on higher difficulties, but there was only a single point of cult disruption and that's when I fed everyone grass and didn't have enough rituals to bring my positive status back to an immediate green, so the mid game ended up having the bulk of that important back and forth stressing proper micromanagement and stressing resources, where early game felt like a borderline tutorial with how automated things felt, and late game feeling almost like failure states didn't exist between the obsessive amount of rituals and materials I had access to, food being a non-issue entirely and cultists relations never dipping down past a 90% approval rating, even when hard pressing the bulk for donations. Despite diligence on every front, I barely got half the building upgrades through the cultist tech tree while maxing out on everything else long before, and many of the later unlockable buildings simply just make things easier and were never really mandated for my victory, which again cultivates the problem that the main selling point of your game doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
So of course my main complaint is simple; more importance needs to be added to the cult side of the game. If you're decent at these isometric roguelikes, you can get an easy clear without utilizing most of the game's systems. And unlike other roguelikes, there's a hefty amount of content you need to do to get to that point of facing the final boss, which decentivizes new playthroughs, and subsequent dungeon runs do nothing more than give you more resources to implant into your cult, which already emphasized doesn't do a whole lot anyway.
Still the charm does exist, the dialogue is witty and the experience is generally good for a first time playthrough, and they are working on future updates for the title. Just that this feels rather rare for a roguelike that there's not much reason to return after completion, despite not having everything unlocked and upgraded, where a game of the same genre like Enter the Gungeon rings completely opposite where, despite having all unlocks, I still find reason to start up new runs on the occasion.
And I really hope Cult of the Lamb strings up its own identity, as comparing it to Gungeon feels incredibly unfair, but the comparison is only made because every gameplay facet feels incredibly average.
The positives are cooked in the concept alone, where you work on building and maintaining a cult that feeds itself into your dungeon exploring progression, and both systems loop into one another. However the execution leaves a lot to be desired, with the main issue being the main draw, your cult, feeling more like a tech tree with extra steps you see in similar titles all the time, and that stings since that's what makes the experience unique, as combat encounters in general are very plain compared to its contemporaries, where there's essentially little to no synergies or bombastic weapon and item combinations like you would find similar in Isaac or Gungeon. At best you'll have some fairly powerful spells, but nothing that can steamroll a dungeon run, which again wouldn't be a problem if the cult side of things came up stronger.
I did play on medium, so perhaps some of my woes can be circumvented on higher difficulties, but there was only a single point of cult disruption and that's when I fed everyone grass and didn't have enough rituals to bring my positive status back to an immediate green, so the mid game ended up having the bulk of that important back and forth stressing proper micromanagement and stressing resources, where early game felt like a borderline tutorial with how automated things felt, and late game feeling almost like failure states didn't exist between the obsessive amount of rituals and materials I had access to, food being a non-issue entirely and cultists relations never dipping down past a 90% approval rating, even when hard pressing the bulk for donations. Despite diligence on every front, I barely got half the building upgrades through the cultist tech tree while maxing out on everything else long before, and many of the later unlockable buildings simply just make things easier and were never really mandated for my victory, which again cultivates the problem that the main selling point of your game doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.
So of course my main complaint is simple; more importance needs to be added to the cult side of the game. If you're decent at these isometric roguelikes, you can get an easy clear without utilizing most of the game's systems. And unlike other roguelikes, there's a hefty amount of content you need to do to get to that point of facing the final boss, which decentivizes new playthroughs, and subsequent dungeon runs do nothing more than give you more resources to implant into your cult, which already emphasized doesn't do a whole lot anyway.
Still the charm does exist, the dialogue is witty and the experience is generally good for a first time playthrough, and they are working on future updates for the title. Just that this feels rather rare for a roguelike that there's not much reason to return after completion, despite not having everything unlocked and upgraded, where a game of the same genre like Enter the Gungeon rings completely opposite where, despite having all unlocks, I still find reason to start up new runs on the occasion.
And I really hope Cult of the Lamb strings up its own identity, as comparing it to Gungeon feels incredibly unfair, but the comparison is only made because every gameplay facet feels incredibly average.