Death in Cult of the Lamb

Death is an interesting topic when it comes to video games because Death is often an inherent part of the gameplay experience. It’s the result of something going bad, or a poor strategy, or even a way the game shows you as the player that you need to level up before attempting another go at it. Death is handled in video games in a few different ways. In games like Breath of the Wild, for instance, death is a consequence which restarts the story. The story doesn’t involve the death, it’s almost like a narrator messing up the story. Which, of course, is another way video games deal with death as part of storytelling.

The experience of dying in video games and then being brought back to try again is an almost endless cycle - only broken when the player finally succeeds. So for some games, this process is built into the story itself. Dark Souls and Eldin Ring, for example, take the idea of the endless cycle of death and rebirth to be a core element of their game’s world, and through the process of death and rebirth, the story of Dark Souls is told. The player’s experiences are written into the script of the game. Cult of the Lamb takes a similar approach. So today, let’s talk a bit about Cult of the Lamb, and the way the process and considerations of death is both experienced by the player and written into the story and world of the game itself.

In Cult of the Lamb, you play as, well, a lamb, who after being sacrificed by the four Bishops of the Old Faith, is brought back to life by the One Who Waits under one condition: you start a cult in his honour. The game is essentially divided into two sections: the first a rogue-like dungeon crawler, where the player does runs through various combat rooms or discovery rooms; and the second a cult management game that feels kinda like a darker Stardew Valley.

So, one quick word here. There’s a lot of religious language and commentary about religion going on in this game, from the Bishops of the Old Faith, to commentary about sacrifice both monetarily and bodily for religions. Haro, our storyteller character the player occasionally runs into, has commented on how it is the fate of Gods to be forgotten. There’s a lot here, and while I may draw occasionally on this commentary in this particular essay, I think there’s a lot more than can be said on this front. So, maybe another day. Because today, we’re focusing on death.

Death is a constant theme in the game, not just because of your character’s constant death and rebirth, but also through the purposes and the process of the story itself. To free your benefactor, the One Who Waits, you must kill each of the four Bishops, who hold one of the chains that’s keeping him locked up. Your lamb’s purpose, therefore, is death. As you progress through the game, death is all around. Not only in the combat arenas, which are typical of any video game that utilises combat, but also when entering boss arenas where we see the followers of the Bishop sacrifice themselves to give each of the Bishops extreme power to fight us. We also gain followers for our cult by saving woodland creatures who are bound for death - whether because they are being readied for sacrifice by one of the Bishops, or because of Helobe (yes, Helobe) selling us creatures he’s readying for food.

We also have the cult management part of the game. While in some respects, it is managing aspects of our cult, like the amount of faith our adherents have and their hunger levels, we’re also, in many aspects, managing death. We can bring death to our adherents by sacrificing them - or murdering them if you’ve unlocked that. You can also make more subtle sacrifices, like not caring which of them, or how many, get ill - which could risk their life. You also manage them when they die naturally of old age - needing to care for bodies and gravesites. There’s a lot of death in the game, both brought about by you, the player, but also by the nature of life. And there’s an important reason for this.

The One Who Waits, our benefactor, the one so controlled and feared by his siblings he’s chained to his place in some other realm between life and death, is death himself. As our storyteller Haro tells us: “He was unalike the rest of his kin. While others dealt with flux; chaos, famine, pestilence, war. Things in which their constancy must transpose. And yet he was the inevitable; the obstinate and irresistible. The one who waits.”

The other elements Haro describes - chaos, famine, pestilence, war - are the areas of life associated with the four Bishops, and the four primary bosses. The youngest, Leshy, is in charge of chaos; Hecket famine; Kallamar pestilence and Shamura both knowledge and war. They each also have various parts of them bandaged and bloody, and references are made at several points to the fact that these wounds were caused by the One Who Waits. Leshy had his eyes removed, Hecekt’s throat was slashed, Kallamar’s ears removed, and Shamura’s skull split. See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil, think no evil.

Each Bishop is a figurehead of a particular domain, and only a figurehead rather than the personification of them. The death of Hecket does not mean that your cult is now magically unable to starve - the death of the figurehead of famine doesn’t mean that famine doesn’t exist anymore. There is simply no one in charge to control these elements and inflict them on others.

The One Who Waits is associated with death from the very beginning of the game. When the lamb very first appears before the One Who Waits, he directly says that the Bishops sent he lamb to his “domain” - in other words, by killing the lamb, the lamb was sent right to him. You know, because he’s death. He instructs the lamb on death and aspects of death. He gives the lamb the ability to sacrifice followers, for example. He lends his power over death to the lamb, and this is important.

Throughout the game, there is a complicated relationship with death. No matter how many times you do a run through the dungeon, or fail to a boss, your character returns from the dead. The inability for the lamb to die is scripted into the game. It’s not a failed narrative thread that has a dead-end and so we have to re-adjust and try again. The fact that we failed is built into the story, it’s as much a part of the narrative as the other parts of our action as a player. In other words, death is not a major consequence. Gameplay mechanic-wise, the player loses a percentage of the supplies they gathered on the run when they die, but other than that there’s not a large consequence. Death doesn’t really touch the lamb despite it constantly touching them - they die constantly but also are always back. Time is passing but they never age. They are a constant and consistent presence. Other run-based games have to have some kind of reason for the ability to dive back into the dungeon despite a failure. For a game like Moonlighter, for example, a “death” is simply injury that kicks you out of the dungeon, rather than being scripted as a death. Other games like Hades has the character being god-like in order to explain their ability to die and come back. It also helps that they’re in, you know, the Underworld. A similar thing to Hades is happening in Cult of the Lamb - the lamb is in some way godlike and has control over aspects of death, being granted the ability to come back over and over again.

That being said, the game also puts the lamb in control of death in other respects. The cult management side of the game is not just managing people, but also managing death. The various forest creatures you save throughout your runs are now working and living in your cult. You put them to work, they worship you, and you take care of their various needs. Over time, they grow old and die. Or they are sacrificed and die. You see cult members making friends, sometimes taking lovers. They grieve at the graves of their fallen friends. Despite death not touching the lamb and their body, it touches on the bodies surrounding them, and it is an important part of the management of the game itself. You control how much death is happening, and how it’s happening, and how people grieve the dead.

Death - the One Who Waits for us all - is chained by his siblings after an attempted coup, not because they didn’t want to kill him but because they couldn't. As Haro puts it in one of his stories: how does one kill death? In fact, if the player chooses to also fight the One Who Waits, their success doesn’t end in his death. Instead, he gets transformed into one of the woodland creatures and he can join your cult as one of the followers. Even at the end he’s not able to die.

There’s an interesting dynamic to the role of death in the game, embodied in the story of Narinder - the other name for the One Who Waits. When you face the Bishop Shamura, they tell you about their history with the One Who Waits. They inform you that it was them who gave the One Who Waits knowledge about change, which began to cause issues between the siblings. Death is a forever constant, an immutable force. It is the One Who Waits. And yet it’s Death that was most interested in change out of the siblings. He began to think of new and novel ideas. What these ideas are exactly is somewhat unclear, though The One Who Waits does present us with some options. He’s the one who teaches the lamb about sacrifice. He pushes the idea of selling items for money. He pushes the lamb to be more exploitative of his flock. These may, potentially, be some of the ideas he was considering, but we can’t be sure.

Change does, however, happen in one of the options to the ending of the game. The player lamb may choose to kneel and bow before the One Who Waits, or they may choose to not. This particular choice is echoed in many of the other choices scattered throughout the game. At several points when in their domain, each Bishop demands the lamb kneel. There are consequences when you refuse, as there is for the One Who Waits. But here we see another running theme, which is parallel to the theme of death: the theme of not cowering to any other power than your own.

Obviously, this has some statement on religion and how the developers may or may not view religion. Bowing to any power is, in the way the game plays out, is revealed as a negative. Perhaps the most interesting ending comes from a refusal to kneel for anyone. The whole game has a more negative view of religion generally, but maybe a fuller discussion of this should be tabled once more.

But what is clear is that the refusal to kneel is an important choice for the lamb. And with the refusal comes another fundamental change - one that can touch on the unwavering world of death. The figure head changes from the black veiled chained figure that towers over those who come to his domain, to the lamb whose powers to choose who lives and who dies echoes the power over death.

Ultimately, however, the choice to not kneel is what triggers this change. The rest of the lamb’s power comes from the symbol of the role of the figurehead - the red hat. Each of the bishops have their own hat to demonstrate their power, and the One Who Waits gives his hat to the lamb. It’s through this power that the lamb continues to live despite both time and combat. But the power to refuse to kneel has nothing to do with the hat’s power. Where the lamb thrives is in strength in the face of death - not because of a crown but because of a strength of will. This strength of will has the power to transform the world around us, and gives us a new sense of what death is and can be.