I went out and bought Cult of the Lamb on my Switch by the end of that section and was playing it by the end of the episode and... I kind of regret it. The game feels like an Early Access title. As someone who loves Roguelites/likes (and has sunk hundreds of hours across three different platforms on the Binding of Isaac) and was fascinated by Cultist Simulator, but is a bit lukewarm on Stardew Valley-type farm games, I thought I'd be more interested in this game than I ended up being. The roguelike gameplay is pretty weak and the cult management is pretty meh as well.
The biggest issue right now is that there are some serious, incredibly common game-breaking bugs that need to be fixed ASAP. Any interaction that triggers an animation- rituals, confession booths, loyalty upgrades, whatever- could potentially softlock the game by locking you into an infinite animation that requires you to restart the game and lose everything you did that day. This is hardly the only major bug, and those issues should get ironed out in time, but it wasn't a great first impression for me.
The second biggest issue is that the gameplay just isn't that deep or compelling. I'm only on the second bishop of four, so maybe the difficulty ramps up over time, but I've only died in a dungeon twice maybe. It's really easy on the recommended setting, and the combat just isn't much to write home about. Magic regenerates too slowly, upgrades aren't very interesting and you get too few of them, vampiric weapons break the game, hitboxes on your attacks are so wide that I was killing enemies that I wasn't even connecting to, some weapon types are so much better than other ones, it just feels like the dungeon-crawling half of the game was either incomplete or an afterthought.
But then as far as cult management goes, it's also incredibly easy. After the very beginning, I haven't struggled with any of the resource management aspects. I can build whatever I need to, I can keep everyone fed, I can keep everyone healthy, and that's before getting into the upgrades that automate those processes for you. That easiness then makes choosing doctrines really boring- a lot of choices are A) thing that will make your cult mad but give you resources, or B) thing that costs resources and makes your cult happy. I'm drowning in resources, why wouldn't I pick the second one most of the time?
The problem seems to come down to the rate your cult generates Devotion (and thus, Blueprints) is set way too high, and the costs of building stuff are way too low. Before I ever got to the point where I had to struggle with managing resources, I had already unlocked the thing that made it easier to manage those resources, and every time I turned around it seemed like my cult had capped out on Devotion and I was unlocking the next thing to build. I'm only halfway through the game and I'm already at the last level of the upgrade trees, and the only thing stopping me from passing the rest of my doctrines is that they timegate it to stop you.
Lastly, the style of the game has been disappointing. Griffin described it as similar to Happy Tree Friends, and that's fairly apt. Much like the shock and horror of random gore and violence, the Creepy Cute horror elements lose their impact fairly quickly. When they described it as being like the Binding of Isaac, I pictured the Lamb picking up upgrades that made them become more and more grotesque or demonic as they became corrupted, but if you watch the animated trailers... that's about as dark as it really gets. A few gestures at horror, blood coming from the eyes, red empty eyes, glowing pentagrams. Cute at first but quickly loses any punch.
The way they described the game made me think it was going to be similar to Cultist Simulator, your cult operated in the shadows of society, and you had to recruit/tempt/corrupt vulnerable people and exploit them for power in your crusade against the other cults. Instead, this is a primitive world where four evil cults rule over the land, so almost everyone you meet is a cultist. You're not corrupting regular people into a shadow war, you're a small startup that is just headhunting your competition. People aren't leaving the comforts of society to move to a camp in the middle of nowhere where they have to eat grass and there aren't any bathrooms all so they can worship you, and that makes it lose the grotesque impact it could have had. Maybe it's an event I haven't run into, but they mentioned recruiting a follower who seemed to have killed their whole village. I haven't seen anything like that. All of my followers were converted from other cults, recruited by missionaries, or saved from being sacrificed. And from a gameplay perspective, since the cultists randomly generate with 2-3 traits, but the pool of traits has only 20 traits (and most of them are just positive/negative versions of the same trait) it makes them all feel interchangeable. A couple of example traits: lose/gain faith when recruiting this character, lose/gain faith when this character falls ill, this cultist is harder/easier to level up by 15%, etc. You can't get cultists that have bonuses to farming but are bad at missionary work, or who are shy- so they gain extra loyalty when being inspired or confessing but won't attend sermons or rituals, or who get sick when they don't eat specific meals- the kind of thing that would give you another lever to manage. It's just so boring.
Sorry for the essay, but I don't really understand what game the guys were talking about this week, because it doesn't feel like it was the same one as the one I played.