Cult of the Lamb hands-on: Animal Crossing meets the dark arts - Ars Technica

Cult of the Lamb begins with the game's hero, a Disney-like cartoon lamb, being led to its slaughter as a form of religious sacrifice.

You're given the option to rise from your grave, grow a cult full of devout followers, expand your mastery of the demonic arts, and defeat a series of monstrous rivals.

Once your follower is occupied, enter a gate that takes you to a randomly generated series of battling rooms, where you'll make progress on your kill list, gather rarer resources, and find and conscript more easily influenced animals to join your cult.

(The longer you're out adventuring and battling, the more adrift certain followers may become back at the cult farm, as indicated by an always-running day-night cycle.).

Early in the game's skill-tree system, cult leaders learn that they have the option to outright sacrifice their followers, which can bestow rare rewards on your cult.

This might cost some of the admiration of your other followers, but from what I can tell, savvy cult leaders can still balance their emotional needs while feeding their lust for blood and power.

The devs, artists, and writers at Massive Monster deserve credit for making this game fun to talk about, look at, and ponder; its systems of cult management lean in to brutality in ways that make logical sense yet add mechanical fun to the question of how players might move forward as cult leaders.

One of the game's skill trees asks a brutal question early on: Would you rather build beds for your followers or develop the ingenuity to build disease-reducing graves, instead.

While its randomly generated battling levels clearly draw inspiration from Binding of Isaac, Cult of the Lamb's upgrade system requires careful curation of the cult's farm region, in terms of resource management, skill-tree decisions, and even side quests to unlock more "Tarot cards" (which are shuffled and randomly dealt during battling encounters to increase your chances of survival).