Cult of the Lamb

 Hell is other farmyard animals

Devolver Digital is ever the gushing receptacle for endless onslaughts of some of the best Indie games that you could hope to catch a glimpse of. If you're just looking to play something new and don't know exactly what this is, you just need to sit down for one of their conferences and you'll come away with an entire shopping list's worth of 'to buy' games. That's actually one of the reasons why it can be so hard to cover their E3 and Gamescon presence, so many interesting games with so few details, there's little more perspective I can add other than "Ohh" and "ahh". (Not that I'll stop myself from providing just that when there's a game which really steals my breath away) But then I'll slip up and see something fly past my face and instantly fall in love and then I have to talk about it and that's why we're all here today. But what is it about Cult of the Lamb which made me stop and look it up? Why this game and none of the others? That's actually very simple...

Helluva Boss is the reason why. If you haven't been watching that, Helluva Boss is a adult-oriented animated webseries which is so much better than those collection of tags imply. It's a project of several talented artists from all walks of life coming together to create something outside of the purview of any of the major animation studios and therefore allowed be a bit more 'out there'. Helluva Boss and it's currently unaired sister show 'Hazbin Hotel' both star twisty denizens of Hell and present all kinds of hellish locations, people and skewered moralities under that spotlight. And I love it. Every single frame of it. Every flawed character, every tucked-away background joke, every surprisingly well produced song, the whole package. Thus, as you can imagine, smothering myself with the show has really given me a taste for animated hell; just in time for Cult of the Lamb to waddle up to me and tempt me with it's satanic cartoony wiles.

Wreathed in a art style I'm going to call 'adorably twisted', Cult of the Lamb tells the rather simple tale of a lamb starting a cult. What? What did you expect? Maybe a demonically possessed lamb who strikes out in a wild and strange land to summon an army of devotees in the name of the mysterious quad-armed entity who saved his life? I hope so, 'cause the game's about all that too. But that window dressing is all well and good, what has me up and away so far is the visual design because, as I implied, they struck all the cords I just finished stringing over the past month. Just watching the trailer and seeing these adorable little anthro-animals raise their arms as their eyes roll into the back of their skulls and turn blood red is fantastically hilarious to me. It calls upon that same vein of sweet corrupted comedic absurdity as the Woodland Critters from South Park, I love it.

Another interesting aesthetic direction was taken with the way that the actual gameplay is envisioned, and you ought to know by now how much of a sucker I am for different and unique art directions. Functionally this is very familiar, it's a cartoon-flat angle-down perspective hack and slash with a lot of bright colours and gloriously hideous enemy design. But just with a lot of scroller games this year, there's a mix of art styles that are colliding in a cool way. You see, the actual stage environments are drawn with proper depth to them whilst the characters and foreground objects are purposefully drawn completely flat, as though up against the page of a comic, giving this very subtle effect that makes the foreground items almost look like cutouts placed atop the stage. This is emphasised with long shadows and choice lighting effects that collate together to achieve a style that reminds me, at least, of a stage play production. (Whether that'll come to anything within the actual plot of the game is anyone's guess.)

Core gameplay seems to be your usual affair of slicing and dodge rolling, with a pace to it that I find oddly reminiscent of Moonlighter. (I wonder if this will be one of those games that'll ask you to adopt a 'glass canon' sort of playstyle.) Although if I'm being honest it's the cult building which still has my attention here. Snippets of the trailer show the player cutting down trees and erecting vegetable patches, almost like something you'd expect from Animal Crossing, only in this game the focus of this little town is around a grotesque monstrous idol with weeping black gunk eyes that the villager-animals prostrate themselves before in reverence. And just to bring things back around to the deliciously dark, we see our lamb protagonist brutalising and poisoning some of his own cultists under the tag "Beware of false prophets." It's so charmingly twisted, I just can't help but smile everytime I learn more!

And that is about the high and low of Cult of the Lamb. These indie games don't typically come along with grand promises and speculation vehicles in order to get tongues wagging in perpetuity, they are what they are. Can you tell how much I find that refreshing? I've touched on it but there's just a rolling snow drift of games that promise to be the sky and the moon, banking those promises on ever swelling teams of disassociated programmers or literal blank cheques of development costs. (Looking forward to watching 'The Initiative' and it's AAAA games fall apart spectacularly.) When as a consumer, I get just as much out of spying these little games that do something singular and do it well. Cult of the Lamb is concerned with corrupting the cute and innocent. Great. Rock that.

It goes to show how important it is for a company like Devolver Digital to exist for propping these games up, because they encourage a future for game development that isn't barrelling towards ever more unsustainable ballooning projects. And maybe somewhere along the way we can see a reflection of how wrong Playstation is to shirk these very same developers in favour of their pursuit of gaming 'perfection'. Heck, we've already seen the wear it's starting to have, now that Sony is pushing for £70 games and calling it a justifiable response to the huge development costs that they themselves readily incurred! If only lower budget and smaller games factored into their sales models so that they wouldn't be straining their goodwill with their customers like this... (I'd call that 'food for thought', if I ever believed for a second that such an idea so much as touched a single Sony employee.)

One of the greatest things about the gaming market, in my opinion, is the way that any game, big or small, can find a sizable audience for what it is. Huge and garish budgets don't need to be written on the screen in gilded gold, and nowadays you don't even need a production company, how's that for a welcoming market? (though luck is often a factor that needs to be accounted for, given the sheer number of games that are out there) And sure, I speak with the bias of someone who themselves is contributing to the indie scene, but I like to think what we have puts us well above other entertainment forms like Film and TV for sheer bristling choice. That's the beautiful thing about the gaming market, whether you want to live out a sleepy virtual life managing a town or sacrifice cute animals to a demonic death cult, there's a game out there for every time of the day.