Cult Of The Lamb Plays Into Our Desires To Kill Our Animal Crossing Villagers

thegamer.com:

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I felt 2022 lacked a standout indie game. Not that there weren't any good ones, but there weren't any that had fully grabbed the zeitgeist. There was no Hades, no Valheim. Nothing that had grabbed 2022 by the scruff and had planted its flag to say 'this year belongs to me'. Since that article was written, we have had Stray and Cult of the Lamb. Stray captured our imaginations but felt a little short-lived, so it feels a little close but no catnip. The next challenger is Cult of the Lamb, and while I haven't played it myself yet, it does move in the right ways to be this year's Hades. Why? Mainly because it is Hades, only with Animal Crossing thrown in there. But it might be the latter that pushes Cult of the Lamb over the edge.

While The Last of Us Part 2 took the major plaudits, it feels like 2020 belonged to Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Hades. Both are games that you could essentially play forever, and when the pandemic gave us nothing but time, they were the games of the moment. Neither excelled purely because they could be played over and over again, but because of what else they offered under the surface. Cult of the Lamb inverts this idea.

Related: Get The Look: Stray Edition

Hades had a fantastic cast of characters and you developed your relationship with them fight after fighter. Most roguelikes ask you to complete the game as fast as possible, but Hades does not. It wants you to fail over and over again - failure is but a part of victory. Failure is rewarded with greater slices of the narrative, and God Mode helps underline this. Animal Crossing doesn't have pass/fail in the same way, but it similarly survives off the backs of its cast. In Animal Crossing, you get ten