One of the best feelings in Cult of the Lamb is when the cult management side of the game and the dungeon crawls all click together, and you enter a serious flow state, balancing both halves of the game without having to think too hard about it.
But as fun as that may be, it’s not really the point of Cult of the Lamb. Really, you should always be thinking about what the next thing could go wrong and not getting complacent about it all—which is where Woolhaven came in clutch.
“People have been playing Cult of the Lamb for so long now, you kind of get really comfortable,” the art director at Massive Monster, James Pearmain, tells me. “Woolhaven is right at the end of the game, you have your big cult set up, and you have things automated.
“Introducing the winter felt like a really good way of switching things up, because it makes everything look different. Suddenly, there’s all this excitement, and the followers are throwing snowballs. You can make snow lambs and change up how you’re going to generate your food.
“It was a good opportunity to get people to rethink, okay, how are you going to get food? And maybe the crops die? You can’t farm the crops during winter. So then, okay, well, what if we had ranching animals? So it kind of was something that came from that central idea of having the winter and just sort of wanting to sort of mix the gameplay up a little bit in the cult.”
Winter in Woolhaven brings waves of storms, some worse than others. At its easiest, winter brings a chill in the air and prevents you from farming on any land that hasn’t been fertilised with rot. But at its worst, it’ll cover your cult in heaps of snow, with storms so violent that cultists are forced to stay inside their tent as structures get snowed under or destroyed. If you don’t prepare well enough, your followers can starve or even freeze to death.
“We wanted to make sure that you’re doing some new things back at the cult,” Pearmain says. “Because it’s a game of two halves. If we had just spent all this time on the dungeon side and the story side and left the cult site as is, it would have got a little bit boring. We weren’t necessarily trying to stress the players out. It was more to provide a fresh experience.”
Woolhaven doesn’t just make the cult management side of the game harder, like Pearmain says, “it’s a game of two halves”. With two new dungeons accompanied by new bad buys to fight and indoctrinate into your cult, the dungeon runs in Woolhaven are also a much-needed refresh to Cult of the Lamb.
It’s not only exciting to run into the snowy mountain and rot underbelly just to face new enemies and earn new tarot cards—the winter requires you to head into these new dungeons.
Charged shards and rotburn are a vital resource for looking after your cult, and at the beginning of Woolhaven, you can only find them in the dungeons. “It’s all about trying to encourage people to jump around and keep things balanced and never feel too comfortable,” Pearmain adds.
“We didn’t want people to just burn through one biome and then burn through the next in a linear way. We wanted them to jump around a little bit and keep that balance. I think that gives us a bit more of an interesting journey if you go between the two.”
The two new dungeon biomes work brilliantly in tandem. “Cult of the Lamb is all about juxtaposition, right, of the cute and your horrific, your comedy and your horror, those two things at odds with each other. So we wanted the second biome to be something that felt quite different. And then this idea of the rot came about, blood red versus the snowy white, pure style of the snow—it felt right.”
If I had to pick, my favourite of the two would have to be the rot—the enemies are just too grotesque not to love. But I agree that both biomes are made better by existing alongside one another. I mean, now I get to enjoy the best of both worlds: indoctrinating adorable little wolves and horrific rot monsters that were made to spite god. There really is a lot to love in Woolhaven.
