How Cult of the Lamb's cute aesthetic allowed its developers to explore darker themes

gamedeveloper.com:

Cult of the Lambsees the player battling their way through dungeons, but also managing a cult of adorable animal friends. Cute as they are, perhaps they’re more valuable to you as a sacrifice to unlock some greater power. That duality led to some complex decisions, both for players taking Cult of the Lamb for a spin and for the developers tasked with creating the two complementary sides of the game.

Game Developer sat down with Jay Armstrong, director of game design at Massive Monster, to talk about how cuteness can be made to make unspeakable acts a lot easier to swallow, the thought process behind giving players greater rewards for sacrificing their most beloved followers, and how poo became an important piece of the game’s connected systems.

Game Developer: What inspired you to mix cult caretaking and roguelike dungeon crawling in Cult of the Lamb? What sparked the idea of combining the two?

Armstrong: The mix of base building and dungeon crawling was the starting point for the game, even before we settled on the theme of creating a cult. This came out of our experience with our previous game The Adventure Pals, which was very linear, which meant that, at best, you could play the game once, and, at worst, you could consume the game by watching a streamer play it and you’d never need to play it yourself at all!

At the same time, I noticed roguelike games such as Enter the Gungeon and Binding of Isaac, as well as colony sim games like Rimworld, were absolutely fantastic at creating unique stories every playthrough. They offered infinite replayability and emergent narratives - stories that sprung forth from the game’s mechanics - and I wondered why no one had thought of combining them before. It wasn’t until much later that