Cult of the Lamb came out swinging. The announcement at E3 was enough to get me highly interested: Cult Sim + Town Builder + Roguelite Action Game. Adorable + Hyperviolent aesthetic. Devolver backing it. All Platforms. Yes.

Launch was . . ok? The game played pretty great, core mechanics were solid, core gameplay loop is great. The decisions made in founding and developing your cult have tangible direct impacts to gameplay. Choosing one doctrine over another can make your game easier or harder, by making your cult favor certain things over another. It’s incredibly easy to go on a deep dive and come back to your whole town on fire with a bunch of dead cultists surrounded by vomit surrounded by crap, with your remaining cultists ill or dissenting. Doctrines can help you smooth that over by making your cultists totally cool with death, or more trusting of your guidance. Or you can choose stuff to help you squeeze your cult for more cash, more resources, more labor time, etc.

The core combat mechanics and general dungeon diving are all pretty great. Dungeon dives give you the opportunity to get more resources, find and save new cult members, find new tarot card upgrades, and progress through the linear plot of the game. Dungeons are built out as a multi-round multi-tier encounters. Pick a biome, fight through a floor, get a reward. Make some branching choices as pioneered by Slay the Spire, do more floors, eventually get to a boss, get a new follower. Revisit three more times to progressively go deeper into the dungeon, and eventually beat the biome’s boss. Then move to the next one.

So why’d it take me over a month to talk about this game? Bugs. So many bugs. And worse, bugs that require a patch that for some reason took forever to get released on Xbox. What kind of bugs?

Sometimes you’d do something and the game would just get stuck. Do a sermon? Softlock. Talkin to one of your little buddies? Softlock. Fighting in a room against specific enemy types that fly off screen? Softlock. The game would just get sad and fail to exit out of whatever subroutine you were in the middle of, and if you hadn’t saved, tough, quit to menu and restart.

Progression was also screwed, because there was a bug that made it so no more than like 6 followers would come to a Sermon or Ritual. This means if you had a specific cultist who you needed to off, and wanted to do it through a Ritual . . well tough, maybe he just doesn’t want to show up today.

There were also some achievement-based ones where you just . . wouldn’t get progress. Those suck too.

This led to a LOT of frustration, but I still plowed through it, unlocked all the buildings, unlocked all the weapons and powers, beat all the biomes, got to the final boss. Then . . . just stopped. Patches had already released on PC, Switch and PS5, surely the patch will be out soon! I’ll just wait for the patch and finish the game . . and then it just didn’t come.

It’s out now, though! Finally!