A great game marred by a lack of polish.
Cult of the Lamb has a lot of really excellent bones, but fails to add any meat to its experience.
This is the best way I can think of to sum up my beef with this game. The art direction, visuals, music, and sound design are all wonderful and I have no complaints there, but the moment you step into the actual gameplay or writing, I found disappointment abound.
For example, several of the melee weapon options are outright bad with the current game balancing. Trying to use combo-focused weapons is impossible without taking hits, as they don't put out enough dps to kill fast enough and enemies attack slightly too fast to get the full hit out. Cooking is a simple and very easy timing minigame, and fishing is just a variant on that same minigame. Most of managing your cult is just kind of boring busywork, to be blunt, and even on hard I had no difficulty maxing out my leveling in as little as an afternoon.
The writing, meanwhile, is a severe disappointment. For a game about cults and religion, it fails to really commit to its theme and include the cultish flavor you'd expect. For example, you can choose your own doctrine, but it's just a description of stats. There's no flavor text or actual DOCTRINE in the menu. The intro text to most new dungeons is just the same text with names swapped. There's a stunning lack of fun being had with the theming on a writing front, and it definitely drags the whole experience down.
Finally, I don't know if the developers just overcommit to a bad joke or what but a lot of the poop stuff comes off as an outright fetish. The only reference to sex I've seen in the ENTIRE GAME ABOUT A HIPPIE CULT COMMUNE is regarding the coprophiliac trait, which... makes your cultists love dirty toilets and poo. It's weird and kind of offputting instead of funny or distressing in a way that adds value.
Overall, it's an 8/10 experience lowered to a 6 at best by lacking polish and missing elements.