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@@jamiefitzpatrick4377 This is hardly the first time that people as a whole have misunderstood the meaning of something, even a single word (phrase), and misused it so much that the wrong definition is what prevails. The word "literally" and the phrase "blood is thicker than water" come immediately to mind. And thanks to the eldritch glories of the Internet as well as the infinitude of human stupidity, it's definitely going to be nowhere near the last either (in part because it already wasn't given how long said misunderstanding has been in place). [/hasn't even studied physics] Ain't humanity grand?
The fishing minigame, tedious as it is, was actually my main source of income for most of the game. There's a chest you can use to exchange resources to your god for money, but probably as a nod to Lovecraft, squids and octopuses in particular can be exchanged for an enormous amount of cash (a single octopus is worth 20 gold, which is about a third of what you get in your average run in the roguelike mode). And so I became The Lamb: Cult Leader, Slayer of Heretics, Harbinger of the One Who Waits, and World-Renowned Fish Salesman.
This works even better when you use the ritual that allows you to get the 2 for 1 fish. While this is nice, there is one ritual that nets you over 1k gold just by asking your followers for money, which is just nuts and very time efficient (especially when you get the 50% cd reduction & minus 50% cost on rituals).
Pro tip - Bones return the highest number of items from any missionary mission, even more than gold, and the missionary mission for bones is low risk. Bones can be sold for 1g. Missionary quests for bones literally earn more gold at lest risk than missionary quests for gold
I blasted my way through the tech tree until Devotion literally stopped spawning and instead became gold. I have literally only just killed the second boss and I will never need money ever again.
As much as the micromanagement of the cult feels like a drag I feel like it compliments the dungeon crawling. You're subtly encouraged to move quickly through the rooms, doing your best to pull off as many combos as possible all while hoovering up as many resources as you can so your cultists don't starve or run out of beds. Then when you get back you make them all their mac and cheese, tell them about the greatness of the dark lord and how he's only probably kinda evil, tuck them into bed then head out in the middle of the night to do it all again.
The devs have been really good at bug patching (on PC at least, can't speak for consoles). The bugs he listed (as well as a few I hit) have all been specifically patched out already. But this review is quite accurate, actually. I don't understand why the janitor's station doesn't allow the peeps to pickup their own poop, or why *I* have to clear out the outhouses. I don't understand why I can't appoint a cook. Those issues contributed to why I had to spend more time with the cult and less on crusades. As such, I ran into the same issue as Yahtzee. My cult base was all but complete, my upgrades were all unlocked, and I hadn't even entered the third zone yet. So, the pacing there is a bit off. That said, like him I also found myself drawn into a "...just one more (in-game) day addiction". If you're interested, give the demo a try and don't let the bugs scare you (on the PC at least), a rapid barrage of patches seems to have cleaned that up.
@@Dusty-- Hm, that's odd given the lil buggers poop all over the place (until restrooms). Does that mean janitor stations need to be spread out all over the place?
I'm gonna guess the pacing is designed for players who go "I'm bored, gonna go crusade" with their base still in shambles. That's why there's so many "bail me out of problems" rituals in the game. I couldn't do that though, if there were chores that needed doing I wanted to do them before doing the next level and I got myself into a pretty comfortable (if tight) rhythm before whoops unlocked the final tier of upgrades in the 2nd area. This also had the side effect of leaving aforementioned "oops I fucked up" rituals completely unused in my playthrough.
@@theredknight1757 To ensure good 'coverage' I would yea, same way you might spread outhouses, though I managed to get by with 1 of each on either half of the map.
As for the bug thing, only on pc is it completely patched. Up to you on console but don't bother on switch. I don't have a switch but the way people on cotl Reddit describe it, I genuinely think there might be a lawsuit soon...
So, last week Yahtzee reviewed a game where you play as a Hell cow, and this week he reviewed a game where you play as a lamb who heads an evil cult. Seems like there's a recent trend in games where you play as an evil animal. EDIT: I did not expect this comment to get so many replies
Great alternative for the eat-grass trait: The cannibal trait. That way, you can just eat the corpses of your dead. You don't have to dig graves, you have a lot less issues with the food supply and everyone gets happier eating dead gramps. The base building part really does get bogged down with a lot of micro-management. It's kinda ludicrous that the farm requires an upgrade so your followers get the idea to actually harvest the food they've grown or the farm just stops working when every plant is grown fully. Overall, though, it's still really fun to play and provides a good chuckle every now and then.
frankly I think a bit of an expansion to the followers list would do the game some good, keeping track of which cultists are assigned to which jobs because either I'm bad at keeping track or they just wander around doing whatever jobs they damn well please because I genuinely can't figure out who's supposed to be doing what.
I think the grass is still better, its more than plentiful, and once you unlock resurrection you can just keep a rotation of all the cultists you need, best way to level them up instead of starting from scratch.
Why use bodies for one, shitty small meal though, when you can turn them into compost and then use the compost to boost whatever crops you got, as such making many more meals (or whatever else is being cultivated) with it in the long term? (And yeah, granted, it's a late game thing, but I'm talking in general)
@@FunnyStripes Yeah I agree. Cannibal seems like a trap to me in general, especially since I didn't find cultists died a whole lot until late game anyway. But even then it wasn't that much.
@@FunnyStripes Why do either of those things when you can drag your cultists back from the void and put them back to work? Saves on grave space if it's just a nap until the cooldown on resurrection is ready. :)
I think the game, despite all its clear flaws, has a lot of charm, enough to make me look past those problems and keep it fresh enough until the end. I hope the devs either polish it further and allow then to make a more refined sequel or similar idea in the future. It's been a lot of fun.
I think this is a good way to put it. I also think Zero Punctuation certainly didn't give it a bad review either. It's got it's flaws but it was a lot of fun.
Ah, the usual response in any hybrid base building game when Followers/Essential NPC's (PRESTON, I KNOW THERE'S SETTLEMENTS THAT NEED MY HELP, LEAVE ME ALONE) keep pestering you with quests and garbage every single time you take a step in their direction.
For anyone wandering what the fishing was good for: High end meals and shit tons of money because your totally not evil dad fukin loves squids and gives you 20 per.
It takes a long time to get rare fishes so that's pretty useless. You can't be feeding anyone at that rate. But I hadn't considered that the good price of squids and octopus is a Cthulhu reference.
@@twilightvulpine I forget its name but there's a ritual that gives you a fishing cheat code basically guaranteeing the fisherman quest completion in one go. After that the fisherman becomes an infinite fish source and together with the Dad money box -- an infinite money exploit.
OR you could use that ritual that makes your followers give you like 700 coins for the cost of like 10 or 20 faith and then offset te lost faith with a sacrifice or any other ritual
I ate food that a minion was trying to grab, but he grabbed it anyway and began eating that meal forever! I also had multiple buildings just stop working with no reason or the building destroy itself when used up, so I had to manually delete and rebuild the buildings.
@@trucluu7894 Thats fine, but if that happens the building is supposed to collapse and you collect everything up and you KNOW its dead. These buildings stayed standing and my minions would tell me "Sir, theres no wood to chop though." So I murdered 2-3 for talking back to me because obviously the building was still standing.
I also had the building bug multiple times, my lumber yard would be fine one day, and then everyone would refuse to touch it, making me destroy it and build it again. I also had issues getting my cultist to refine resources, to the point that I just had to build a second station for it because no one would use the first. Ps5
Cult of the Lamb was a phenomenal *concept* which i hope to see more of. The colony builder and the rougelite are two of the most replayable genres. Cult’s problem was that both elements were underdeveloped. Every dungeon run is the same, and the colony is a grind to build up, and lacks the “sim city” satisfaction of seeing a well-run society. Colony sims are only really fun when its a micromanage-y grind at the start, but a properly managed colony runs itself in the late game. Like a proud parent seeing a child grow up; such games must have this satisfying element, or they lack any replay value
Do you play Rimworld? I just wrote a comment about how a good strategy game should only have you focus on the mundane stuff in the early game, and have you focus bigger picture in the end game.
@@TheBuckweat33 You should, it is a whole lot of fun, and it does the ramp up well. Its primary scaling factor is the number of settlers you have, whom automatically do tasks within the jobs you delegate them to. The more settlers, the more automation. The only thing that isn't automated is the combat.
Given the game's premise, it seems odd that a large chunk of the primary gameplay loop is performing mundane chores. If there was a choice of career where you could make a bunch of underlings drop everything and perform whatever menial task you assigned them, I would think that Cult Leader would rank somewhere close to the top.
I also have/had the problem that you get way too many upgrade points in the beginning-ish part of the game. Like, I've unlocked about 12 builds and only had the resources to built two of them. Some balancing or more upgrades that just reduce cooldowns and costs would probably be nice.
interestingly i haven't had this problem, my problem is I don't have enough cultists, thye keep dieing of old age XD. I feel like the cost is at a fine point.
@@MasterGhostf i have two saves going atm, one I'm streaming and one for the hell of it. And in my stream save i found 4 necklaces that make the followers live significantly longer than they normally would, i use those for as demons since they live long enough to be lvl 10+ and they are almost 100 years old each. When they get too old I sacrifice them to the delight of everyone then bring them back also to the delight of everyone. In my other save I haven't found a single one of these necklaces.
Interesting how you're the *second* reviewer I follow to point out that the two halves are fairly discrete and neither are as involved or well-developed as other games with one of the two halves, but each serves as a good distraction from the other so you always have something to do. Either it's a very accurate description or someone has been looking at someone else's homework.
Or maybe it's just kind of obvious? If you look at the building tree, only the demon summoning actually impacts the dungeon crawl. It's not like the faith level of the cult makes you hit harder, or you unlock a method to choose your weapon or there's a hades mirror where you can put resources into doing more damage using poison. Meanwhile, failing or succeeding on the dungeon crawl has almost no impact on the basebuilding, you just gain or lose some faith which can be fixed by a couple inspirations on followers. Once you have the spider who sells followers and the buildings that generate resources, there's no reason to go into the crawl except for story or to kill time.
Ah hey, Yahtzees played factorio. I just started playing that again a few days ago. I unironically recommend it as a teaching tool for engineering automation. I took a uni class on automation and it was basically what factorio is all about.
My mum hears me on voice chat with my friend who I'm playing with and wonders why the hell I'm talking about "bottlenecks in our production lines" and similar things that most games would have trouble using as an actual game thing. In that sense it's kind of like papers please when you think about how non-gamey themes are turned into fun gameplay like that.
This is what his reviews tend to sound like when he likes the game so I'd say he agrees with you; he still makes jokes and points out issues but when he mentions getting hooked that's an endorsement in my book
I have all of Yahtzee's complaints and more, yet I still loved the game. The dev gave a cross-my-heart promise in a special announcement to continue working on improving/expanding the thing, so props to 'em.
Actually I think Yahtzee liked this game, you can even see him compliment it around 4:30. Remember: he's the Simon Cowell of game reviewers except with a cooler voice and more profanity, even when he's complimenting a game it still sounds like he loathes it.
I’ve been playing this game a ton and yeah it’s def a weird mishmash but I Think what keeps me going is slowly learning about why the god your helping was locked away and the game really goes super into it’s theme. I have yet to play a game where you run a cult with this much to think about from food to decorating your camp to doctrines. Also the art style is stunning, very much a fun game to look at in the night when things have this dark purple and red hue.
The lore is kinda cool and i can do my best explaining it: The one who waits was the god of death, but he wanted more So he started to murder the shitty gods The bishops were just thematically wounded: Leshy got no eyes cuz he young and reckless Hektu got no throat because he's really salty and complaining about everything strains your vocal cords Kallamar was a pussy and didn't want to hear no threats, hence he got no ears And shakura put his heart into the one who waits, without thinking first, now his head is brutally damaged, making him intellectually challenged
If you haven’t yet gotten sick of rogue-likes, Subset games (the creators of FTL) put out a massive content update for their new game Into the Breach. Which is like a bizarre fusion of FTL, XCOM, and Battletech
I'd say rather the opposite somewhat. Enjoyale at the start when there's still dffculty and stuff to do but less when you've basicaly unlocked all the tech tree and there's nothing new to do. Laack of ontent for both gameplay and lack of replayability are defintively this game big weaknesses. I'm usually not a big proponenent of DLCs but there, yeah that's deifntitively a game that ill benefit from more content. But I'll say for as long as it last, it does manage to hold your attention in a pretty solid loop between the two gameplays.
I picked this game up about a week or so out from its release and was quite impressed at the level of graphical detail this game has. Impressed in the sense that there are so many animations going on in any one screen that my old rig was chugging at 10 fps just on the title screen 🥲 But thanks to streamers, I can say that this is a game I will love as much as Binding of Isaac (mostly because the Lamb is too goddamned cute lol)
My wife and I have had competing cults since picking it up. I haven't had a bug but she got a bad draw when she got a follower that was old and died the day after he was brought in. Problem was the game wouldn't let her leave the body unburied but she didnt have the money to build a hole. But she couldn't leave to get any more money (this was very early in game) and so she got stuck restarting.
I had a bug where I put a grave very near the center, but it turned invisible. Without realizing, I built a stockades over it. The stockades worked fine, but everyone kept stopping at the imprisoned person to grieve and give me +2 Faith each time. You could really tell where their hearts were. They didn't want me to re-educate the heretics. Sorry, (pig) Emergency Bacon but (wolf) Red needs to get back to work in a few days. They have a skull necklace and they're level XII so I just need a little more before I leave their eyes perpetually glowing forever and hope each morning I wake up to a new hybridized skin.
Having beaten the game this past weekend, he’s not wrong with his criticisms. I wound up getting stuck on the final boss of the third area and wound up getting all the upgrades for all three trees. I didn’t have the kind of bugs he got but I did get some where I had to exit to main menu and reload. I still recommend this game because despite the genre mash-up, the developer actually took time to make sure it worked as a whole. There’s nothing about the game I would say is bad as even the optional stuff has some thought put into it. It’s a game that I think is going to boil down to personal preference for people.
also the existance of a roadmap is promising. Between the devs outright stating they plan to add more free dlc and extra content to the game as well as how popular it is, I'm hopeful that this game will grow into a much more fully formed and solid experience. Plus the bugs seem to be exclusive to console versions. The PC users have reported little to no issues (myself included) while the console users are up in arms about the technical issues but again, the devs are already working to fix it.
@@Randomyoutuber-4831 I'm on PC and I definitely got bugs. I've been locked on a screen after indoctrinating new followers, I've had my entire compound empty after returning from a run, and I had to beat a boss AGAIN because the game softlocked on me because I got hit by a projectile that didn't despawn while I was picking up a Heart of the Heretic. None of them were game-breaking as I was able to do the Main Menu fix and it wasn't that constant to detract from the game. Also I don't care about the roadmap as I feel the base game is worth recommending in it's current state.
@@Randomyoutuber-4831 Then you got lucky as I played for 27 and definitely got the bugs I described above. And these ones kept popping up during a few of the patches.
Cult of the Lamb sits in a weird spot for me. I never feel the pull to go out of my way to actually play the game, but when I do I can't stop myself for hours. When I first started playing I thought the management aspect detracted from the dungeon crawler aspect, since you can get so bogged down with everything. But then the upgrades roll in and you can stop caring about a lot of it eventually.
Holy cow, that's why all of this sounded and felt so familiar to me, but couldn't exactly point to what made it so. It really is sort of like Dark Cloud, albeit of course, a lot more simplified, more resource-based, and more oriented towards the micro-management aspect than the dungeon aspect.
I don't know why I enjoy watching Yahtzee review games I've beaten to death already but yep, we definitely played the same game and had the same problems with it.
Gotta hard agree with the tech tree and upgrades point. Not only are 80% of the upgrades entirely pointless, they are only like 5 levels of dungeon upgrades, and the base upgrades are just ‘better’ versions of what you already have. Once you have an outhouse and lvl 2 farm, all you actually need to do is fix the beds when they break (until they dont) and make food for them whenever you get home. Enemies aren’t very varied, it doesn’t get hard, and the ultimate upgrade just gives you a set of oneshot weapons that auto-win runs. Which is hardly rewarding.
A few things I'd like to add: 1. The worst thing about the base is the fact that they used diamonds for the grid while having the island be a square shape is stupid as hell, it made each wall and corner look horrible and waste a lot of space, and paths just look really bad with diamonds as well. 2. The other thing I didn't like was some stuff were easily automated when leveling up such as having followers clean all the poop, plant food and harvest it, etc, while other stuff can't even be upgraded such as having to cook each meal individually yourself or having to continousally build wood/stone mines every now and then instead of being unbreakable like the beds.
The gane should've had a much longer timer between things. Because i felt like leaving the cult at any point was leaving it to suffer. Like "come back in 8 hours for your outhouse" would be a good notice for going to do a dungeon run
I'm in the same boat. This is a basebuilding pick-up-sticks with a dungeon-crawler minigame, which is odd because the story of the game is beating the dungeon crawls. And to me, the dungeon-crawl could benefit from taking a few MORE things from Hades and Binding of Isaac. With hades, the resources poured into the mirror or the weapons gave us the option to adjust play styles in the crawl section, giving a feedback cycle where we go farther and get more resources to upgrade our base so we can go farther. In Lamb, you don't unlock any meaningful upgrades through the basebuilding. Yes, the sermons unlock new weapon levels, but the damage is meaningless because the monsters scale, so the first room monsters still take 3-4 hits from lvl 1 weapons or lvl 20 weapons. There's no meaningful change between an endgame run and your first run. With Isaac, each run starts the same, but the sheer variation and synergies between items is mindboggling and you can have trash runs or god-tier runs. With Lamb, none of the upgrades change the runs meaningfully. The cards range from get a bonus red heart or gray heart, attack damage goes up slightly, and heal a bit more. None of this changes that the random mobs take 2-5 hits per turn with an axe or sword. The only real difference between runs is which weapon you have, but the difference between 2 axe runs is close to zero.
If cult of the lamb didn't last 24 hours from beginning to end I might not have gone outside until summer was over, that said I'm happy (mostly) that I only experienced one bug despite the fact that that bug caused me to lose one of the hearts of the heretic. The final boss was easy so I didn't need the final upgrade though. I wish the spider stopped crashing for me, sometimes he just stops and I just kill him and it makes me said that he's supposed to be an interesting boss but couldn't stop crashing because of his ridiculous amount of minions that spawn every second.
A bug I had was I rushed the starting day and mined up everything only to be soft locked at looking at 3 cult members till the end of time unable to go back to the dungeon or do and sermins and such
I'm surprised that nobody mentioned Stardew Valley - I feel like it scratches the same base (farm) + dungeon itch much more effectively. Both halves actually.
Because there's not really any comparison that isn't skin deep. Yes, there's farming and fishing and relationships, but they're not really the same at all. You don't get attached to followers the way you do with the townspeople, because the followers die after a week in game and the game says you can kill and eat them yourself. There's no junimos to get random fish and veggies for. Farming is for cooking meals and not much else.
I've also tried to complete requests by some of the cult members like sacrifice and marriage but when I try I can't select them, and you'd think when you're giving a sermon or doing a ritual that everyone would show up but it's only five!
And nowadays the whole "they can't feed/clean themselves" issue is resolved (with upgrades of course,) making it a reasonable gambit to go on looping crusades for an extra helping of loot.
Cult of the Lamb's hybrid base management/dungeon brawling gameplay gives me hope that someday someone really will make Doom Crossing: Eternal Horizons.
Was in a stream of this game and someone in chat referred to it as, "demonic daycare," and that about nails it. The music during the knucklebones minigame slaps, though.
I've watched this channel for more than a decade now I think (there or there abouts) and I still wait for everyone to Come out. Yahtzee is such a gem In The gaming community
I now cannot be convinced that Wilford Brimley did not in fact become one with The Force upon death. Constantly Nagging the other Ghosts and Luke about 'Diabeetus'.
To me the game was really fun right up 'til the 4th dungeon. Like you, I had unlocked everything, and when that happens the base management becomes meaningless. I had thousands of gold, three followers to level up for demon powers, and unlimited resources with nothing to spend them on. Nothing really mattered after that point.
Yeah. Both dungeon crawling and base management could use a little more variety int heir gameplay. Tho, to be fair, at this point you're like... pretty close to the end anyway.
Been a great game for me as a sahm with a baby, it tracks everything well enough that I can put it down and pick it up a dozen times throughout the day, I thought it was because I was on easy mode that the fishing game seemed pointless, glad to see it mostly was. The bugs soft locking me come the 4th baddie has been my only issue. Otherwise it's a great rouge lite for people like me who like dungeon crawlers but not must rouges. Pair with the creepy cute aesthetic and I'm pleased as can be
The biggest thing when I play Cult Of The Lamb is that after I quit I don't want to get back on because it'll give the opportunity for my cult to be unhappy again after I worked so hard to make things perfect before I get off
I'm starting to think that Actraiser really went and hit on a very successful formula years before anyone was really ready for "a management simulation game of some sort mixed with a combat action game of another sort surprisingly married together." Cult of the Lamb, XCOM, hell even Stardew Valley all seem to prove that if you do it right, you can make quite a hit when you use the formula.
Just getting a comment out right at the beginning before I see the review, I'm really curious as to whether yahtzee will make any direct comparisons to last week's Hell Pie. Heck, I can't help but wonder why that wasn't a full-on double feature.
W e a p o n d u r a b i l i t y is also a trend in wood gathering games that most don’t really like. And lately I’ve compared this to actraiser meets isaac in the respect your towns people see you as a god, and much like actraiser you go do some actiony bits that play into the town building part
Honestly I wish Yahtzee harped MORE about the bugs - we've essentially reached this point where bugs are just an expected norm and we're suddenly okay with absolute turds on release because they'll "eventually be patched". I'm not talking about little funny haha "dragon goes brr backwards in the sky not really affecting the game" bugs, either. Like his example with Schrodinger's Corpse, Cult of the Lamb not only launched with but still has an extreme number of objectively gamebreaking bugs and inexcuseable softlock states that are balls easy to fix, but they simply refuse to even acknowledge their existence and would rather get into discussions with users on the Steam Discussion board about how bad or good the fucking fishing minigame is. My prime example is the fact that if you get any kind of quest, you're LOCKED WITHIN THE CULT GROUNDS. This happens with nearly every single quest still, even this long after launch, and you can encounter it as early as the Bonfire Ritual - you're damned if you think to even try and get some upgrades, let alone build a Barn (which isn't even really that useful until you get its upgrade, because your cultists are too stupid to know to harvest the damn plants 'til then). So screw you buddy! You didn't hoard a mass amount of gold or timber? You literally have to wait over an hour for the trees to respawn to do your precious little Bonfire Ritual or restart, because the game doesn't allow you to do what would be the objectively easiest thing to fix a resource-related problem AND LET YOU GO GATHER MORE RESOURCES IN THE DUNGEONS. And yes, as of today that shit still isn't fixed. I refunded for that exact bug - one that was unfixable with a reload, mind you - ruining my progress an hour and a half in. It's a neat little title and it's good to burn some hours with, but holy shit the bugs kill it. You have to micro on top of your micro to make sure you have an emergency fund of resources and PRAY you have enough to not run into these softlocks. :/
I wish I bought it on Steam since it's heavily patched there when there's hardly any patch on Xbox, so many bugs that softlock the game it's not even fun anymore, especially when you have a quest for a certain ritual, you perform it and when it's done all just keep standing in the church and nothing happens but if you save and restart the game again you have the effect of the ritual, the cooldown on the ritual but the quest is not completed! Love it, the other most frustrating thing is when my lamb was supposed to sacrifice a cultist for HP but instead run to the side and stucked in the running animation, and you can't leave without loosing all progress on stage.
