Honestly, it's hard to give this game such a bad rating.
The gameplay loop is addictive, the art exceptional, the music incredible. But now, today, I can no longer progress. The sermons crash, forcing me to relaunch the game and skip them (and therefore blocking my progression) and most of the changes I make to my cult are not reflected.
Before the last update, it was already complicated. But this is no longer playable. And that's a real shame: again, gamers who choose not to buy on Steam, gamers who choose to actually own their games are being pushed aside by the development team and publishers. Gog must do what is necessary to guarantee game updates equivalent to the Steam versions. As for publishers, if you do not intend to update your games on Gog, do not publish them on this platform!
I requested a refund for the game and I will be willing to buy it back once it gets updated/if it ever gets updated.
Suckered into preordering for cosmetics, progression bug fix deployed on Steam but not on GOG ( at the time of writing. )
The overall experience left a bad impression; transitioned from wanting to play on release to waiting for the fix, regretting my choice of platform and looking for something else to play, so I may be overly negative.
From what I could enjoy of it:
Dungeons are a la Binding of Isaac, without bombs, keys and spacebar items. You get a random weapon and spell at the start of each dungeon, with maybe a chance to replace one of them. You can pick from two tarot cards a few times per dungeon, but effect on gameplay seemed minimal ( +1 heart or better chests, more damage or more mana drop, etc.) Combat is faster than Isaac, with dodging.
The base/cult management is Don't Starve + Stardew Valley + Oxygen Not Included, but very limited in scope and world size, with essentially none of the exploration and overall very stripped down. The premise ( cult leader ) promises more than it delivers. There is no mystical eldritch subtlety, and there is no -cult- per se ( see Cultist Simulator )
The best way to put it, I could see this being a bugged Don't Starve Halloween DLC; on mobile.
This would be 5 stars if it wasn't so buggy. I was first hit with the Tier 3 softlock bug. Started a new save and was careful to not trigger the Tier 3 softlock bug. Now that they have finally patched the Tier 3 bug I now can't perform any rituals. It just goes into a endless animation loop. This also happens if a cultist dies which is kind of funny because you just see other members continiously encounter the body and puking while having no control over the Lamb. So now my first save is fixed and my second; much deeper into the game, save is soft locked.
Game is often touted as roguelike + base management. The base requires virtually no actual management, just somewhat tedious busywork. Impossible to fail at if you have your eyeballs pointed at the screen. The fighting parts are a normal hacknslash dungeon crawler with procedural generation. You can't save/reload mid-dungeon-run, but they take all of ten minutes. Not a roguelike or roguelite by any stretch of the terms.
What it really is is a super shallow but quite fun cult simulator with pretty art. Casual fun.
The hacknslash gameplay is fun, but very easy by default, playing on max difficulty + golden fleece made it a nice challenge for me, someone who has little experience with hacknslash games and is terrible at bullet hell. If you're actually good at those genres, it might be impossible to make this game a real challenge.
I see a lot of older reviews mentioning bugs, I experienced no bugs except one where occasionally at the base everything would stop moving. This can be resolved simply by saving and exiting to the main menu.
Self-corrupts save game.
When loaded again, the game freezes at random points unrecoverably.
Spend money on something else because you won't be able to finish this title.
