Apart from the mushroom zombies and the skeletal scoutmaster, this is basically lore-accurate mountaineering.

A lot of reviews of the demo are being logged as first impressions without actually sitting with the demo to understand its systems. There are a few things to talk through here:

Each run starts with a pistol tier and 3 perks. As you rank up, which is slow in the demo, you can select incrementally more powerful perks that can drop from perk drops to help your runs start more smoothly. My point of friction is that many of the initial perks don't feel very useful for being able to chunk down early bosses without engaging with counter windows, which feel short if you're just starting out with the game.

Guns are equipped with random attribute lines. I haven't played enough to figure out what determines the number of lines beyond arbitrary points of run depth, but this can make or break your run early. It's fun to see which ones have the best synergy with the guns you roll, but some attributes are definitely less beginner-friendly. I wonder if there's a way to ensure a more consistent experience for beginners here.

Most of the non-pistol weapons are MUCH stronger than the pistols, but you can absolutely still roll a strong revolver or pistol.

Once you finish ~4 stages, you get the chance to go to an outpost and buy weapons / store items. Limiting the item storage to 1 item per run is understandable from a perspective of controlling the player's power curve in the beginning, but sending weapons back in particular feels akin to kick-starting your next run, and I wish there was a way to start banking weapons -- I feel like even storing 2 items instead of 1 would be an acceptable choice and help reward players for engaging with the Vault and letting them take on harder challenges earlier on.

For the other aspect of meta-progression, there's a character skill tree, and eventually there will be multiple characters. The skill tree building is slow, understandable for the demo. Unlocking Tier 2 Perk drops was instantly noticeable for the quality of my runs at the beginning, and these will definitely take time, but are highly impactful.

There are 3 stage difficulties: Tension, Skirmish, and War. Tension always rolls a "Minor Boss", with lower stage counts and health pools. Rewards for defeating Minor Bosses is always 2 Perk boxes. Skirmish always rolls a Minor Boss, with a chance of adding a Major Boss in a second fight on the same stage. War always rolls a "Major Boss", which have 5(?) segments / stages. Major Bosses always drop at least 1 gun, 2 Perk boxes, and a Data Drive indicating the boss you defeated and the score rank you achieved in the fight.

The meat of the game. The fights are variable in their difficulty due to parry windows and attack patterns, but it's definitely possible to find parry and counterattack windows for every boss. After fighting ~40 of them, I've definitely found the major bosses becoming easier, and the minor bosses significantly easier.

Melee parrying significantly heals your character but is both more risky and harder to achieve with highly mobile bosses. Counter-attacking, or shooting the boss in the parry window, is easier but still not trivial because of bullet travel. If you get a Perfect counter, you stun the boss for longer and can dump damage.

At the end of every boss phase, there's (what I've been calling) the "Burn Window"; you deal damage to the health bar to turn it orange, optionally punch it to phase transition, and the boss goes on a consistently offensive roll with health that dissipates over time. This is the "Burn Damage" that the Tier 1 perks are referring to.

How does this all feel when it's pulled together? Like others have mentioned, there's a lot of visual noise in the game. As a RoR2 enjoyer, this isn't the worst thing for a game with this much style, but is something to point out. The fighting? Crispy as hell. Unyielder clearly wears its Ultrakill influence on its sleeve, and I love the structure of the game, even with how barebones it is at present. As someone who's enjoyed Gunfire Reborn, Returnal, Crab Champions, Roboquest and RoR2 while disliking the movement of roguelites like Remnant: From The Ashes, I've found something to love in the fast movement and challenging combat of Unyielder.

If you've played some or most of these games, you'll know what I'm talking about. That feel. The one you get when your ammo reserves are deep and plentiful, your movespeed is lightning fast, your dash recharge is quick, and you feel untouchable. A god of death and bullets whom none can oppose.

Yeah, you get that here. In spades.

I've recently come back to Cult of the Lamb after finishing the initial content offering -- which I enjoyed pretty thoroughly -- only to discover a few systems expanded and a new post-game with objectives driving me to put more time into my original playthrough.

Cult of the Lamb, for those who don't know, is half village builder / resource management (think Animal Crossing: New Horizons island decoration, but if the villagers had constantly decaying meters for hunger and faith) and half hack-and-slash dungeon crawling. These two elements are married by way of time and loot; in the beginning especially, but even throughout your save, you'll be on the lookout for resources that sustain your village while "crusading", and you'll come up with ever-expanding lists of items to acquire in dungeons while managing your village. For some, this divide seems like a lack of focus for the game, but the tension that arises from your village going hungry while you're deep into a looped dungeon run is an addictive push-and-pull that bears consequence, which is a fantastic limiter and forces you to make decisions about your play.

The village management portion of the game brings the themes of the game to the forefront. You have the capacity to perform unholy rituals, showcasing the dark powers the lamb has adopted and wields, which can bolster your Faith or Hunger meters, often at the cost of a villager. You can bleed your villagers dry of their meager wealth for your own personal gain, sacrifice lives in order to further expand your power, all with beautifully animated cutscenes and comically dark reactions. You can adopt tenets within your cult to further define the faith your villagers follow, allowing your villagers to remain faithful to you even on the brink of starvation or to preserve their faith while their compatriots die in the fields of their toil. It's wonderfully evil stuff. One of the better additions was a new system added within the last year, Sin. This forces players to choose between growing loyalty and extracting a resource to birth new, more loyal followers. These villagers are natives, and know nothing beyond the twisted sanctuary of your cult, innately embodying the traits you choose for them as well as the holy laws you've imposed on your village.

The dungeon crawling has also improved over time, with more variety to its gameplay. Initially, it was a relatively simple system, with mechanics defined by the outfit you wore into your crusades. These can vary from converting your health into "shields" (blue hearts) to forcibly removing the hack-and-slash elements to force players to focus on spell-casting only. At a point in the past, the only ways to upgrade your runs were through Tarot cards, which offer persistent bonuses (sometimes at the cost of increased danger or more damage taken), and weapon or spell (curse) upgrades. Now there are relics, which can offer summoned companions, one-time use AOE damage, or many things in-between. This both removes some power from the Tarot cards and offers more ways to scale your damage or health in a single run. In my opinion, the dungeon crawling needed this added complexity and it works very well.

The aforementioned post-game expansions expand the bossing as perhaps the most important aspect to gameplay, but it adds one additional facet to the game that felt only partially uncovered in the initial release -- LORE. After reaching the ending, you are tasked with venturing back into the Land of the Old Gods to scour and eliminate any traces of the ones who came before. Upon doing this, you're able to indoctrinate each of them into your cult. Doing so will provide 2 side quests per character: one to acquire their unique relics and the second to take each ex-boss back to their temple to confront their past, and to shine light onto their former lives one last time. It's a well-considered addition and one I think shapes the game world into something more complete.

Cult of the Lamb is more than it might appear to be. Cartoonishly evil on the cover, but simultaneously a cozy village manager and a frenetic and tense dungeon crawler with a strong vision and two synergistic halves. I highly recommend giving it a try if either of these genres scratch an itch for you.

Another Crab's Treasure is a creative and generally consistent experience for much of the game, with some flaws.

Kril, even at his most expedient, attacks relatively slowly, and closes distance even more slowly. You CAN rush into combat but it's generally not recommended. What this game gets in terms of ludo-narrative harmony is the shell system, the primary differentiator from other similar Soulslikes. Your shell, the primary defensive tool for any hermit crab, is adaptable based on the situation - sometimes you want a different spell, stat set, or weight class while fighting a boss. Maybe your shell recently broke, so you'll need to engage with the battlefield dynamically to find a new defensive tool to withstand the fight. When this system is working, it feels incredible.

There are a few lowlights on the game for me - one, collision. At times, the collision feels unpredictable; an enemy will attempt a jumping attack, and if you parry or block it with a high-defense shell, they might land on top of you. This can cause a number of things to happen:
- enemies may float above you for a small duration, making them difficult to reach without advanced upgrades
- enemies can possibly goomba stomp Kril into the ground, forcing him to fall into the void and take fall damage from the ground (???)
- enemies can yeet themselves off terrain, making some fights unexpectedly trivial
This was especially noticeable in The Bleached Palace (a level that pays homage to levels like Anor Londo and Farum Azula). To be fair, I mostly experienced this when interacting with enemies and rarely had clipping or collision issues when engaging with the world itself. Since there's a good amount of platforming as well, I'm generally glad I never had clipping issues when attempting platforming puzzles.

The second issue I had was a difficulty spike in The Abyss. INB4 GIT GUD, there are a number of enemies that stand too tall to hit on a consistent basis but hit you for an extremely high amount of health or shell damage (to be fair, I indexed pretty squarely into attack only and did not try re-speccing, which you can do at any rest location), and the grappling hook upgrade that lets you pull yourself to enemies has an arbitrary number of charges that can be used before you need to rest, even if you have ammo to continue using this move. So clearing this area is not an option, but there are a LARGE number of enemies standing in your way, in an area that is not well-illuminated. This is the only point I felt compelled to use the assist to prevent microplastic (the "souls" currency in the game, lol) loss.

There are a number of references to other games and inspirations - some of the areas are parodies of From Software game levels, and an array of collectibles and terrain from around the world point to attention paid by Aggro Crab to what's happening in their industry and honoring it, which is very cool.

Overall, I felt it was a good (with the potential to be great) Soulslike with a unique take. Boss fights are generally fair and quality, the exploration is fun with the unique moveset, and I found some casual sequence breaks by texture platforming, which helped me feel like I had some agency in how I wanted to approach the game.