I return from a successful crusade, relieved I was able to find wood to bring back to my cult. Great, I think to myself, now I can do the bonfire ritual to save my low Faith Meter, and maybe even upgrade a few beds for my followers.
It’s early in the game for me still, and crusades feel like a reward for managing my cult and making it more sustainable over being the main focus of my game. A checklist runs through my head as I sprint around the grassy field; Will my followers start starving if I leave for another crusade? Do I have enough berries to make food? Berry meals aren’t great, but it’s all I have right now – oh, I have to clean up their poop, too, because otherwise they’ll get mad at the place being dirty, and maybe even sick.
This wasn’t exactly what I had expected when I signed up to play a rogue-lite, but hey, I had played my fair share of Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley – a little bit of cute-animal-resident management, a little bit of rudimentary farming, and when the ball got rolling, I could sneak away to a crusade to progress the story.
But I kept on asking myself why – why would this game push this compound management over the crusades? Shouldn’t a roguelite be focused on the fighting?
So I started thinking about why I take care of my followers at all…well, I’m told I have to grow a cult to overtake the Old Faith. Sure. Gameplay wise, if I don’t take care of them, the bars for their hunger, cleanliness, and faith in me will go down, and that makes me feel bad. Also if I take care of them, I get to upgrade a bunch of different things: personal powerups for the crusades, doctrines for the cult, new buildings for resource gathering.
Okay, so the followers help me, and it’s a bit of a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours situation; I get more followers to get more devotion points to make the rest of the game easier for me. Part of me was inclined to endear myself to my followers – I was devastated when my first follower, Bartlebe, died, and was delighted when I advanced my cult far enough to raise them from the dead! On top of that, I had put ton of hours into the Animal Crossing franchise – I love taking care of cute little animal residents! But I couldn’t get myself to love my followers, because they are not meant to be loved. They are meant to be used.
That’s when I realized that Cult of the Lamb was a farming sim. You’re farming livestock.
The routine of feeding my followers, cleaning up their poop, doing small quests to make them happy, building better shelter for them – I started to feel as though I was a farmer, running around to take care of their animals. Yes, I have to care for these beings, and yes, I will work to take care of them, but we are not on the same level, and these beings are ultimately objects of utility for me.
I spend time picking out the animal and color of my new follower, maybe even gift them a necklace that will make them walk faster or make them generate new devotion; I become familiar with the followers that have been around longer, and get used to seeing the new guys around.
But they’re just that to me – animals.
They will provide for me what I desire from them after I provide for them the necessities of life. When they die, I may be slightly sad, but I will harvest their bodies for meat to serve to the surviving followers, and I make a mental note to recruit a new person to replenish the ranks and keep the show on the road.
This has gotten the wheels turning for me – what could this mean for me, as a player? Was the game making a comment about labor, devotion, sacrifice, being taken advantage of? I was dissatisfied with the depth of my analysis being capitalism bad – like, yes, of course, but is that all that there is to this? I then started drawing on my real-world knowledge of cults: taking in vulnerable people by providing for immediate needs (shelter, food), isolating your followers from the outside world (the followers rarely leave the clearing, other than for missions, where they either return successful or die), monetary, physical, or temporal sacrifices – all boxes are checked there.
I’m over 20 hours into the game. I’m running around as a cute little lamb, killing enemies on crusades and returning to my compound to make meals for my numerous followers. They are my employees, I am their boss. They are my followers, I am their cult leader. They are my animals, I am their butcher.
You raise some really good points!
At the beginning of the game, I also didn’t get its management aspects—taking care of the cult came as an annoyance even. Why couldn’t I just go back to dungeon crawling and focus on getting better at the combat?
But then I realized Cult of the Lamb has tricked me into playing two games at once: it’s two interdependent flip-sides of the same coin. You gather resources for the cult through crusades. Your followers, in turn provides power-ups for your upcoming journeys into the forest. This design choice gives you an objective to work towards at every moment of play, and the game turns into a feedback loop of cycling between the two stages. By doing this, developers cleverly averted the shortcomings of farming/management games, while providing a source of power-ups and adds nuance to the rogue-lite genre in an organic way.