Cult of the Lamb: Woolhaven DLC review

It’s been 4 years since Cult of the Lamb first graced our consoles, and I don’t know about anyone else, but it feels like it never really left. It’s extremely hard to ensure a game’s longevity; it can only be done successfully in two ways. One is that your game is just THAT good, redefining the genre and being an innovation to its medium. The other is constant quality updates. A lot of companies seem reluctant to do the latter—cough cough Nintendo—and seem to prefer working towards their next title instead. However, Cult of the Lamb has been consistently pumping out DLCs and updates ever since its launch. Heck, just last year at Gamescom, they were doing marriage ceremonies in front of a massive lamb statue. Massive Monster have poured their heart and soul into this project, and I’m glad to see its success. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, we are now being treated to their biggest update yet—maybe signalling the end of our time with this game.

Woolhaven is a DLC that the developers have said is just as long as Cult of the Lamb’s base game, and I can attest to that. Woolhaven is massive; I spent a good 20 hours revisiting my cult and getting back into the swing of things with a whole new set of dungeons to complete, new cult mechanics, story, and much more. For the price tag, it’s absolutely worth your money and time if you were a fan of the base game—which our lovely Ron reviewed here! The DLC can be accessed after you have completed the base campaign.

The story of this DLC expands on what was alluded to in the base game, which was that the lamb’s clan had been wiped out by the bishops and both the land and its God had been abandoned. Now, we have the chance to meet Yngya, the lost Goddess of Winter in Woolhaven, who tasks us to conquer the mountain, Ewefall. It has been taken over by Marchosias, the leader of the Free Pack of wolves who acts as the villain of the DLC.  It’s so great to finally get more lore on the lamb’s backstory and be privy to more history of its world.

This time around, the rogue-lite dungeons are on Ewefall, and they have a bit of a twist. Ewefall is two-fold, with one side being a wintery mountain and the other half being The Rot, a demonic hellscape full of blood and guts that used to be ruled by Yngya. You’ll need to clear out the usurpers on each side to finally make your way to the top. In contrast to Ron’s review, I unfortunately thought the rogue-lite dungeons were by far the weakest element of the game. It never felt substantial to me and never presented a challenge or gave me any satisfaction that I associate with the genre. However, I will give praise to Woolhaven for its two dungeons. There’s still not a lot of strategy to be found here—you mostly just hit hard and fast before the enemy does the same—but the enemy variety and move sets felt a bit more fun and challenging. In Ewefall, you mostly face wolf variants and enemies that strike lightning, and in The Rot you face amalgamations of blood and guts and fire demons. I think my love for these dungeons is more for their aesthetic, though. Both are gorgeous and extremely unique compared to the repetitive look of the base game dungeons.

The DLC dungeons also provide variety in that not every dungeon run has a boss at the end. In The Rot, the final room can be a puzzle or unique bosses that aren’t just larger versions of standard enemies. Overall, I prefer these dungeons to the base game, but I never found them to hit a high that was missing in the overall experience.

Let’s talk about Woolhaven itself. It acts as a hub world where Yngya’s statue will reside, surrounded by graves of the lambs lost in the cull. Tied to the dungeons is your quest to find the wool of these lost comrades and to restore them to their graves so their ghosts can find peace and rejoin Woolhaven. Once these ghosts have been rescued, they’ll open up various shops and buildings in the area that you can interact with. An example of this would be the rancher who introduces you to the DLC’s new ranch system and a warrior who tasks you to locate lost legendary weapon fragments so she can create ultimate weapons for you. Watching Woolhaven transform from being desolate and abandoned to a restored civilization was fun and satisfying as a b-side to what I was most looking forward to in this DLC. The revamp to how you run your cult.

The never-ending spring has ended, and the cult is now subject to the harsh cold of winter. Every few cycles, the season will change and bring a new set of challenges to managing your cult. The main concerns of survival are your food source and warmth. Your followers can freeze and die if you are not constantly filling up your new furnace, which needs to be fueled by Rotburn, a new resource that can be harvested in a mine or in Ewefall. Your farmlands, which you depend on for crops, are also barren, frosted over by the snow, so you must find alternate methods to feed your cult. At first, winter was terrifying, as I felt myself needing to quickly adapt to this new playstyle. I needed to make sure I had stocked up on food and Rotburn so winter wasn’t such a tough time. Progressing through the game also correlates with winter becoming more challenging, as the more you help Yngya, the more prevalent winter will be. It was a nice new challenge that made cult management feel fresh.

Yngya also opens up a new branch system of buildings that are unique to the DLC. The main new feature is ranching, where you can build your own livestock farm of cute woolly animals that can grow up to produce wool and other animal products. These guys are your main source of food in winter and can be cared for and raised to a prime age so they can be harvested for food. Luckily, you are given two options to do this. You can… butcher them, or you can pleasantly ascend them to heaven! I know which one I’m choosing. There is also an array of other buildings that can be built that can ease the burden of winter and keep your cultists happy and healthy.

Despite my time with Woolhaven being a delight, as I poured more hours into running my Welsh patriots—yes, my cult was Welsh, and the cultists were all colored red and green and named using a Welsh name random generator—my time was consistently put on hold by the sheer number of graphical bugs and crashes I experienced whilst playing. I played the base game Cult of the Lamb on the Nintendo Switch, and boy did that game suck in terms of bugs. It took weeks for the game to be playable, and it soured my experience with the game. I pushed on because underneath it all was a great game. However, flashbacks of this time came flooding back when I realized Woolhaven was exactly the same. The game is constantly suffering from graphical bugs, and I even had to make sure I saved before I went into Woolhaven, as my game often crashed. At the moment, I can’t honestly recommend Woolhaven on Nintendo Switch 1 or 2, as its faults hinder the experience. Despite its great price, bugs ruin the experience.