Cult of the Lamb was easily one of my favourite games of 2022, being a truly unique take on the cult simulator and roguelike battler. It’s a game that has stayed with me over the years, but while it has had a few DLCs over the years, there hasn’t been anything big enough to pull me back into the game. Time moved on and I had other things to play. That is, until we got Woolhaven.
Cult of the Lamb: Woolhaven is a spectacular expansion. In a way, it follows in the spiritual footsteps of Monster Hunter World: Iceborne in that it’s released a few years after after the base game and it’s almost the same size…
A DLC of this magnitude is certainly enough for us to dip our cloven hooves back in the water and see what’s going on. However, I immediately regretted not playing Cult of the Lamb game in three years, because I had no idea what state my cult was in. There were new systems and previous updates I had also completely missed, and I had a bit of catching up to do.
Tempting as it might have been to just start from scratch, you can only start Woolhaven after completing the base game. If you have time to start New Game+ (i.e. you aren’t working through a stack of other games to review), it might be better to start fresh and enjoy it all over again. Fortunately, the game is still relatively easy to pick back up, so I forged ahead.
To reach Woolhaven, you need to have defeated the base game end boss, at which point a new totem appears in your base camp. Donate a few items to it and a new path opens up, taking our intrepid hero to the ruined mountain village, the ancestral home of your species.
As the last living lamb, you have caught the attention of the almost dead Yngya, Goddess of Winter and the forgotten deity of lambs. She was also slain by the Bishops and left to rot, so you have that in common. After resurrecting what little is left of her, she tasks you with not only making your collective killers pay, but returning the lost souls of your brethren to her.
In doing so, you not only restore her powers but raise the ghosts of her disciples. As they repopulate Woolhaven, you unlock a bevy of new features, like a ranch for livestock and a variation of Rock Paper Scissors. Some of these are cool, others a little woolly. You also get to pretty much double the size of your camp, which is nice.
What’s less nice is that as the Goddess of Winter grows, so does your to-do list. It starts out fairly manageable, with the weather turning a little cold, and people being a little chilly, but happily frolicking in the snow. However, once winter sets in, you quickly realise you have a life-threatening problem to contend with. The ground is frozen, you can’t grow crops and your followers will literally freeze to death.
You have to build a new furnace, unlock a ritual to lock in warmth and even build an onsen to thaw the cultists close to frozen death. Winter will quickly wreck you if you’re low on resources. If you thought you were in for an easy time, you’re sorely mistaken. This DLC is tough to bleat.
But that’s just the cult management side of things — there’s also the bit where the lamb brings the slaughter. The DLC adds two new procedurally generated dungeons. The first, Ewehaven, is where Yngya reigned before death. It’s all snowy cliffs with frozen fish in giant icicles poking out of the ground. After Yngya was slain, the evil Marchosias and his wolves moved in — your mission is to clear them out.
The second map is The Rot, which is exactly what you’d expect and forms the caves inside the mountain. There’s fewer wolves in here, and more demonic enemies alongside some returning characters.
As you might expect, both biomes bring new enemies, weapons, tarot cards and so on. There’s even a new Rotten follower type, which comes with its own pros and cons. Namely, they have no soul, so they don’t need to sleep. However, they always die in 10 days, no matter what happens. They’re a surprisingly useful addition to the team, even if they die annoyingly fast.
In all, there’s not much to complain about here, other than the occasional slowdown — I had a few rooms where it took 20 seconds of running around to force the enemies to spawn. Beyond that, the instructions aren’t always clear in terms of what you need to do, more so if you’ve been away for a long period of time.
