On the precipice of release day, Cult of the Lamb's creative director Julian Wilton was still pinching himself: "I haven't taken it in yet, because my priority has been getting the game out," he told ABC Arts.
"I was refreshing the Steam store page yesterday, and watching the numbers continue to go up … this is in a totally different league to our previous games."
In the year since his studio Massive Monster's fourth game was announced at the European trade fair Gamescom, Cult of the Lamb has become one of the most keenly anticipated video games of 2022.
Ahead of its global release on Friday, pre-orders alone had driven the Melbourne-made indie to the top of the sales charts on digital video game marketplace Steam.
At its Gamescom debut in August 2021, Cult of the Lamb immediately distinguished itself from other games. The announcement trailer focused on narrative and aesthetic rather than the mechanics of gameplay; in stunning cell animation, it dramatised the game's titular protagonist as it escapes the sacrificial altar to start its own cult of adorable animal followers, exacting revenge in the name of a mysterious entity known as The One Who Waits.
Set to a groovy, ethereal beat by First Nations musician and producer Narayana Johnson (who wrote the game's soundtrack), the trailer triggered a flurry of activity on social media that has continued to grow in the year leading up to Friday's release.
When Massive Monster released a demo of Cult of the Lamb a few months after its trailer, it was clear that the game's blend of creepy and cute ran deeper than its aesthetic: it combines action-packed dungeons and tightly designed combat with gentler gameplay such as fishing, community building and home decoration elements inspired by titles such as 2020's smash hit, Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
It's a game that puts fun first, welcoming in 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 ascribed the game's reception to the marketing campaign by the game's US-based publisher ("Devolver Digital really know how to do their job!"). But the game's early success also has something to do with his studio's respect for the breadth and diversity of the people who play video games.
Making approachable games
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 they met online as teens.
Making approachable games has been a guiding principle for their collaborations from the get-go.
Wilton met art director James Pearmain and design director Jay Armstrong through chat forums dedicated to Adobe Flash, a piece of computer software used to make games and animated shorts.
Widely proliferated, free, and easy to use, Flash was the backbone of the creative internet in the 00s, and Wilton was drawn to it from his teenage years.
The online Flash game community encouraged "jumping in and making something weird, and people would check it out," Wilton says.
This community allowed all three developers to hone their sense 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 in length, and designed to be played for fun by anyone with an internet connection; for a small, browser-based game, approachability is key.
Wilton enjoyed early success through this community with a Flash game called Angry Bees, which was published on popular video game website Miniclip, earning the then-teenager a cool $20,000 (which promptly saw his PayPal account shut down for suspicious activity).
These formative experiences with the Flash game community led to a game design approach that Wilton describes as iterative, unprecious, and audience-led.
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 jamming together, layering different approaches and ideas until something sticks.
However their goal was clear: they wanted to make a strategic video game based on layered systems that offered players lots of ways to play and replay – something more complex than their previous adventure games, Never Give Up (2019) and The Adventure Pals. Crucially, however, it had to be fun first, challenge second.
"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 with it – or at least to have fun with it," Wilton says.
"It's important to us to make things approachable and casual."
Bringing roguelikes to a broader audience
Despite its mass appeal, the gameplay in Cult of the Lamb was initially inspired by a genre that is notoriously challenging: the roguelike. The term is named for 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 journeys through a series of randomly generated rooms fighting enemies to gain power-ups, weapons and loot, becoming stronger as they go — but when they die, they die permanently, and any new run will see the player starting again with none of their previous spoils, at square one.
Because roguelikes reset the character's skills with each death, they particularly reward the player's strategy; really skilled roguelike players become so familiar with the kinds of enemies and opportunities that can arise, and the frequency with which they do, that they can strategise their way through each unique run based on percentages, making strategic decisions and taking risks as they go.
As a result, playing roguelikes can be incredibly rewarding; however, they are also notoriously unapproachable to new players.
In the last 10 years, the roguelike genre has seen a resurgence through titles such as the hugely popular Darkest Dungeon and Binding of Isaac. At the same time, the genre has seen pushback from players who are left out due to these games' high barrier to entry.
For someone unfamiliar with the genre, playing a roguelike can be punishing – they take a long time to start feeling fun.
Cult of the Lamb isn't the first recent indie hit to remix the roguelike for a broader audience and find success. In 2018, Supergiant Games' Hades swept awards season with the story of Zagreus, son of Hades, whose repeated attempts to escape the underworld reveal new aspects of the story, in addition to skills and weapons.
By using narrative to motivate a player through each 'failure', Supergiant Games found a way to make the roguelike appealing to an audience who cared more for story than strategy.
The game also featured a 'god mode' that increased the player's defences every time they died; it meant that the assistance they received was commensurate to their personal skill level, and evened out as their skills improved (rather than making the game easier by removing elements of gameplay completely).
Difficulty modes for everyone
Like Hades, Cult of the Lamb draws on the challenge and replayability of the roguelike, while offering accessibility and difficulty modes that help open the game up to more players.
While there are some differences in Cult of the Lamb's four difficulty settings that are discernible to the player – you have fewer health points in harder modes, for example – there are also subtle assistive aspects built into the game's standard mode that respond directly to player behaviour.
"The game tries to figure out if the player is struggling, and adjusts the combat or the dungeons accordingly," Wilton explains.
"[But] in the two harder modes, those settings are turned off."
Knowing that they wanted the game to break through to wider audiences, Massive Monster chose to treat these assistive aspects as the game's standard; the 'unassisted' challenge of a typical roguelike is available for players who want it, but on an opt-in basis.
Combined with accessibility options that allow players to turn off flashing lights, camera motion, and alter the size of the text, these design decisions offer a highly customisable game experience.
Play how you want
Cult of the Lamb also welcomes in a broader player base by facilitating play styles that favour less combat and more community building.
While the core gameplay is the same for every player — venture out to a dungeon, combat enemies, return with supplies, build your community with those supplies — the game supports a range of methods for approaching these challenges.
Spending time developing your cult can generate resources that make each dungeon run easier, and visiting neighbouring villages offers the opportunity to gather resources through trade or quests, minimising the player's time in combat.
Massive Monster took a similar approach to darker elements of the gameplay, too – the player can be a relatively benevolent leader or a vicious tyrant.
"Our approach is: it's okay if some of that dark stuff is there, so long as we're not forcing any of this stuff on the players," says Wilton.
Video games are for everyone
Cult of the Lamb's design is founded on a deep respect for the diverse reality of video game players.
In the 2022 Digital Australia report from the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association, a survey found that 17 million Australians play video games. Of those surveyed, 46 per cent identified as female, and 1 per cent as non-binary.
The age range of players is also more diverse than video games' youthful reputation would suggest: the average age of a video game player in Australia is 35, and 42 per cent of adults who are 65 years and older also play video games.
Not only do a wide variety of people play games, but they play for a wide variety of reasons, including socialisation, creativity, and relaxation.
This is reflected in the sales charts; alongside Cult of the Lamb, the top-charting games on Steam in August include university management simulator Two Point Campus and cat adventure game Stray, as well as more aggressive, action-packed games such as Elden Ring and Rust.
With over 60,000 pre-orders on the Steam store alone, Massive Monster's approachable design looks like a winning strategy – but even if it wasn't, Wilton wouldn't want to make games any other way.
"I also designed the medium difficulty mode after my own skill level," he says.
"Honestly, I kinda suck at the game."
