3.5/5 ★ – Crackthesky's review of Cult of the Lamb.

There's so much about this game I adore, but I just couldn't finish it. :( I LOVE the art style. It strikes a great balance between being cute and sinister, and the same can be said for the music which nails a very specific tone, that I'm sure was very difficult for the composers to pin down. I just found a lot of the gameplay mechanics too shallow. Building up the cult and your base can be really fun, but once you've cycled through a few members, their unique traits fade into the background. The rituals and base upgrades can play really well into the power fantasy of calling all the shots, but ultimately you're left with a pretty simplistic and tedious farming sim. Where the game really fell flat for me was the combat. Poorly implemented rogue light elements, repetitive levels, and questionable hit boxes made for combat levels that I dreaded coming back to. You have no choice in your starting weapons and abilities, and progression is tied to a rigid upgrade tree. It's all very surface level and I just found this side of the game so boring and repetitive. Oddly, the combat sections never felt connected to the cult management/ base building aspect, but beating the game requires playing through these levels and defeating all of the bosses. It just made for a pretty inconsistent game. A novel concept for sure, but I unfortunately never felt compelled enough to finish it.