In the run-up to launch day, Cult of the Lamb creative director Julian Wilton was still pinching himself: “I haven’t accepted it yet, because my priority has been to get the game out,” he told ABC Arts.
“I was refreshing the Steam store page yesterday and seeing the numbers keep going up…it’s in a whole different league than our previous games.”
In the year since the fourth game from its Massive Monster studio was announced at the European Gamescom trade show, Cult of the Lamb has become one of the most anticipated video games of 2022.
Before its global release on Friday, pre-orders alone had taken the Melbourne-made indie to the top of the sales charts on digital video game marketplace Steam.
Debuting at Gamescom in August 2021, Cult of the Lamb immediately stood out from other games. The announcement trailer focused on narrative and aesthetics rather than game mechanics; with stunning cell animation, it dramatized the game’s titular protagonist as he escapes the altar of sacrifice to start his own cult of lovable animal followers, seeking revenge in the name of a mysterious entity known as The One Who Waits.
Cult of the Lamb is animated by Half Giant, a studio from Australia. (Provided by: Massive Monster)
Set to a cool, ethereal beat by First Nations musician and producer Narayana Johnson (who wrote the game’s soundtrack), the trailer sparked a flurry of activity on social media that has continued to grow in the year leading up to the release of Friday.
When Massive Monster released a demo of Cult of the Lamb a few months after its trailer, it was clear that the game’s mix of creepy and cute ran deeper than its aesthetics: it combines action-packed dungeons and combat well designed with smoother gameplay such as fishing, community building, and home decor elements inspired by titles like 2020’s blockbuster Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
It’s a game that puts fun first, accommodating a wide variety of players without sacrificing (no pun intended) the strategic edge and replayability of a challenging title.
Speaking to ABC Arts ahead of the global launch, Wilton graciously attributed the game’s reception to the US-based game publisher’s marketing campaign (“Devolver Digital really knows how to do their job!”). But the game’s initial success also has something to do with its studio’s respect for the breadth and diversity of people who play video games.
Julian Wilton, the creative director of Massive Monster, won an Australian Game Developer Award in 2019. (ABC Arts: Kate Disher-Quill)
Make games accessible
Massive Monster’s first official title was 2018’s The Adventure Pals, but the studio’s three co-directors have been working together for more than a decade, since meeting online as teenagers.
Making accessible games has been a guiding principle of their collaborations since the beginning.
Wilton met art director James Pearmain and design director Jay Armstrong through chat forums dedicated to Adobe Flash, a computer program used to make games and animated short films.
Widely proliferated, free and easy to use, Flash was the backbone of the creative Internet in the 2000s, and Wilton has been drawn to it since he was a teenager.
The online Flash gaming community encouraged “jumping in and doing something weird, and people would check it out,” says Wilton.
This community allowed the three developers to refine their notion of the kind of mechanics that people could pick up quickly.
Rather than offering complex narratives or high skill thresholds, successful Flash games were generally short-lived and designed to be played for fun by anyone with an Internet connection; for a small browser-based game, accessibility is key.
Wilton found early success through this community with a Flash game called Angry Bees, which was published on the popular video game website Miniclip, earning the then-teenager $20,000 (which saw him quickly shut down your PayPal account for suspicious activity).
These formative experiences with the Flash game community led to an approach to game design that Wilton describes as iterative, low-cost, and audience-driven.
In fact, the way the Massive Monster team worked together in the early stages of Cult of the Lamb sounds less like the work of three software developers and more like a band coming together, combining different approaches and ideas until that something sticks.
However, their goal was clear: they wanted to make a strategy video game based on layered systems that offered players many ways to play and replay, something more complex than their previous adventure games, Never Give Up (2019) and The Adventure Pals. Crucially though, it had to be fun first, challenge second.
The Adventure Pals (2018) is a platform adventure game about friendship and exploration. (Provided by: Massive Monster)
“We always like to make things very accessible and easy to pick up. When we make a game, we want your grandma to be able to pick it up and play it, or at least have fun with it,” says Wilton.
“It’s important to us that things are accessible and informal.”
Bring roguelikes to a wider audience
Despite its mass appeal, Cult of the Lamb’s gameplay was initially inspired by a genre that is notoriously challenging: the roguelike. The term is named after the 1985 computer game Rogue and refers to video games that share a set of challenging gameplay features.
Typically in a roguelike game, the player travels through a series of randomly generated rooms fighting enemies for power-ups, weapons, and loot, getting stronger as they go, but when they die, they die permanently, and any new run will see the player starting over without any of their previous loot, on square one.
Because roguelikes reset the character’s abilities with each death, they especially reward the player’s strategy; really skilled roguelike players become so familiar with the types of enemies and opportunities that may arise, and how often they do, that they can strategize for each unique run based on percentages, making strategic decisions and taking risks as they progress.
As a result, playing roguelikes can be incredibly rewarding; however, they are also notoriously inaccessible to new players.
In the last 10 years, the roguelike genre has experienced a resurgence through titles such as the wildly popular Darkest Dungeon and Binding of Isaac. At the same time, the genre has been rejected by gamers who are left out due to the high barrier to entry of these games.
For someone unfamiliar with the genre, playing a roguelike can be punishing: it takes a long time to start feeling fun.
Cult of the Lamb isn’t the first recent indie hit to remix the roguelike for a wider audience and find success. In 2018, Supergiant Games’ Hades took the awards season by storm with the story of Zagreus, son of Hades, whose repeated attempts to escape the underworld reveal new aspects of the story, as well as abilities and weapons .
Hades by Supergiant Games was released in 2018. (Provided by Supergiant Games)
By using narrative to motivate a player through each “failure,” Supergiant Games found a way to make the roguelike appeal to an audience that cared more about story than strategy.
The game also featured a “God Mode” that increased the player’s defenses every time they died; it meant that the assistance they received was proportional to their personal skill level and leveled out as their skills improved (rather than making the game easier by removing elements from the game entirely).
Difficulty modes for everyone
Like Hades, Cult of the Lamb builds on the challenge and replayability of the roguelike, while offering accessibility and difficulty modes that help open up the game to more players.
While there are some differences in Cult of the Lamb’s four difficulty settings that are noticeable to the player (you have less health on the harder modes, for example), there are also subtle assist aspects built into the standard game modes that respond directly to player behavior. .
“The game tries to figure out if the player is struggling and adjusts combat or dungeons accordingly,” explains Wilton.
“[But] in the two hardest modes, these settings are disabled.”
Knowing that they wanted the game to reach a wider audience, Massive Monster chose to treat these aspects of support as standard in the game; the “unaided” challenge of a typical roguelike is available to players who want it, but with a subscription.
Combined with accessibility options that allow players to turn off flashing lights, camera movement, and resize text, these design decisions provide a highly customizable gaming experience.
Play as you wish
Cult of the Lamb also welcomes a wider player base by facilitating playstyles that favor less combat and more community building.
While the core gameplay is the same for all players: venture into a dungeon, fight enemies, return with supplies, build your community with those supplies, the game supports a number of methods to tackle these challenges.
Cult of the Lamb is set in the Forest of the Eternal Moon, a mythical place ruled by warring cults and dark magic. (Provided by: Massive Monster)
Spending time developing your cult can generate resources that make each dungeon run more easily, and visiting neighboring towns offers the opportunity to gather resources through trade or questing, minimizing the player’s time in combat.
Massive Monster also took a similar approach to the game’s darker elements: the player can either be a relatively benevolent leader or a vicious tyrant.
“Our approach is, it’s OK if there’s some of this dark stuff, as long as we don’t force any of that stuff on the players,” Wilton says.
Video games are for everyone
Cult of the Lamb’s design is based on a deep respect for the diverse reality of video game players.
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