Cult Of The Lamb review – the evil Animal Crossing

metro.co.uk:

Running a demonic cult that sacrifices its own followers seems a bit grim for a video game, but it’s all good fun when it’s just cute animals.

The idea of having cute little cartoon characters doing inappropriate or violent things is not a new or particularly clever idea. It’s not uncommon in video games, with Conker’s Bad Fur Day being one of most famous examples, but there is a good reason why Cult Of The Lamb is filled with cute anthropomorphised critters. Running an evil cult would be far too disturbing if you did it with real people, and realistic depictions of violence, but when it’s only cartoon puppies and bunnies getting hurt it suddenly becomes a lot more palatable.

The real question here is not why you’re controlling a cute little lamb but whether running your own cult, to appease a mysterious, Lovecraftian god, is a good idea for a video game. It is an amusing concept but, especially given how hard the trailers try to obfuscate what you actually do in the game, you quickly begin to wonder whether the peculiar story set-up came first and the ideas for the gameplay sometime later.

Cult Of The Lamb describes itself as a roguelike, which is technically true but while there is a certain amount of top-down hacking and slashing, at heart it’s a business management game not a million miles away from the recent Two Point Campus. Except here your business is indoctrinating followers, performing rituals, and going on crusades.

There are a lot of obvious influences in Cult Of The Lamb but while there are few direct similarities in terms of gameplay, it’s obvious that making an evil version of Animal Crossing was one of the starting points. The management aspect of the game plays like a more traditional city builder or