Good evening everybody! This is Aifos coming to you alive from the titular Cult of the Lamb, a dark Cult run by the also titular Mighty Lamb, in service to the dark god The One Who Waits! And I am here to tell you whether or not joining this cult is something you should do! If you've spent any amount of time talking to me about video games, and maybe even if you haven't, you probably know that I love Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin! It's this really fun hack 'n slash platformer, that's also a rice farming simulator, and the two halves of the game are intertwined in such a way that it all comes together brilliantly! So, when I heard of Cult of the Lamb, which is one half dungeon crawler, and one half town management sim, I was very excited to see if it could create a similar experience! Did it succeed? Well.. Each individual half of CotL is very well made. The dungeon crawling (called Crusades) uses a Roguelite format, as you make your way through one of four dungeons to take on the Bishops of the Old Faith. To do this, you need to successfully complete each dungeon 4 times, with ever changing procedurally generated rooms. There are a lot of small clever bits of design here that really help alleviate some of the problems Roguelites usually face; there are different weapon types, but rather than affecting damage they give weapons bonus status ailments. So, Necromantic Weapons spawn little ghost projectiles, while Blighted weapons inflict poison. This leaves most of the weapons feeling rather balanced with eachother, so you never feel you lost because you got a bad weapon type. One particular nice touch is your weapons are a lot slower than they are in most of these kinds of games. The hammer and the axe very much support a hit and run playstyle, while the sword and the claw are a bit faster, but nothing close to a hack 'n slash. The game felt very strategic, with you needing to pick and choose when to attack, something a lot of Roguelites skip over for a more hectic "DIE DIE DIE" approach.. That is, except for the Dagger, which is much faster than any of the other weapons. It feels very out of place with the rest of the bunch, and any time I get a dagger I sigh, because I know that run is probably dead. Overall, though, the Roguelite side of the game was very good! The town management is also very fun! I was a bit worried it would feel like a drag, but it very much did not! You always have something to do throughout the day, whether that's just taking care of your followers, farming, or cooking. As you get further into the game, a lot of the things you originally had to do by hand can get relegated to your loyal cult, but you'll always have to cook for them, and you can only level them up through interacting with them. The town management sim side of things primarily revolves around managing their "Faith", which is essentially a happiness meter. It goes down when followers die, get sick, or when you push them to their limit, but goes up when you make them good food, dance with them, and give them days off. If it gets too low, some of your cult will start to dissent, ultimately causing them to leave. To counter this, you can either throw them in prison until they repent, or just sacrifice them in the name of the One Who Waits. So, both halves of the game are really great, which is good news, but here is where things start to go a little awry. The town management sim can do a lot to help your crusades. You can eat food to gain extra hearts, gain loyalty from your followers to gain new weapons, sacrifice them to summon demon allies, and/or resurrect once per dungeon. But, it doesn't go both ways; your crusades do very little to help out your cult. Early game, they can provide key resources like lumber, food, bones, and so forth, but as you continue through the game you wind up with either an excess of those resources, or some way to generate them within the cult. The two things that you did still gain from dungeons that were actually useful were more followers, and gold. But, as long as you're taking care of your followers they last quite a while, so you don't need to go questing for them all the time, and gold ceases to have any value as soon as you max out your Devotion (basically the town's level), where all Devotion gained turns into coin. And, you get [i]a lot[/i] of coin this way.. Which you can then use to buy more followers, making dungeons completely useless by the end. Each dungeon does also have a single dungeon specific resource, but they aren't particularly useful, outside of decorations. To be fair, however, the coin issue is only an endgame thing. You need to collect a lot of Devotion to reach that point, and for me it happened near the end of the fourth dungeon (and reminder there are only four), so I could give it a pass saying I wish the two halves were more intertwined, but each half is fun enough that it's not a huge deal.. I could, but unfortunately there is one really big flaw in CotL's design. Going into dungeons is not only not terribly useful to your cult, it is actively detrimental to it. As mentioned before, your goal is to kill the Bishops of the Old Faith. As you go into dungeons, they will occasionally stop you, and try to hinder you by attacking your cult, inflicting them with plague, famine, and worse. While the Bishops attacking you was fine from a lore standpoint, and getting inflicted with periodic issues in your cult was a good thing, that it was triggered by going into certain dungeons was not. The combination of these two things (Crusades not helping the cult that much + Bishop curses) left me not really wanting to go into dungeons by the end of the game. As the game went on, I found myself just spending more and more time in the town, only going into dungeons out of an obligation to beat the game. I was perfectly content to simply sit back, and take care of my adorable little animal villagers. I think they focused so much on the town helping the dungeons because they simply expected people to play the game mostly for the dungeons, and as such wouldn't need any extra motivation to go play them, but for me at least it really dragged down what the game was supposed to be. Ultimately, however, CotL is still a lot of fun. The two halves of the game are both really well made, and good fun on their own. While they don't mesh quite as well as other similar types of games, like Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin, I still very much enjoyed my time with the game. [b][u]Tl;dr? Here's my point![/b][/u] Cult of the Lamb is both a really great Roguelite, and a really great town management sim! The two halves of the game feel a bit too separate for my tastes, and I think they should've put more threads weaving them together. So, while it's not as great as some other games of a similar type (like Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin!), it is still quite fun, and I would indeed recommend it! If you want a number, then I'd give it a 4,795/6,850! If you want a more readable number, too bad, I don't like rating things with numbers! Read the post if you want to know what you're getting into! But that's all for now folks! Jambuhbye!