I absolutely did not enjoy my time playing Cult of the Lamb.

The game starts off with a simple enough premise: you're a little lamb being sacrificed to four religious leaders because some really big scary dude will come back or something, but after the sacrifice the big dude brings you back to life and instructs you to build a cult in order to grow more powerful and kill the four religious leaders so that the big dude can come back. He gives you a crown. The crown can turn into a sword, a knife, claws, an axe, and various tools. You're given a home-base, and a level-select hub-world-type area to open the door to the first "world."

Then the gameplay loop begins.

God damn I hate the gameplay loop of this game.

I've read some takes from other reviewers on this site I respect saying things like "gameplay loops are inherently suspicious" and, while there are better more egregious examples of games with capital-O Obvious gameplay loops, I think Cult of the Lamb is an excellent example of a game with a fucking horrendously obvious gameplay loop.

In short, there are two core sections of the game:

1. Binding of Isaac-but-worse roguelike dungeon crawling.
2. People-farming.

You do these as far as you can, and when you get to the end you win!

In long, Massive Monster put these two core sections next to each other in the most annoying way possible. You go on a "Crusade" to "purge the heretics" and "convert" any new potential followers to your cult, collecting miscellaneous resources along the way. Then you go back to your cult, do your dailies (I detest this fucking term), run out of resources, and then go back on another crusade until some kind of emergency by no direct fault of your own (aside from deliberately playing the game, which I would argue is very much your own fault) forces you to go check on the cult. Maybe someone died? Bury the body or collect meat. Someone's starving? Gotta make food and farm more. Poop everywhere? Gotta clean. Faith level low? Fix it. Health level low? Fix it. Issue? Fix it. And the loop repeats itself ad nauseam.

Listen, I do chores in my own home already. I've played enough Animal Crossing and had enough "chore simulator" arguments for one lifetime. I have no problem with a game having chores in it, but there has to be some kind of tangible payoff if you're gonna put a checklist of chores in a video game. And by nature of it being a CULT, "Smiling Happy Faces" and undying loyalty from cult members you "rescued" is a fairly fucked up reward. It could be argued that this is the point, but it doesn't make for a fun video game to me. I play video games for fun.

I'm glad I brought up Animal Crossing just there, because the satisfaction I get from creating a "neat and tidy" "home" for my cult members is on-par with the enjoyment I got from molding the island to my every whim and desire with no real consequences in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Minimal.

And that's completely ignoring the combat half of the game.

The combat half is fine. Not great. Fine. It would be even better were it not constantly interrupted by the day-night cycle and the people farming gameplay loop. I get that this was probably a deliberate design decision, but it's a decision that actively interrupts progress for no reason other than to remind you that you've got "people at home."

In contrast, the lessons I'm picking up from the gameplay hints that this game is dropping via the pressure of time, aging cult members, and the sheer number of times it suggests doing mean things to your cult members, is to view my cult members as dispensable.

No matter how much you'd like it to be, this isn't a family. You're collecting pawns. You're repeatedly given choices that seem to imply otherwise, but just remember: this is the all-messed-up cute animal game.

Absolutely depthless.

There's very little actual direct involvement from your cult while you're fighting. You're just getting stronger through the farming gameplay loop giving you more points to get more resources to get more upgrades to get more point generators to get more points and you get the idea. They're separate, except that the game will remind you that the other exists and needs tending to, so they're forced to exist together. Actually separating it from the farming half completely, the enemies and bosses are unremarkable and, with some minor exceptions, there aren't all that many core differences between weapons and curse types.

The closest immediate comparison I have of a game integrating combat and farming together well that I actually enjoy is Pikmin. Literally any of them. There's an element of direct resource/people management in both Cult of the Lamb and Pikmin games, and, while they are completely different genres with the former being a farming-sim roguelite and the latter being an RTS game, I just think Cult of the Lamb is somehow way worse about both creating a consistent element of emotional attachment to your "underlings" (which could be argued is the point of the whole game, which is even worse) and the collecting element. It wants you to exploit them as much as you can, and there's no option not to. It doesn't even bother pretending like you're capable of making moral choices here, you know what you are and you know what you're doing.

It has about as much subtlety as, I don't know, what's a good example...

The Jonestown Massacre?

Yeah, that's a good example.

I don't mind a game portraying religious extremism and cult behavior, but if your gameplay is mid, at least have literally anything to say about your subject matter.

Whatever. Cute marketable lamb character doing weird things a cute marketable lamb character wouldn't normally be doing, very clever and never been done before. Twitch streamers delight. Money all around.

Anyway, just play Binding of Isaac again instead of getting this.

If I'm gonna play twitchcore bullshit, it should at least be good.

Cute, short, chase game!

I know I literally cannot stop talking about Pikmin, but this reminds me of the Waterwraith from Pikmin 2. You start with one silly skeleton, you scramble around a maze in order to get more silly skeletons and destroy treasure so that the unkillable "hero" doesn't get stronger, and after a few mazes the game shows you if you got enough skeletons to defeat the "hero".

It's a little jank to control, but that's honestly part of its charm, and I'm going incredibly easy on it since it was for a game jam and is free on Steam. The animation of the skeletons moving around is very silly.

Not to dump credit on the artist alone, but I'm looking forward to playing more AndyLand games.

Strikers 1945 was (and kinda still is) my go-to "this arcade is cool if they have this game" game when I was in high school.

I didn't have too much experience playing shmups thanks to my parents never letting me play the cool "blow up a bunch of dudes in a plane while flashy stuff happens on the screen" games when we went to bowling alleys. They let me play the occasional beat-em-up when I got a chance, but for some reason or another shmups were always verboten when I was little. By the time I got a little older and was given more autonomy, arcades in the US were very obviously dying out, but I would still find the occasional game cabinet in movie theaters and pizza places. My local movie theater specifically had Strikers 1945 and I would go out of my way to play it a decent number of times before or after seeing a movie. I was never any good at it, but dodging projectiles for a few minutes and seeing the flashy bullet effects and explosions always gave me enough of a dopamine bump to give it another try whenever I found another cabinet of it somewhere. It was my go-to shmup.

Now that I'm much older and have played way more video games, I think it's safe to say that Strikers 1945 is best left in my nostalgia.

The gist of giant ships and planes transforming into machine gun-wielding mechs is cool as hell, but almost every other aspect of the game is either weak or forgettable.

The sound design across the board is just flat-out bad.

It's still fun, and it will always hold a special place in my heart as the first bullet-hell/shmup I actively remembered the name of, but after playing it comfortably in my living room via emulator with infinite coins instead of in a noisy, cramped, dimly-lit corner of a movie theater, I think it's safe to say that Strikers 1945 is just alright.

Don't ever ask me to 1cc a shmup by the way.

Never ask me that.

A little bit less of a game and a little bit more of a toy with boxes and levers and knobs to mess around with until something neat happens.

I've been stressed out lately about miscellaneous stuff, and Gnog has been the perfect little distraction I've needed on occasion.

Thanks, tactile noisy box-game. You are very cute.

Literally every single time I use a mechanical blender for making cookie dough or cake batter I'm transported right back to being four years old, wearing a child-sized apron, baking sweets with my mom.

I've been getting more into cooking since I moved out of my parents' house a few years ago, and it cannot be understated how good it feels to make food for others. People talk about love languages, but I think a very strong one for me these days is making soups for other people. I was lucky to grow up with a mom who loved making a wide variety of foods for the family. I've told her this multiple times.

I really ought to make her some soup.

I didn't realize kestrels were so common in...

checks instruction booklet

...caves?

One of my best friends and I found this one goofy review of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja for NES on youtube that, at the time, was one of the funniest things we'd ever seen. It featured a lot of complaining about hitboxes, sporadic jokes, and being interrupted by ATTA BOY!! every time it showed up on screen.

I cannot for the life of me find this video, but even if I could I can't imagine I would find it nearly as funny as we did back then.

Anyway, I played the arcade version. The hitboxes ATTA BOY!! are fine in this version. The game is whatever.