Cult of the Lamb review: Midsommar by way of Animal Crossing

digitaltrends.com:

For a good chunk of my Cult of the Lamb playthrough, I was a perfect leader. My flock of woodland cultists was living in harmony, merrily showing their devotion to a monstrous god. Then came the lumber shortage. Within a few days, dissent started to stir in my ranks as I was unable to fix broken beds. By the time I harvested enough wood to fix the problem, I needed to use it to construct a prison instead. It turned out that the line between paradise and nightmare was mighty thin.

Cult of the Lamb explores that balancing act through a darkly comedic premise pulled straight from the golden age of the company Newgrounds. It’s a hellishly addictive management game that revels in its religious farce like cultists prancing around a bonfire. But like my uneven stint as a leader, it struggles to fully pull off the complex genre juggling act it sets out to achieve.

A much better management sim than it is a roguelite, Cult of the Lamb is at its best when it’s a bizarro world version of Animal Crossing (with more satanic rituals). I just wished I could order my followers to do my dungeon crawling chores for me.

In Cult of the Lamb, players take control of an innocent lamb who gets suckered into running a cult for a chained god. The woolly hero is tasked with building a functioning commune, converting other animals into followers, and killing four rival gods that are keeping its master imprisoned. It’s a zany premise that just so happens to be a perfect management sim setup, one that’s loaded with interlinking economies and strong progression hooks.

As my followers generated devotion by praying at my camp’s central shrine, I could use that resource to unlock structures that could be built with the wood and stone lying around. Within