Cult of the Lamb Analysis

Overview

Cult of the Lamb is a 2D isometric rogue-like and base management game. It was developed by Massive Monster, and published by Devolver Digital in August, 2022. You can find the video version here.

Dramatic Elements

In Cult of the Lamb, you play as the titular lamb. You are sacrificed to 4 powerful bishops, and immediately resurrected by "The One Who Waits," a being who was betrayed and imprisoned by the 4 long ago. He tasks you with building up your own cult, killing the 4 bishops, and freeing him.
Along the way, you will meet a small cast of characters, and get to know more about "The One Who Waits" and the four bishops who betrayed him. There are also procedural story events that occur: two cult members can fall out, become friends, and you can develop relationships with them yourself by completing randomly generated quests.

Formal Elements

Rules

Combat and Movement

Movement is confined to a 2D plane, much like in Hades. You cannot jump or climb on objects, and there are no inclined planes or stairs anywhere: combat all takes place on a single level. You are able to roll through any projectiles or dangerous areas.
Combat itself is similar in many ways to Hades or Dead Cells. At the start of a run, you receive a random weapon and a random curse. The weapons fall into 5 broad categories: swords, daggers, claws, axes, and hammers. Daggers are the fastest, and do the least damage, while axes and hammers are the slowest and do the most damage per hit. Claws fall somewhere in the middle, and are reliant on the last hit in a combo to deal effective damage. Different status effects can be applied by the weapons: enemies can be stunned, poisoned, or can sometimes be resurrected as a ghost that attacks other enemies after they die.
Curses could be AoE blasts, tentacles that shoot out of the ground to damage enemies, fire balls, fiery or icy sword slashes, or homing arrows that seek out enemies. These are tied to a resource called Fervor: without Fervor, you cannot cast a curse. Fervor is picked up from dead enemies and from enemies after you've attacked them.
Some enemies will shoot arrows, which can be reflected back by attacking them, while the regular projectiles can only be reflected using certain shield curses.
The rooms are randomly connected together in a grid pattern, but the interior layout is hand-designed. They are all square or rectangular in shape. Most contain a number of enemies, and sometimes more enemies will spawn in after the first group is defeated. The rooms can be freely moved between outside of combat. You'll have to carefully dodge, and time your attacks, because encounters can become very busy on the screen, with projectiles flying around, enemies leaping and flying, and pools of poison or outcrops of spikes to damage you littering the floor.

Enemies

Each of the four areas has several unique enemy types, as well as types that will appear throughout. The most basic types are dagger wielding cultists, but these also come in bow wielding and bomb throwing varieties. There are larger cultists who wield swords, and others that cast healing spells.
In Darkwood, you'll find bats, and different kinds of worms: some will shoot at you, others will jump at you, and others are spiky.
Anchordeep features sea-themed enemies, Anura has frogs, and Silk Cradle, of course, focuses on different types of spiders.

Making a run

Runs, called crusades in game, start with first choosing your area. On entering the area, you will be presented with a weapon and a curse. Each area will have between 9-11 rooms to start, and these will mostly be filled with enemies. You'll find some that spawn chests containing weapons and curses to swap out, and others that contain a tarot card. Upon completing these rooms, you'll be able to choose among several different paths leading to another group of rooms. You might find a room with resources, a follower, or an NPC offering a service. These other groups could also have different special buffs or debuffs: you might receive double gold, or have any empty hearts replaced with diseased hearts (these cause damage to all enemies on screen when you are hit), or enemies might leave a pool of poison when they die. Eventually, you will come to the boss area. Depending on how many times you've completed this area, you'll find different bosses. The first 4 times, there will be a unique boss - an underling for one of the bishops. After killing these four, the door to that area's bishop will unlock and you can defeat them. If you return to the area again, there will be another unique boss called a witness. Upon defeating the witness, you can start an endless run mode: there will be another group of paths leading to more rooms. The final room will be a randomly generated boss.
Unless you have the Fleece of Fates, you'll be able to find rooms that give you a choice between two different tarot cards, and also find them randomly in chests at the end of an encounter. Tarot cards are similar to boons in Hades - they could change the behavior of enemies when they are hit or die, they could give you extra hearts, increase your damage during the day or night, increase your attack speed or attack damage, or many others. Like the boons in Hades, these will be lost when you die and return to your base.

Inventory

There is a basic inventory system, but you never need to worry about carrying too much or about playing inventory tetris.

Base and Cult Management

As your cult grows, so do the number of problems and opportunities. In the beginning, you'll want to have enough grass sleeping bags for your followers, and you'll want a farm that can provide enough food for you to make meals at the cooking station. However, the basic meals all have a high chance of making your followers sick.
Soon, you'll find your base covered in shit and vomit. The shit can be used as "fertilizer" on your farm, but the vomit just serves to make other members sick. So, you'll have to go around picking it up. Later, you'll be able to build outhouses for them to use, manure boxes to deposit the fertilizer in, and clean-up stations so followers can remove their own vomit. If a follower should happen to die, leaving their corpse laying around will also make the base a bit dirtier and increase the chances of followers getting sick.
OK. So, now your base is clean, but your followers have extremely low Faith: maybe you've died a bunch of times in a row, and maybe some of the beds have collapsed, so there are not enough places to sleep. If Faith remains low for long enough, some of them might dissent and begin spreading the word that your cult is BS. This will cause some followers to lose even more Faith, and eventually cause them to leave your cult. Depending on how far along you are in the game, you have a number of different options to handle this issue. You could reeducate them directly. If you have unlocked the prison building, you could put them in the prison and reeducate them, which also prevents them from spreading their doubts to other followers in the meantime, or you might hold a ritual and sacrifice them. If you have the murder action unlocked, you can straight up knife them. You could tackle it indirectly as well: complete a successful run to increase your followers' Faith, or conduct a bonfire ritual or hold a feast, both of which have the same effect.
As I'm sure all cult leaders have done in history, you will find lots of uses for your followers. You can task them with tending the farm, cleaning up the base, chopping wood or mining stone for use in new buildings, consecrating these basic materials into sacred ones for more advanced buildings, and worshiping at the shrine to generate Devotion. Any unassigned followers will also help construct new buildings or decorations. Later on, you can send them out on missions to collect materials, or have a demon possess them, which allows them to accompany you on a run and give you a special ability - they might periodically shoot at an enemy, or drop a half heart on the ground to let you recharge your health. You can even marry an unlimited number of followers, which unlocks a kiss action you can use once a day to increase their Loyalty (each additional spouse also causes loss of Faith due to jealousy from the other spouses, so there is a trade-off here as well).
Furthermore, you can give gifts or bless individual followers to increase their Loyalty. Loyalty, as opposed to Faith, will determine how quickly they work and how much Devotion they can generate at the shrine. Unlike Faith, Loyalty cannot be lost, only gained. Necklaces are particularly interesting here, as they give your follower a permanent trait boost - they might move faster or they might no longer need to sleep, or they might generate more Devotion.
When a follower levels up their Loyalty, you will receive some bonus Devotion in addition to a commandment stone fragment. Once 3 fragments are collected, you can issue a new doctrine for your cult. These are arrayed into 5 themed groups: Afterlife, Work & Worship, Law & Order, Possessions, and Sustenance. Each group is divided into 4 tiers, and you'll have to make a binary choice at each tier. Usually, these are between two actions, rituals, buildings, or traits. For example, in Work & Worship, you'll have to choose between the faithful trait and the industrious trait. Being faithful makes your followers generate devotion 15% faster, while industriousness increases work speed by 15%.
Two final points to consider regarding your followers are traits and age. Your followers age as the game progresses and will eventually die, although you can resurrect dead ones in a ritual. Each follower also has traits. So, some of them might gain faith when they get sick while others lose faith when they get sick. Some are cynical, and thus do not level up quickly. Others are hard workers or lazy. It might be worth your while to sacrifice a troublesome follower and replace them with one that has better traits.

Leveling up

Many things level up in Cult of the Lamb. First of all, your cult. This is leveled up by collecting Devotion at the shrine, which will then spawn a Divine Inspiration resource at increasing amounts of Devotion. Divine Inspiration is used to unlock new buildings and new perks for the buildings. These are divided into different tiers, with a certain number of buildings required to unlock the next tier.
Some of these unlocks are upgraded versions of basic buildings - you can upgrade the grass sleeping bag to a tent to a luxurious hut that harvests devotion while the occupant is sleeping.
When you conduct a sermon in the Temple, you gain Devotion specifically for leveling up your character. This lets you unlock different types of weapons and new curses for a run, and increases your starting health.
As mentioned before, your followers also level up. They all start at level 1 Loyalty, and you can increase this by conducting sermons, giving them gifts, and completing their requests. Loyalty determines the amount of Devotion a follower generates at the shrine and during a sermon, and also changes their success rate for missionary work.
Lastly, you can unlock fleeces and Crown abilities. When you defeat one of the bishops, you obtain a Heart of a Heretic, which can be used to unlock a new abilities in the Temple. A fleece is unlocked by spending a Holy Talisman, which is obtained by completing different NPC quests throughout the game. Only one fleece can be equipped at a time, while all unlocked Crown abilities are active at once.

Boundaries

Although there are no limits to how many resources you can carry, you are limited to one melee weapon and one curse at a time. Further, in terms of base management, many of your boxes have a limited capacity: the fertilizer box, seed silo, and compost bin can only hold 15 items at a time.
There are also building limits: the base area is approximately 62 X 33 diamonds, or 2,046 diamonds large, but there is actually a large hole in the center of the area due to the Shrine placement. This removes at least 100 diamonds.
Some decorations and special buildings can also only be constructed once.

Outcomes

There are a number of different outcomes to the game. When facing The One Who Waits, you could decide to sacrifice yourself. This will end the game right there. On the other hand, you could fight against him. If you win the battle, you could kill him or make him a follower. Making him a follower unlocks several special quests.

Dynamic Elements

Engine Building

The engine building pattern occurs mainly in your base management. You have control over the number of followers who pray at your shrine, and you can directly and indirectly influence how much devotion they generate - by leveling up their Loyalty you can increase their devotion generation, and by researching the Shrine Flame upgrade, you can burn grass or lumber to increase their praying speed. Conducting certain rituals also offers temporary boosts to praying efficiency.

Dynamic Friction

The dynamic friction pattern makes several appearances. First, collecting Divine Inspiration to level up your cult requires increasing amounts of Devotion to unlock the next one. Further, each tier requires an increasing number of unlocked buildings before you can access the next tier.
Second, to level up the lamb also requires increasing amounts of Devotion collected by delivering a sermon. Similarly to the cult, each tier requires you to unlock an increasing number of abilities before the next becomes available.
Third, the enemies will become more difficult after completing an area.
Finally, the areas themselves require an increasing number of followers to unlock.

Converter Engine

Regular materials must be converted into consecrated materials, and you have control over which materials to convert, and over how many Refineries you've built.
You can also view your followers as part of a converter engine - you give them food, which they convert into shit and Devotion. The shit can be taken back to your farm and used to grow more food.

Trade

You can sell unwanted resources at your base, and you can buy new tarot cards, follower forms, and decorations at different vendors. Further, you can occasionally purchase new followers using gold coins from an NPC at different points in a run.

Stopping Mechanism

The stopping mechanism occurs in several places. First, your rituals all have different cooldowns, preventing the player from spamming them.
Second, your base actions can only be performed once per day: you can give a sermon, kiss a spouse, and reeducate a follower just one time per day-night cycle.
Third, your curses all use the Fervor resource, and you can only hold a limited amount of it. Since you collect it by damaging enemies with your melee weapon and you only get a small amount from each hit, you are severely limited in how many times you can use a curse.
Finally, when you sell items, you gradually reduce the price of the item. So, even very lucrative items will become devalued over time.

Worker Placement

The worker placement pattern occurs literally in Cult of the Lamb: you can place your followers in different jobs and this has no cost to you.
Another instance of worker placement is in your fleeces. Once unlocked, you can switch between any of them at will.

Play-Style Reinforcement

Play-style reinforcement occurs in several areas. First, you are sometimes given the chance to choose between different weapons and curses. This lets you choose between the high-damage but low hit rate axe, and the faster but less powerful sword, for example, or between an AoE blast and a huge crack with tentacles that damage enemies they contact.
Second, you can unlock different fleeces, each of which gives you different benefits. For example, the Golden Fleece gives you a +5% damage bonus per kill, but this resets when you take damage (you will also take double damage with this Fleece). On the other hand, the Fleece of Fates gives you 4 tarot cards at the start of a run, but removes all tarot card pick-ups for the rest of the run.
Third, you customize your cult to match your play-style. For example, if you make a lot of runs and you always try to pick up followers on a run, it might make sense to invest in the cannibal trait: the chance of sickness from eating minced follower meat is 0%, and your cult's Faith is increased by 5 when they eat minced follower meat. This means you don't have to keep them around and find a bed for them, or feed them, as they are actually the food. This could be paired with the Good Die Young trait. This trait gives +10 Faith if an Elder follower is sacrificed, murdered, or consumed (but you lose 20 if they die naturally). Further, you could invest in the murder action, which would let you murder a follower at any time, and then cook them up later.
Each player will probably end up with different combinations of such doctrines. To indulge a bit in the mathematics of it: since there are 5 categories and you must make a binary choice at each of 4 tiers for each category, that gives you 2*2*2*2*2*4= 128 different combinations of doctrines. Not a terribly large state space, but one that offers interesting options.

Conclusion

Cult of the Lamb is an absolute gem of a game. The story is dark and the developers don't shy away from giving the player a horrifying suite of actions when managing your cult. Further, due to locking out half of the cult management options each play through, you are encouraged to play through at least once more to see how those options open up other possibilities. The combat is fun, but not deep enough to support hundreds of hours of play. But, it doesn't need to do so.
The brilliance comes in managing your cult. The way that all the different elements tie together and interact is a wonder to experience. Basic actions like managing food and Faith, providing enough beds, giving sermons and performing rituals to harvest Devotion and level up follower Loyalty and your own skill tree link up to create interesting decisions. You'll regularly find yourself with an internal monologue like the following: Oh, my follower Alno just died: should I resurrect them? They did have level six Loyalty...I think I'll bury them in this empty grave, so others can grieve there and give me some bonuses to Faith. I'll resurrect them in a few days. Hmm. I was married to them! I'll definitely bring them back.
If you like rogue-likes, I recommend giving this title a look. If you're interested in how to design interlocking systems, pay close attention to how the developers have designed their base and cult management elements.