To be fair, the early days in the game can be annoying, your followers can't tend to any of their basic needs and the experience can quickly morph into being a parent for a dozen whiny and needy toddlers. I enjoyed this aspect of the game more, you get to recruit as many people as you like, perform rites and rituals to increase their devotion and look after their day to day. Moving onto the management sim aspect of the game, when you're not dicing up or cursing soldiers of the Old Faith, you're taking care of your own followers.

The random nature of the stages still wasn't something I treasured but in fairness, it kept me on my toes and I got the intended experience from CotL. I still do have a couple of complaints, the hit boxes on the enemies aren't perfectly calibrated and that gets more frustrating when you're on your last half heart and the boss has 33% of it's health left. The enemies are presented as cute/mildly threatening but many of them evolve into some hideous monstrosity which all have a unique/ugly visual flair that makes them more fun to beat up. There's enough variety in the enemies and the game doesn't punish you too hard for making the occasional mistake. While I still didn't love every minute of the dungeon crawling/fighting, it was pretty well done. Playing a game that requires combat that doesn't have clear goalposts to run through and a linear path to plan for was never my favourite (see zombie mode in Call of Duty for another example). I'll start with the roguelike side of the game, I knew what I was getting into with CotL but this aspect of the game isn't my chosen genre normally.

At first glance, Cult of the Lamb doesn't look like something revolutionary (the first thing that will probably catch your eye is the art style, more on that later) but it's a really interesting mix between a roguelike/dungeon crawler and a management sim (think something like the Sims with a much darker edge).

Cult of the lamb animation