Woolhaven is Cult of the Lamb at its most difficult yet satisfyingly chaotic. It’s arguably one of the better, if not the best, DLC expansions of recent years thanks to how much good content is added to the base game. While it might be punishing thanks to the winter mechanics, it’s in line with the painful existence associated with the teachings of our favorite little lamb. Believe you, me, Woolhaven is a fantastic standalone post-game in and of itself.
Massive Monster’s Cult of the Lamb is nearly four years old. Since its September 2022 release, it has been pushed onto just about every gaming platform, it’s been made into an animated series, and it’s had several smaller form DLC expansions that have brought additional cosmetics into the dungeon-crawling-roguelike meets cult-builder. I didn’t expect there to be a significant DLC expansion…until now. I was just as surprised as you when I saw the Woolhaven announcement during Gamescom’s Opening Night Live. It was sparse on details, but it looked like our favorite little Lamb was in for a chillingly cold time.
I’ll do my best to avoid the “Winter is coming” meme during this review. Instead, I’ll wax poetic about the size of this DLC expansion. After playing for 20-or-so hours, I’ve come to the conclusion that Woolhaven is not a typical DLC expansion pack that gives some sparse post-game content. It’s a game that stands on its own that is perfect for sickos like me who wanted a real challenge out of Cult of the Lamb.
What’s in Woolhaven, you ask? Here’s a quick rundown:
- Two brand new biomes, Ewehaven and The Rot
- A village that can be rebuilt, along with several NPC vendors with their own sets of quests
- Ranching! You can raise pets!
- One new weapon, the flail*
- *Very powerful versions of existing weapons (no spoilers on these – they’re worth the grind)
- New follower forms, new curses, new rituals, new tarot cards, new outfits, new NPCs, and new cosmetics galore
- The ability to expand the size of your cult’s space to take advantage of all the new goodies present in this DLC. FINALLY!
Accessing the Woolhaven content was immediate for me. During my original two playthroughs on PlayStation and PC, I had defeated the bishops at the end of the base game’s four biomes along with The One Who Waits. I had also amassed lots and lots of resources that I had very little to do with given my lack of creativity in making decorations and such. All I needed to do was pay the toll at this mysterious fleshy tower at the entrance to my cult and I was good to go.
Woolhaven took me to two new biomes for my dungeon crawling: Ewefall and The Rot. Ewefall was a snowy biome at the tippy top of a living mountain. Here, I fought wolves that would burrow underground and shed their armor for a second round of fighting. The Rot, on the other hand, featured Lovecraftian motifs like fleshy demons in an organic hell. It was one of the first biomes in Cult of the Lamb that truly tapped into the potential of the darker side of cultbuilding and my favorite place to travel just so I could get some spooks.
The core gameplay loop of Cult of the Lamb exists in Woolhaven, but taken up several notches. The new flail lets me attack some enemies from afar and push others away. It took several tries to fully master given the base game’s reliance on melee weaponry and close combat, but it ultimately ends up just as satisfying as the other weapons. Later in Woolhaven is the opportunity to uncover Legendary weapons that push the existing weapons to new heights without warping their power levels. While these Legendary weapons are stronger than their original counterparts, they are
Traveling through Ewefall and The Rot brought winter upon my little cult. This meant that all of my crops were in stasis for several days. I had to use a furnace to keep my cult warm for several days, requiring me to seriously consider how I was to stock up on resources during the regular snow-free days. On snow days, though, my little cultists would occasionally take breaks to build ice sculptures, throw snowballs, and frolic in the winter wonderland just like I do whenever I am blessed with frozen sky water.
It wasn’t all fun and games, though. This is Cult of the Lamb we’re talking about.
Winter adds multitudes of pain, chaos, and stress to the already painful, chaotic, and stressful cult management of Cult of the Lamb. Remember, you cannot access Woolhaven until you’ve defeated the four bishops and accumulated multiple types of resources (including sin). This means that your cult is probably large, complex, and relatively spread out at the present time. The first few winters were tests of my patience, as I would often have to speed through crusades to return back to my cult to make sure I had stocked the furnace with enough rotburn, stocked up on enough food, and had enough resources to rebuild things if necessary.
After completing a few runs in Ewefall and The Rot, winters got…well, worse. Blizzards shut down my cult and prevented my little cultists from doing their daily duties. Here’s an excerpt of one of my experiences at the midpoint of Woolhaven:
“Okay…a blizzard arrived. Got to go feed and shear my little animals. Sh**, there isn’t enough of their favorite food for them to increase their happiness levels…looks like they’re gonna settle for grass for the next few days. Need to add more rotburn to the furnace…f***, how am I out of rotburn?! Need to go back to The Rot…but I can’t until this is sorted. I guess I’ll feed my cult, as no one is cooking during a blizzard. Why did one of my cultists freeze? I guess I’ll use their body to power the furnace. Have to rebuild one of my buildings…Shoot, one of the buildings has been snowed in and I don’t have the resources to open it back up.
Things were chaotic. Winter had disrupted my typical CotL gameplay loop because of how I was to keep track of the furnace levels that kept my cult from freezing entirely. My visits to The Rot and Ewehaven were often cut short because I was too afraid to risk freezing. The worsening blizzards would blanket my buildings, preventing me from using them unless I had built the requisite miniature furnaces or used spare Rot to get them back. I rarely had enough Rot stockpiled to get me through the winters, assuming an enemy NPC encountered on my new crusades hadn’t taken my Rotburn entirely.
Rotten cultists take some of that pain away, but they are encountered infrequently enough to ensure that the average player can keep their cult running through the winter at bare minimum levels. Rotten cultists are unique in that they don’t need to sleep, eat, or recover from sickness. Instead, they work through the winter for a few days until they inevitably expire, leaving behind a handful of rotburn that can be used for the next inevitable winter. They’re also used to unlock new tarot cards (should you have enough in your cult at any given time), so they serve a short-term purpose to subsist through the worst of the snow.
Ranching adds some nice depth in the pet keeping department. It’s unlocked relatively early in the Woolhaven story upon my first successful crusade through Ewefall. The rancher NPC gifted me a little yak (Yakish!) that I could take back to the ranch and raise it. After raising it for a short spell and increasing its happiness level, I was to bring Yakish back to Woolhaven (by taking it on a walk or riding it!) and unlock another animal to grow my little ranch.
In some ways, ranching feels like a missed opportunity to fully realize what and how animal husbandry could function within the chaotic world of Cult of the Lamb. Most of the functions of ranching are utilitarian: Harvesting the little pets yields resources (like wool for rebuilding the Woolhaven village), meat (that helps sustain the cult through the winter), and a small little gifts for the animal cultists. Sure, it’s great that you can give your followers another set of duties rather than sit around all day. Sure, you can create a little racetrack and attempt to ride your favorite pet through the checkpoints. But, there’s very little personalization that could be done with your favorite animals unlike the litany of hijinks that can be done to your cultists.
When I originally played Cult of the Lamb, I loved the Knucklebones minigame and was thrilled when a member of the community created an Android app so I could play it on the go. This time around, Woolhaven introduced Flockade. Flockade is a twist on Rock-Paper-Scissors (Roshambo) between two players who place chess pieces on a 2×2 grid. It’s a super simple game to learn but difficult to master, especially once I acquired additional pieces with special effects.
Rebuilding the dilapidated remnants of Woolhaven felt mildly repetitious and chore-y. Beyond needing to acquire very specific sets of resources to rebuild each NPC’s hut, the additional steps I needed to take felt like time-wasting measures. Unlocking new animals required me to take a specific animal of a certain level back to the NPC. Riding/walking the animal on a leash took twice as long as my usual walking speed; I was unable to roll/dash when I had an animal with me. Completing the Flockade quests required me to play the minigame twice on each difficulty level, dragging things out. Some of these chores were completed during the course of a natural playthrough over one or two crusades at a time. Once I completed Woolhaven’s story, though, there was still quite a bit left for me to grind through and accumulate over several future runs.
Perhaps the grindiness of the NPC-quest completion was added as a way of prepping players for more future content. There are still several NPCs I need to give wool to, but I have nowhere near enough to complete it in short order unless I create a massive farm with upwards of 10+ furry friends. Perhaps these quests were added to pad the game and prevent it from being completed by players who are already intimately familiar with dungeon-crawling. Regardless, these grindy quests occupy a small portion of playtime. There’s enough meaningful content added to make Woolhaven a blueprint for how other developers should consider expanding their games going forward.
It felt great to return to my little cult, though. Woolhaven gave me a glimpse of what Cult of the Lamb could be under heavy duress, testing my resolve in how I could multitask and stress test within the confines of Massive Monster’s dungeon crawler. I’m excited to see where Cult of the Lamb goes outside of Woolhaven. Hopefully Massive Monster adds more to this delightfully demonic world of silly little lambs, frozen animals, and Lovecraftian horrors.
Woolhaven is Cult of the Lamb at its most difficult yet satisfyingly chaotic. It’s arguably one of the better, if not the best, DLC expansions of recent years thanks to how much good content is added to the base game. While it might be punishing thanks to the winter mechanics, it’s in line with the painful existence associated with the teachings of our favorite little lamb. Believe you, me, Woolhaven is a fantastic standalone post-game in and of itself.
