Cult of the Lamb: Cultist Edition

Cult of the Lamb has elements of Binding of Issac (crusading) and Stardew (cult management) with a combat style that forces you to dodge roll a lot and learn enemy movements. Artstyle reminds me a bit of Don't Starve (but a lot cleaner and cuter). Animations are well done and flow nicely between actions. Music is just 👌. I did encounter a soft lock that had me restart my save (can't upgrade my cult to lvl 3). It did reappear on my 2nd run. Problem got reported, hope devs will fix it soon. To all those negative "no Linux" reviews. I'm playing on a Linux based Steam Deck and a laptop with Fedora Linux 36 and it runs great without any lag, stuttering or crashing.

Cult of the Lamb has a lot of really excellent bones, but fails to add any meat to its experience. This is the best way I can think of to sum up my beef with this game. The art direction, visuals, music, and sound design are all wonderful and I have no complaints there, but the moment you step into the actual gameplay or writing, I found disappointment abound. For example, several of the melee weapon options are outright bad with the current game balancing. Trying to use combo-focused weapons is impossible without taking hits, as they don't put out enough dps to kill fast enough and enemies attack slightly too fast to get the full hit out. Cooking is a simple and very easy timing minigame, and fishing is just a variant on that same minigame. Most of managing your cult is just kind of boring busywork, to be blunt, and even on hard I had no difficulty maxing out my leveling in as little as an afternoon. The writing, meanwhile, is a severe disappointment. For a game about cults and religion, it fails to really commit to its theme and include the cultish flavor you'd expect. For example, you can choose your own doctrine, but it's just a description of stats. There's no flavor text or actual DOCTRINE in the menu. The intro text to most new dungeons is just the same text with names swapped. There's a stunning lack of fun being had with the theming on a writing front, and it definitely drags the whole experience down. Finally, I don't know if the developers just overcommit to a bad joke or what but a lot of the poop stuff comes off as an outright fetish. The only reference to sex I've seen in the ENTIRE GAME ABOUT A HIPPIE CULT COMMUNE is regarding the coprophiliac trait, which... makes your cultists love dirty toilets and poo. It's weird and kind of offputting instead of funny or distressing in a way that adds value. Overall, it's an 8/10 experience lowered to a 6 at best by lacking polish and missing elements.

on Linux, via Lutris, and it's lovely. Performance is near native on windows (like states at protondb.com). I played for 4-5 hours and really like it. The art style and storytelling is cool. The introductions you get (long into the game) are really helpful to the complex but doable gameplay. I only saw one slight visual bug for the time being, so a lot seems to have gotten fixed over the time since release. I watched a lot of gameplay videos since i bought it and couldn't play nor refund it. I think at this point most of the critique to the game itself has been said, so now to the point of me writing this: Until the recent update, it has not been possible to play the offline installer version of this game on any of my tested devices, regardless of the OS (!), which for many people like me (not only because i play on linux) is the one of the reasons of buying games on gog.com. It was a known "bug", where in the first 5 minutes of gameplay you would get softlocked out of the game (it is where you would get an achievement when playing through gog galaxy, so this could have been the bug). Other comments stated this would be due to baked in DRM, which would be against the policy of gog i think (also a reason to buy here if possible). Nonetheless, this game runs in a sandboxed environment with no internet access for me (firejail) and works very well so far.

I'm 4 hours in and I can't put it down! such a great combination of a rouglite + base managment. Dungeons are challenging and get harder the more you play. Game does have some bugs, but nothing too game-braking (or at least not for me, yet). All in all, I highly recommend it, especially if you like games such as The Binding of Isaac, Stardew Valley, and Animal Crossing.