I missed this when it was on Game Pass but picked up a Steam key for a tenner. If you don't know it, Cult of the Lamb is sort of like a town-building or farming sim with the twist that, instead of establishing a cutesy village à la Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, you play as a sweet little lamb who's been charged by a satanic figure to develop a ritualistic cult in his honour. As such, your primary currencies are the faith and devotion of your followers, who you can brainwash, sacrifice and cannibalise as you see fit. Like in other games of this type, your main objective is to keep everyone fed and happy. You, in turn, use your followers' reverence to establish gradually grander and more complicated buildings to fill your woodland commune.

When you're not building your cult, you embark on 'crusades' into the neighbouring forests, hacking and slashing through hordes of creepy crawly enemies in procedurally generated dungeons, searching for valuable resources to take home with you. This part of the game has a roguelike whiff to it, with randomised weapons to choose from at the beginning of each run and boons you pick up along the way in the form of tarot cards, like a very pared-back Hades. Unlike Hades, however, it's quite simplistic, really, with a lot of dodge rolling going on and not many synergies to plan for.

Overall, it's a difficult game to review because, on the one hand, I found it very addictive and played it for nearly twenty hours, including several late nights in bed on the Deck, but, on the other, it's not that far removed from a clicker game - certainly, in the town-building bits, you're spending most of your time watching numbers go up and meters refill, and not much else. It's also a bit too easy, and towards the end I was building things arbitrarily because I had nothing else to spend my followers' devotion on, not because what I was building added to the gameplay. There's been some new post-game content added since launch, but by the time the credits rolled I was done.