YMMV / Cult of the Lamb

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • In the good ending, what motivates the Lamb to turn on the One Who Waits? Furious anger over how their patron is so quick to discard them after everything they did for him? A selfish desire to keep the Crown's power? Desperation not to die? A desire to save and protect their flock, who the One Who Waits is revealed to have taken prisoner? A combination thereof?
    • Speaking of the Lamb, their motivations are rather obscure. Are they genuinely loyal to the One Who Waits for saving and empowering them? Are they serving him out of fear or lack of choice? Are they just taking advantage of being a cult leader to avenge their fallen lambs? And do they really care about their followers or do they only show them kindness out of pragmatism?
  • Do the followers actually care about the Lamb? They appear to lose Faith in them over fairly small things such as being woken up late at night for sermons and rituals, and whenever they're killed in battle, despite knowing that they can come back to life and do it all over again every time, as they perceive any death they have in battle as a sign of weakness. Are they simply with the Lamb because it's better than their previous situations or being sacrificed? Or because serving a cult leader is all they know, rather than doing it out of actual loyalty? It's implied that they do have some loyalty to the Lamb, as they apologize for being mind-controlled by Bishop Shamura into fighting them. As well, they look horrified when the Lamb is asked by The One Who Waits to sacrifice themself.
  • If you choose to have the Lamb indoctrinate The One Who Waits, rather than killing him, is the Lamb doing it to show he's not like him and wants to show him a better way of being a leader and making others happy? Or is it a form of Cruel Mercy where the Lamb is surpassing his cruelty by ruling over him with the same power he's lost and will never again have?
• Angst? What Angst?: While it's meant to set up the backdrop of the story and establish why the Lamb was chosen to be a servant of The One Who Waits, the Lamb doesn't seem too broken up about the fact that their unseen family and potentially friends were genocided so that the prophecy couldn't be fulfilled.
• Awesome Art: The art style is regularly touted as a highlight of the game, being very colorful and cute to look at.
• Awesome Music: One of the most praised aspects of the game is its haunting soundtrack, fitting the vibe of the cultist aspect of the game.
• Breather Level: During Crusades, there is always a chance that any given combat room will only contain a handful of weak enemies. The player can invoke this themselves by choosing a route with vendor or pickup rooms to give themselves breathing room between combat encounters.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Picking the Grass Eater Trait is almost always more desirable than the Cannibal Trait, especially early on when your food supply is limited. While grass meals aren't very nutritious, they are readily available since grass can be found everywhere and at least keeps your followers from starving to death. Follower meat is much more difficult to come by and is much more likely to make your followers sick.
  • The Fleece of Fates is a fairly safe choice for any dungeon, giving you four Tarot cards at the start of each crusade at the cost of not being able to pick up anymore afterwards. This is a relatively small price to pay compared to the doubled incoming damage and lack of healing that comes with other fleeces, and four cards is usually enough to give you a significant advantage.
• Complete Monster: Midas is the greedy worshipper of unknown gods related to fortune and riches. Having turned various people into golden statues, leaving them alive and aware, Midas has the Lamb give him four of their followers to put them through the same fate, rewarding the cult leader only out of pragmatism and not hesitating to attack them when he decides to steal their money.
• Crack Pairing: Sozo x Helob has gained somewhat of a following, despite the two never interacting with one another ingame not to mention Sozo's death.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The Propaganda Speakers. At first, it's a chilling reminder that, despite whatever benevolence you may have, you're still setting up what's basically a totalitarian dictatorship in the form of a cult. Then you fuel it and get close to it and you hear... sheep noises.
• Crossover Ship: The Lamb x Red from the Angry Birds franchise. Yes, really. It all started when the official social media accounts for both franchises challenged each other to a Creator Clash, which spawned a Fandom Rivalry that lasted several days... up until the Cult of the Lamb Twitter account called a truce by posting fan art of Red and The Lamb sloppily making out. The Angry Birds Twitter account responded with a flirty video of the Red playing Cult of the Lamb, and fans following both accounts jokingly accepted that the characters are either dating or married after it was "officiated" by YachtClubGames.
• Cry for the Devil: The Bishops earn a little sympathy when they are recruited into the Cult and finally start to feel the pain of the mutilations they suffered from Narinder. Heket in particular seems especially broken, her arrogance gone now that she can barely speak through her ravaged throat.
• Demonic Spiders: The Sins of the Flesh update introduced a new type of enemy: Damned Followers, which are followers corrupted by filling up their sin gauge one too many times. You only rarely need to deal with them and they can be avoided entirely by not interacting with the new Sin-related buildings and rituals, but they are a pain when they do show up. What they lack in health they make up for with Bullet Hell patterns that you would normally only see from bosses, as well as having to be fought multiple times throughout your run. Initially, fighting them would've meant that you'd be forced to murder one of your followers, which would've be devastating if it'd been one that you have gotten particularly fond of, but a patch made it so that they can be re-indoctrinated into your Cult after defeat.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • The One Who Waits is established as being an evil god just like the Bishops, perhaps even more so, and yet many depictions of him have treated him as a misunderstood Jerk with a Heart of Gold white sheep of the family who became more cruel after his imprisonment.
  • The Bishops themselves have their villainous traits downplayed and their familial bond emphasized despite causing the genocide of the lambs.
  • Despite how you can play the game, the Lamb is still a Villain Protagonist running a cult to reach their own ends.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Sozo, the eccentric Addled Addict, is one of the most popular NPCs by far. Many fans fell in love with his lovable Cloudcuckoolander personality, as well as the Black Comedy surrounding his entire character. This popularity was likely a driving factor in Sins of the Flesh allowing you to bring him Back from the Dead and actually heal him of his madness.
  • Helob, the spider merchant who sells you followers, has a surprising number of fans, due to his Affably Evil demeanor.
• Fan Nickname: Pre-release, Redditors on r/CultOfTheLamb nicknamed the main character Lambert. The same nickname is also used by fans of the game on Twitter.
• Fanon:
  • The One Who Waits and his keepers Baal and Aym are commonly depicted as a father and son dynamic, with TOWW raising them as his own and caring for them greatly. Some even have them be his actual children if they ship TOWW and Forneus. This has been debunked in the Relics of the Old Faith update where, while TOWW did raise them, he cares not for them.
  • If Narinder is spared and becomes a follower, many stories follow the after where he is much more mellowed out and kinder after years of being in the Lamb's cult.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With the The Binding of Isaac and Don't Starve fanbases, even before release, due to all three games having a somewhat cute art style combined with a dark and ominous tone and atmosphere. There was even an official Crossover with Don't Starve, where both games got items from the other, and Webber from Don't Starve: Reign of Giants became an unlockable follower.
  • It also developed one with Amanda the Adventurer due to both games having a sheep/lamb as a main character and focus on demons.
  • It developed a small one between Ringing Bell, another dark form of media where the protagonist is a Villain Protagonist sheep with a bell collar.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Offering Shrines will allow your followers to leave you offerings in the form of resources such as money, cooking ingredients (including meat, which is usually difficult to get on a steady basis) and even consecrated materials. Building a ton of them will ensure that you'll be drowning in resources.
  • The Ritual of Enrichment will grant you an utterly massive amount of money at the cost of some Faith, which can be offset by immediately using a Faith-increasing ritual or a Sermon. It will ensure that you'll have more money than you'll know what to do with. Just be careful using it with a large amount of followers, particularly on console versions, lest it become a different kind of game breaker due to the ludicrous amount of coin objects generated.
  • The Ritual of Resurrection allows you to bring back followers that died of old age or are sacrificed/ascended, allowing you to reach loyalty levels well beyond what a follower could normally reach in a single lifetime, meaning they'll net you more devotion and make a stronger demon. The Golden Skull Necklace will only amplify this effect, as Followers won't even have to be ressurrected to reach extreme levels.
    • If an extreme-level follower becomes Fornax, the demon that delivers an explosive attack to a random enemy in a room, the damage of said attack will be so high that even the hardest bosses will be dead before you can reach them, as they're the only enemy in the room when the fight begins. The tipping point for this happening seems to be around Level 30, which can be easily reached in just a couple resurrections if you know what you're doing, let alone by the time you reach the Purged Bishops.
    • The same applies to Paean who can generate so many hit points with an extreme-level Follower that it makes the Lamb functionally invulnerable even if the player makes little effort to dodge enemy attacks.
  • The Golden Fleece gives you a 10% attack buff every time you kill an enemy that initially stacked without limit, at the cost of the buff resetting and you taking double the damage when you're hit. Considering the number of weak enemies in the game you'll quickly reach the point where you're one-shotting everything you hit, gaining ever higher attack in turn. It pairs especially well with high-damage weapons like the Hammer as well as Tarots that boost Curse usage/damage. This was eventually nerfed in patch 1.0.12, which capped the damage buff at 200%, but was brought up to a middle ground in patch 1.0.13, which removed the cap but made it gain 5% per kill, making it ramp up much slower.
  • The Fervour's Host tarot card. It fully replenishes Fervor every time you enter a room with enemies in it. Even mediocre Curses can be spammed with impunity to delete entire rooms at no risk to yourself. And if you draw this card while wearing the Fleece of the Glass Cannon mentioned below then the dungeon you're in is basically just a formality.
  • The Fleece of the Glass Cannon halves your health and weapon damage, but also halves the cost of curses and doubles their damage. Combined with a high level fervor gathering demon, it's possible to just walk into a room and spam curses, even finishing with a full fervor gauge. It's powerful even with bad RNG; a good curse and fervor/curse enhancing tarots pushes it into absurd territory. Then the Relics of the Old Faith update added the Fleece of the Cursed Crusade, which makes its abilities even more extreme, disabling weapons entirely but drawing a guaranteed four good tarots, the aforementioned Fervour's Host included.
  • Divine Guardian grants two seconds of invulnerability on casting. This doesn't seem like much, but paired with Fervor cost reduction, regen, and gathering abilities, that invincibility can last an entire fight. Paired with the aforementioned Golden Fleece, the Lamb can become nigh-unstoppable.
  • The Fleece of Fervour's Favour added in Relics of the Old Faith. It allows you to regenerate half a red heart for the same Fervour cost as using a Curse, with the downside that no hearts will appear in the dungeon. But given that it's normally easier to gain Fervour than it is to find hearts, especially when combined with fervour collection buffs, the Fleece essentially gives the Lamb a Healing Factor. It's particularly broken when combined with the aforementioned Fervour's Host tarot card, allowing you to regenerate two full hearts in every single combat room (provided you don't use many Curses).
  • Having The One Who Waits as a follower and giving him a Missionary Necklace. With that and the combo of his immortality, you'll always have a follower who will have a guaranteed success at pilgrimages.
  • While the Berserker Fleece normally turns the Lamb into an extreme Glass Cannon, multiplying their damage output by 10× at the cost of making them a One-Hit-Point Wonder, this weakness was completely negated with the demon Paean, which increases your max HP regardless of what fleece you're wearing. By the way, The One Who Waits will always be Paean, so his natural immortality would've allow him to reach an extreme level. Having him around turns the Berserker Fleece from Power at a Price to power for absolutely free. This was removed in the Sins of the Flesh update, however.
  • In the Accessibility Options menu, there's a toggle to freeze time while on a crusade. With this enabled, you can take as much time as you want crusading, and followers will not get hungry or age, and time limits for quests will not run out. It's even possible to complete several crusades in a single day. It can even be toggled on mid-crusade, such as if you draw a tarot card that increases damage during the day/night.
• Goddamned Bats: Shielded Scamps are enemies introduced with the Relics of the Old Faith update, taking The Goomba of the cultist enemies and giving them a small shield that reduces all damage dealt to them to Scratch Damage. They are no more dangerous than regular Scamps, but to make any meaningful progress in killing them you need to break their shield with the newly added heavy attacks. This is not too much of an issue with most weapons, but heaven help you if you are using something slow like a hammer or the gauntlets, since Scamps are usually fast enough to get away from you while you are charging your heavy attack.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • A follower may suspect another follower is a spy and ask you to investigate and arrest them. However, the quest-giver is not excluded from the target pool, so a follower can end up accusing themselves of being a spy.
  • Similar to the above, any follower can give a quest to rescue their sibling and add them to the cult. Notably, this also included Narinder—the One Who Waits— which, given their family history, has some interesting implications. This has since been patched out, however.
  • Narinder's skin should be unique, but randomizing a new Follower's appearance after recruiting him has a chance of offering it.
  • Shamura will summon a total of three of your followers and compel them to fight you. Once killed, the follower will drop any necklace they were wearing which can be given to another follower. However, if you Resurrect the slain follower, you'll find they still have their original necklace meaning you now have a duplicate.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game has a big Japanese and South Korean fanbase thanks to its cute art style and animal characters.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In Random Encounters Cult of the Lamb Song one of the things the Lamb said they could do is "Dance in the nude around the fire light". Come the Sins of the Flesh update the cult can do exactly that with the "nudist" ritual.
• Jerkass Woobie: The four Bishops can be seen as this, given the brutal and crippling injuries they sustained from Narinder. In particular Heket grieving over how much she and her family suffered from the lamb, Kallamar pathetically begging to be spared, and Shamura going from being the wisest of the bishops to a brain damaged garbler are all particularly tragic.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • There's a (rather common) trait that gives affected followers a fetish for poop. The tendency for these followers to confess that they've always wanted to eat a meal made of poop almost immediately reached infamy among players.
  • Jokes abound over how the Lamb, the vessel of an imprisoned God of Evil, and possessing said god's nightmarish powers... is basically a babysitter for their cultists, having to feed them, clean up after them, and do tasks for them. Fanart sometimes portrays the Lamb as being very annoyed and exasperated by their flock's antics. The Monster Roadtrip crossover took this interpretation and ran with it. Similarly, the ending of the "Sins of the Flesh" trailer features a frustrated-looking Lamb shoveling a turd.
  • The sex update. ^Explanation The Cult of the Lamb official twitter claimed they would add sex in the game if they reached 300k followers. They did in fact reach and quickly surpass 300k followers after that, and they weren't kidding: the update "Sins of the Flesh" was announced not too long later, the initial teaser depicting your followers in nothing but a fig leaf dancing around a fire, and though it obviously doesnt depict explicit sex, it prominently features a Creature-Breeding Mechanic which (according to the developers) was directly inspired by The Sims and Pokémon. In the wake of the update's announcement, other indie developers jokingly talked about doing the same, and still other indie developers had to go on record adamantly denying that no, they wouldn't.
• Nausea Fuel: You can make food out of your own followers' poop! Naturally, it's not something you should be doing regularly unless you're really desperate to feed them, as you lose substantial Faith and risk causing diseases for those who eat it. The exception is if that specific follower has the Coprophiliac trait and wants to eat it.
• One True Pairing: An odd example in that the Lamb can marry anyone — or everyone — they please, but a lot of players enjoy immediately marrying Narinder, The One Who Waits as soon as the option comes up. Mostly because of the comedic value of taking down a God, dragging him to your level and making him your spouse just like that, but a lot of fans seem to genuinely like interpreting him as a tsundere who hates how fond he gets of the Lamb's eternal company.
• Popular with Furries: Established a base in the Furry Fandom before it was even released due to it being a colony builder centered on Funny Animals. The fact that you can marry one of your animal followers likely helped.
• Porting Disaster: The Nintendo Switch version is known to suffer from performance issues and be quite laggy, especially if there are many members in your cult. Flickering, softlocks, and random crashes are also known to happen. While subsequent patches have considerably improved it, it's still noticeable.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The buildings that let you generate Lumber and Stone will collapse once they run out, forcing you to build more. It can get very irritating to constantly have to build these structures just to keep a steady supply of materials in the early game. It's even more annoying when you take into account that the only other structure that can collapse are beds and tents... and yet they can be repaired with just some lumber, instead of needing to be rebuilt entirely, and the houses upgraded to the third tier don't collapse at all. While this is clearly to give the players use for lumber and stones toward the end of the game, as most of the other things the players have on their cult site won't have much use for these materials unless they're deliberately destroying the reconstructing buildings, it can be very irritating during the early game when the player will be consistently using and running out of these materials while trying to build other buildings. As well, no upgrades exist for the lumber mill and mine to make them permanent either.
  • Players having to find and clean up the follower's poop in the early game is funny at first but it becomes tedious the more followers you recruit. This doesn't die down after the player makes the first tier outhouse, as the capacity is low and it can quickly overflow depending on your number of followers, which can lead to followers vomiting, getting sick, or finding somewhere else to poop until you empty it. You have to make at least two outhouses and keep track of the capacity of both of them until you can upgrade to the better outhouse, which has a higher capacity but costs more difficult to obtain materials to make. You'll also need at least one Janitor's Station so followers can clean up any messes.
  • There's no indication as to which followers you have given/extorted money to/from, meaning you must interact with each one to check if you want to make sure. Also, you have to perform these actions with each follower, every day.
  • In addition, if your actions have indirectly given a follower enough Loyalty to level up, they will not actually level up until you run up to them and interact with them, even though there's never any reason why you wouldn't want them to level up immediately. This part is fixed in the Sins of the Flesh update, however this update also made the unpopular decision to cap follower levels at 10.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Hammers. The long swing and cooldown of this weapon makes it difficult to use against more mobile enemies and can easily become a death sentence in later levels as more enemies use ranged attacks.
  • Necromantic Weapons. While not necessarily bad, the ghosts they summon are not very frequent and don't do enough damage when they do appear to be worth their low spawn rate. The only less desirable weapon is an unenchanted weapon of the same tier, and players will be eager to drop them for a more powerful enchant at the first opportunity.
• Self-Fanservice:
  • The furry fandom tends to draw the Lamb as... curvier than they are in the game.
  • Heket, unsurprisingly for being the most prominent woman character, gets this as well, often getting depicted as a Big Beautiful Woman.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: The "Leshy's Kitchen Nightmare" short features a brief scene of an unnamed cat follower cheering up a distraught Leshy—the latter having accidentally burnt a steak he'd been cooking—by handing him a camellia flower. This interaction, coupled with Leshy's subsequent reaction (the triangle on his blindfold morphing into a heart as he happily accepts the gift) has led to a number of people shipping the two together.
• Squick: Not only can you make your followers eat poop, but there are also those who specifically ask to eat it because they've always wanted to. The requester also gains Faith from eating it and loses a substantial amount of Faith if they are denied.
• That One Boss: The character players hate fighting the most actually isn't any of the Bishops or Witnesses, it's the unnamed Giant Mook Tennis Boss that appears at random in Anchordeep. When he was first added to the game, players had to figure how to fight him by trial and error, leading to a number of frustrated posts on Reddit calling him assorted expletives.
• That One Sidequest:
  • One of the quests a follower may ask of you is to take a dissenter into your cult. If you accept this before you have a prison you're in for a really rough time. If you deny the quest before you might have to imprison the quest-giver themselves as they might dissent, leaving you with the exact same problem.
  • The "prank" quests can easily become this if the targeted follower is especially valuable. Following through with the quests ends with killing them, while refusing is a heavy hit to your faith.
  • The quest to retrieve 10 Menticide Mushrooms from Anura used to be dependent on praying to the Random Number God for success — unlike the other Fetch Quests which could be resolved in a single dungeon run, the mushrooms had an utterly abysmal drop rate, making it reasonably likely that the quest would be failed, regardless of how long you spend in Anura. This was seemingly unintentional, however, and has been patched by the developers as of the Relics of the Old Faith update — now every mushroom you destroy in the dungeon will drop a Menticide Mushroom.
  • The Fisherman's quest can either be really quick or a grinding nightmare. All he wants you to do is give him four different kinds of fish: an octopus, a crab, a lobster and a squid. If you have the Ritual of the Ocean's Bounty you can significantly increase your chances of fishing them up, but if you happened to choose the Ritual of the Harvest over it... let's hope you're in the Random Number God's good graces.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Given the reveal that the player gets to make The One Who Waits one of their followers at the end of the game should they spare him, it's a wonder why the same can't be done for the Bishops once they're defeated, or even The One Who Waits' followers who the player battles before him.
    • Subverted in the Relics Of The Old Faith update, which grants the ability to recruit both the bishops and The One Who Waits' attendants as followers into your cult.
  • In a case of They Wasted a Perfectly Good Enemy, the large pig-like executioner that kills the Lamb at the beginning of the game seems like they would make for a good Mini-Boss or Elite Mook. Early trailers even showed the Lamb fighting the executioner after rising from the dead, but the executioner is never encountered again after the Lamb is sacrificed.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Bishop Heket sometimes get this treatment, due to her deep voice combined with her lack of notably feminine features.
  • Berith—the Robe vendor who debuts in the Sins of the Flesh update—has one of the most outwardly feminine designs in the game, which can lead one to believe that he's female on first impressions. Doesn't help that he dons a bikini when you encounter him in Anchordeep.
• Viewer Species Confusion: Leshy is supposed to be a worm. His design is based on a bagworm (Which is actually the caterpillar of a moth), which makes cases out of shrubbery. Because of this, he looks more like anthropomorphic tree or bush. The same can be said of his followers.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Despite the cute art style, remember that this game is published by Devolver Digital (the same folks that published Hotline Miami). Despite the cute animals, the game involves you taking control of a possessed lamb who becomes a cult leader and is seen killing and attacking other rival cults. After the teaser was revealed, some viewers described the game as "Animal Crossing meets The Binding of Isaac, Happy Tree Friends, and Sanrio".
• The Woobie: The Lamb themselves. First, they become the Last of His Kind when the Bishops slaughter their race. Then they get nearly put to death by the very same Bishops, only to be saved by another god in exchange for eternal servitude. And then that god ends up no better by attempting to sacrifice them at the game's climax. All in all, a fairly brutal Trauma Conga Line for the crime of being the wrong sheep at the wrong time. Can also count as a Jerkass Woobie if the player chooses to play them as a Bad Boss.

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