Cult of the Lamb

sXeth

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I recently got past the first dungeon, and I'm finding that the difficulty curve is ramping up significantly. I went from no deaths, rarely taking damage, to barely hanging on through a lot of individual runs. I think the expectation is depending on your level of ability you'll plow through a portion of the game and then get hard-stopped at which point doing the cult-raising thing becomes a way bigger part of your gameplay, and you start cycling or going back through old dungeons to work up materials, followers, and bonuses.

I racked up a couple of deaths in a row now, but I put that more off to beign tired today (back to work after a week off, and my sleep schedule was less then aligned).

Also Gauntlets are awful and I won't be convinced otherwise, and vampiric weapons don't work.

I do wonder if the honeymoon period ends and good items/cards become fewer and farther between (like I already saw (but avoided buying) the +damage during day tarot card, when its much more productive to go crusading at night when your followers aren't producing resources/building for you to be doing things in town)
 

CriticalGaming

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I didn't even have to use force, the filthy bastards came up to me asking if they could eat some dump on multiple occasions!
I am not going to review this game because I'm just fucking around with it casually here and there, but yeah, it's pretty good.
 

Hawki

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So, is the game going to be anyone's, ahem, goat?
 
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EvilRoy

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I blew through the first 2 dungeons, the 3rd gave me issues, boss there really ramps up the difficulty too. Haven't tried the 4th dungeon yet, been just kinda messing around and redoing earlier dungeons, which get harder once you beat the boss.
Yeah, it seems like the first dungeon or two are kind of getting you used to the concept of what the game is about and then they just ramp everything way up. I only just realized there are lore segments that you can come to as parts of individual dungeon runs, so I think there's an expectation that some areas will be replayed a lot. Kind of an interesting combination of Hades and Inscryption in terms of how everything is set up.

I racked up a couple of deaths in a row now, but I put that more off to beign tired today (back to work after a week off, and my sleep schedule was less then aligned).

Also Gauntlets are awful and I won't be convinced otherwise, and vampiric weapons don't work.

I do wonder if the honeymoon period ends and good items/cards become fewer and farther between (like I already saw (but avoided buying) the +damage during day tarot card, when its much more productive to go crusading at night when your followers aren't producing resources/building for you to be doing things in town)
Its gotta end eventually, for the good of both the player and game honestly. As much as I love Binding of Isaac, there's no denying that the game has so much shit packed into it that it just kind of breaks down after a while. Too much stuff makes a game impenetrable, too much good stuff makes it boring, too much bad stuff makes it an exercise in frustration.

Based on what I'm seeing out of the various skill trees and the Tarot deck I don't think it really lasts that far into the game before you're filling out stuff for the sake of it or busting ass to get the special crown upgrades. I'd rather have that than the BoI issue of accidentally unlocking garbage items and regretting it, or alternatively getting a perfect roll and smashing a run with hardly any input though.
 

sXeth

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Yeah, it seems like the first dungeon or two are kind of getting you used to the concept of what the game is about and then they just ramp everything way up. I only just realized there are lore segments that you can come to as parts of individual dungeon runs, so I think there's an expectation that some areas will be replayed a lot. Kind of an interesting combination of Hades and Inscryption in terms of how everything is set up.



Its gotta end eventually, for the good of both the player and game honestly. As much as I love Binding of Isaac, there's no denying that the game has so much shit packed into it that it just kind of breaks down after a while. Too much stuff makes a game impenetrable, too much good stuff makes it boring, too much bad stuff makes it an exercise in frustration.

Based on what I'm seeing out of the various skill trees and the Tarot deck I don't think it really lasts that far into the game before you're filling out stuff for the sake of it or busting ass to get the special crown upgrades. I'd rather have that than the BoI issue of accidentally unlocking garbage items and regretting it, or alternatively getting a perfect roll and smashing a run with hardly any input though.

Well yeah, BoI spirals off into trying to just find things that interact in inexplicable and ridiculous ways more then a serious effort to build a run nowadays. In ever more esoteric and weird tear effects.


CoL's kind of in the same vein as Gungeon, where very little overall seems to directly interact with each other mechanically, so you don't get the same insane interactions. Gungeon for what its worth had a similar issue at launch, you'd very quickly flood the options with absolute trash and afaik they only sort of ever got it into more respectable shape.
 
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hanselthecaretaker

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So wait, is this like a spiritual sequel to Darkest Dungeon, where you spend hours cultivating and babysitting a bunch of minions that can just wind up RNG’ing themselves out of existence?
 

Old_Hunter_77

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SkillUp's review does a good job answering some of the questions here about length and intention:


He explains that it's not intended to be some endless roguelike- it has an ending after ~20 hrs and there is like a "final boss."
Which is yet another I'm gonna play it.

I also listened a bit to Amy's stream of it on Sunday and various commenters were talking about bugs.
That all suits me fine, I am in the middle of Bayonetta 2 on the Switch so I'm happy to wait until I'm done with that and they release some patches before I move over to this one.
 

EvilRoy

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So wait, is this like a spiritual sequel to Darkest Dungeon, where you spend hours cultivating and babysitting a bunch of minions that can just wind up RNG’ing themselves out of existence?
You can send them on missions and stuff where they might die, but it's purely optional. Death is otherwise a choice to some extent, although nothing lasts forever. For the most part you need faith and devotion from them. Devotion let's you level up your ability to fight in dungeons, and faith let's you build more stuff in your base which can get you resources, ability upgrades, cash money and so on.

Cultivating your cult basically just means getting more people to be more faithful and loyal to you, to get more different bonuses. They can and will die, through a variety of methods, but you just get more followers to replace them. Thus far in the game I have not yet met an individual who I would care about losing, and sometimes they just ask to die anyway.
 
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sXeth

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So wait, is this like a spiritual sequel to Darkest Dungeon, where you spend hours cultivating and babysitting a bunch of minions that can just wind up RNG’ing themselves out of existence?

Making your Cult happy levels them up which makes them better at a few things, but primarily increases the rate at which they generate Xp for the two levelup systems.


Once per day you can do a Sermon, which directly contributes XP to unlocking more powerful tiers of weapons/spells and different categories (not all of which are necessarily good, but you have to unlock most of a previous tier to unlock the next straight power upgrade node)


The other XP they generate goes into unlocking the tech tree to build the base out, which primarily loops back into making the base more automated and self-sustaining. There is one structure that lets you convert cult members into little demons that join you on missions (with more devoted followes making better ones) which function as turrets/etc.


Your passive random upgrades are tarot cards, which you mostly find or buy with cold at shops (which offsets the complete RNG aspect) to unlock, then they appear at particular random points equivalent to Binding of Issaac item rooms. Tarot cards range from... mainly mediocre random bonuses that never seem to fire at the rate they should, to outright pointless, with only a few highlights. Probably to avoid power creep, but I could prettymuch guarantee I"d barely notice a no-card run with most power coming from the weapons directly.


Combat is a pretty basic top down melee affair. Take Zelda a Link to the Past and add a dodge roll (which is necessary on some bosses to bypass a screen expanding radial wave attack that comes out).
 
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EvilRoy

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And we are donion rings. To be honest I was running out of juice towards the end there. Once you have all the upgrades in all the various trees there's pretty much fuck all to do. I didn't even bother trying to collect all the amulets because I didn't see a reason to use anything they unlocked. And I played paragon on this thing. I ascended one guy and sacrificed one guy and the rest I just earned up from regular play without issue in a fairly short 16 hours.

The combat gets a little dull as well. The weapons are basically pulled from Hades, and the health system is pulled from Binding of Isaac. That's not bad by any stretch of the word, but they don't really go anywhere with it. At first I thought I was being super lazy by facetanking and swinging in combat, but by the final boss I kind of realized that the devs seem to expect you to do that and plan for it. The weapons can have different types/tiers, but they don't make enough of an individual difference to worry about unless you get the one weapon type that affects your base. The rest of the time its just swing swing swing, at specific rates depending on the weapon you get saddled with at the start. Same with spells. They're neat, they depart from the Hades approach, but beyond a given spell being more or less suited to attacking groups it really doesn't matter what you get.

All that said, it was a cute, fun game. Not a lot of depth but a good showing I think. Given a little time to let the memories fade and I might come back and be a more murder-happy cult leader. Excepting that you need an entire 20 followers to challenge the final boss, so somewhere along that penultimate dungeon I'm gonna be real merciful all the sudden.
 

Old_Hunter_77

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The sheer amount of literal s**t in this game and reviews that are all agreeing that the game has limited appeal to one play-through has lessened my hype from intense to reasonable. Also apparently there are bugs. So this game is on the list of "stuff to buy/play later on when it's cheap."

Like in December/January I'm planning to go on a very very long trip. I will add this game to my Switch for that maybe.
 

sXeth

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Throw me on the pile of "done, but the end drags"

Probably the most concise way to explain it, just look up the tech trees (for both the character and the base building) online and you'll botice pretty quick the last tiers are just all "Thing + slightly higher number.


Its weird, because the game does nothing *wrong* (my personal hatred of Stardews fishing flappy bird knockoff thing aside), but it just kind of peters out after a strong start and never seems to build much off the initial base line.


(I guess a second gripe would be "refined" resources. Thats the same system that turned me right off Conan exiles where its just adding time grind for time grinds sake)
 

Hawki

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Baa-ram-ewe!

Baa-ram-ewe!

To the cult,

You must stay true!

...

False gods many,

One god true!

Follow you!

Baa-ram-ewe!

...

Follow prophet.

Follow sheep.

Bear the knife.

Be not meek.

...

Cull the faithless.

Castrate knaves.

Burn the heretic,

Dig their graves.

...

Bear the faithful,

Propagate.

More followers for,

The One Who Waits.

...

Bring the wool,

Over the eyes.

Quash the doubt,

Don't rationalize.

...

Baa-ram-ewe!

Baa-ram-ewe!

To the cult,

You must stay true!

(Because I can, that's why.)
 
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