Current Events > Finished up a 100% playthru of Cult Of The Lamb *spoilers*

(+) Yeah! (+)

Overall not really impressed. It feels like a proof of concept rather than a fully fleshed out experience and that's not a good thing considering the plethora of amazing Roguelites out there. The fact that is the same price point as Hades is just nuts. It's a $10 game that has less content than some early access titles I've played. The fact that you can cripple your save file by picking wrong upgrade perks with no way reset them is terrible design. A huge chunk of the game mechanics can pretty much be ignored ( I did Missionary and Demon Summoning both exactly 1 time to see how they worked then decided they were more trouble than they're worth) but even some of the core mechanics like maintaining Faith/Hunger are so braindead easy that they might as well not exist. The only time I even remotely had trouble managing my followers was the plot point where a rival Bishop inflicts starvation on your entire cult with no warning and it took me a few more minutes to finish up the run. By the time I got back to base the starvation had tanked my Faith too because a dissenter was causing problems, but even with all that I put it back to rights easy enough and never had a problem again.

The lack of variety (or in some cases variety that doesn't actually do anything, looking at you Immune To Poison tarot card) in combat upgrades means every run starts to feel very samey. There are 5 weapons total and 5 modifiers you can but on them but frankly only 2 weapons felt remotely viable to me, Sword and Axe. Dagger is so short ranged that you eat a lot of unintentional damage, Hammer is too slow to actually be useful, and the Claws force you to commit to standing in one spot for an entire combo or their damage is junk. For the mods I found Bane (add poison) to be the only one I really cared about. Necromatic (summon a homing ghost to attack enemies) and Vampiric (restore HP on kills) both work off random procs that seemed to work so rarely that they were effectively not there. Merciless (weapon attacks can crit) was good but I only saw it like 3 times in my entire play thru. The Godly modifier (weapons do double damage) actually showed up more than Merciless and is obviously the best. Likewise I think there's 5 spell forms and then modifiers to change what extra effects they had. I practically ignored spells, though. Many of them are impractical to use (Aim this cursor on the ground while dodge rolling to avoid attacks!) so unless I had a spell that didn't require me to aim it I usually just ignored it. I never felt like I was missing out on anything anyway. Combat is very easy.

Don't misunderstand. It is fun, in the same way that eating popcorn is filling. It'll do the job but after awhile it gets kinda bland and samey leaving you wanting more. Its also got great visual appeal and sound design. The world, overall, is fun to interact with and hast lots of small elements that give the game charm. For damn sure don't spend $25 on it though