As I continue to play and replay Cult of the Lamb (2022), I feel like I keep coming back to a certain feeling of disunity that permeates the gameplay for me. At nearly every point in my playthrough, something just feels off. This disunity (and my unwillingness to closely examine it) initially led me to believe that Cult of the Lamb was just not a very good game. When friends would ask me “Is it good?” I would waffle, saying “I mean… I’m having a lot of fun with it, but it’s kinda not a great roguelike and not a great management game…” and refuse to give a definitive recommendation. As I have sat with it, however, I have begun to identify where this disunity exists for me, and why I think, rather than ruining the game for me, it might actually be essential to Cult of the Lamb’s gamefeel and message.
So, a roguelike management game. It certainly seems like a very new concept – one new enough to drive a very large marketing train all the way to 1 million sales in the first week – and I was very excited to see how Massive Monster would synergize these genres and create some new modes of interaction in the space between them. But when I play Cult of the Lamb, it feels less like a brilliant synergy of two disparate genres and more like two separate games that were haphazardly stitched together by some not convincingly necessary resource gathering mechanics. The only two real interactions between the roguelike and management halves of Cult of the Lamb are: 1. the building resources you gather on your crusades (which, other than a select few biome-specific ones, can all be produced internally in your farm) and 2. the weapon and curse upgrades (which require you to generate faith, and are thus, for the most part, just a waiting game and don’t require that much engagement on the management side). These elements feel, to me, like barely enough to justify these two games’ coexistence. In fact, the way I ended up playing this game essentially entailed me picking one of the games – management or roguelike – and sticking to it for a long period of time, only dipping into the other if I absolutely needed to for resources (in the case of the roguelike) or I needed to do some mandatory upkeep to keep my cultists alive (in the case of the management game). Quickly switching between these two games felt jarring and dissonant – moving between fast paced, reaction reliant combat and slow, methodical building placement was a shock to the system and required me to reset my brain to some extent for one modality or the other. So if these two games work so poorly together, why do I still think Cult of the Lamb is good?
Cult of the Lamb is not shy about its critique of capitalism or the church. Early in the game, The One Who Waits tells the player, “Do not make the mistake of becoming the servant of your Followers. They are for you to use to your advantage! Their faith is a resource, spend it as you would gold,” asking the player to exploit their follower’s faith and willingness for labor, and spend it as they would any other resource. It prominently displays classically Judeochristain demonic imagery, calls its bosses “Bishops,” its excursions “crusades,” and its enemies “heretics.” It calls attention to the ludicracy of the Catholic church and the ways in which they radicalize their followers and demonize anyone who dares disagree with them.
But beneath these superficial critiques, Cult of the Lamb infuses its gameplay with a deeper, more entrained feeling of the dissonance in the systems of power it critiques. Just as the modern system of capitalism contradictorily asks an individual to work tirelessly for their personal financial gain, only to funnel the value they generate to the top of the food chain, and as the Church hypocritically asks an individual to uplift and love their neighbor as they are, but shun them if they fail to subscribe to the narrow belief set you demand of them, Cult of the Lamb forces the player to stew in the contradictory, messy, frustrating split world of the roguelike and management game, at one moment slaying tens or hundreds of heretics, and at the next, carefully tending to their flock, feeding them, cleaning for them, and uplifting their spirits. Cult of the Lamb’s failure to create a cohesive synergy of genre plays to their favor in the end, emphasizing the hypocrisy and dissonance of the systems it criticizes. And now, looking at other elements of the game through this frame, it even seems like they may have done this intentionally. This internal dissonance exists not only in the genre, but in the art style – cute, cartoony, almost paper-cut graphics depict demonic, blood-dripping-from-the-eyes, Lovecraftian horror – and even the music – soaring vocals, flutes, marimbas and other classical instruments resampled into harsh, chaotic, pulsing electronic beats. Cult of the Lamb’s seeming careless disunity may have indeed been a 4D chess move to embrace its message on dissonance of modern capitalism and the church.
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Post-posting addendum: As I read through this post again after posting it, I realize that CotL’s disunity was so infectious that it reached through the screen and forced me into its contradictory paradigm as well. “I’m having a lot of fun with it, but it’s kinda not a great roguelike and not a great management game…,” “So if these two games work so poorly together, why do I still think Cult of the Lamb is good?” – this game is not just entraining me to its disunity, it is making me live it!
I love your commentary regarding the Church and its values, but specifically I love how you commented on the contrast in style and the darker undertows of the media itself. I agree with you wholeheartedly, and as someone who walked alongside you as you described the general “meh”-ness of the CoTL, I also grew to love how frequently we would return to it being a topic of conversation. The hypocrisy is blatant throughout the game, and your points about the Followers themselves operating as a mode of currency was incredibly eye-opening. I never considered that you, as the player, were operating on decisions to essentially “optimize” your cult. I now recognize how entrenched the concept of labor and capital was interwoven into the game, all plastered under the cute-sy art style and addictive music. CoTL forces the player to assess their choices given limited resources, and I think its an idea you touched upon beautifully.