Cult of the Lamb's Woolhaven expansion is great, I just wish it was a sequel

Before it was released in 2022, Cult of the Lamb was one of my most anticipated games. Every time it showed up in a sizzle reel, I was pumped. It had all the things I love: roguelite action, base and follower management, and a generally spooky/evil cult vibe wrapped up in a cute package. When the game came out, however, it failed to really meet my — admittedly enormous — expectations. Still, I held out hope that the game would get an expansion or sequel that would bring it closer to the experience I was looking for. 

Woolhaven turns the game into more of what I hoped for originally. It, along with all of the other post-game updates I missed out on over the last four years, have really helped turn Cult of the Lamb into something I was excited to boot up every night for the past week. There’s just one major problem: Woolhaven is good enough that I wish they saved it for a sequel.

Because of my initial feelings on Cult of the Lamb, and knowing it had gotten several updates since I’d last played, I decided to restart the game from scratch when Devolver sent me a code for Woolhaven. I wasn’t going to hit the embargo based on timing, so I just thought “maybe the more interesting questions is ‘is Cult of the Lamb a better game in 2026?’” (The answer to that question is unquestionably, “yes,” by the way).

I didn’t care much for Cult of the Lamb originally because the follower management is tedious and easy to lose track of, and could really benefit from a boring-yet-effective menu so I could see assigned jobs. The combat sections are a little too boring and too easy. (I only failed one run in my entire playthrough, and it was because I got distracted while watching something on my other monitor and forgot to pause). But, the whole thing clicked for me much better this time around, largely because of the new additions and because the followers seem quite a bit smarter than before, so the management is less tedious.

At the end of the original game — literally before you face the final boss, or even after, if you prefer — you can start Woolhaven. You do this by spending some rare resources from each of the four areas and defeating the final bishop, which is the boss of the fourth area that unlocks the big bad. This creates a new area for you to explore, which has a whole new set of unlockable tools.

Both the management and combat side of Cult of the Lamb get some great changes in Woolhaven. Combat is far improved when compared to the original game. Instead of moving through four biome areas and getting to the boss four times each, you instead choose between a snowy mountain, or the mountain’s rotten interior. Each biome has different levels to it, which increase in difficulty the further you progress. The enemies here are quite a bit tougher, with more health and bullet-hell like attacks, and the new Legendary weapons that you can craft and unlock make the combat quite a bit more engaging. Plus a bunch of the levels end with a fun puzzle that’ll allow you to unlock a management system back in town, rather than just another mini-boss that turns into a follower.

On the management side, the totem in the new area brings a terrible winter to your cult. On one hand, this means you have to manage new systems like heat to keep your followers and your buildings from freezing. On the other hand, it unlocks a bunch of fun new tools to play with that make surviving winter a lot easier, namely: farm animals (all of which are definitely different from the animals you and your cult members are, because otherwise that would be a weird Goofy/Pluto situation … right?).