Cult of The Lamb Nintendo Switch Performance

While we are still working on our review of Cult of The Lamb (Review now finished and can be found here) and having a great time so far, we have received many questions about how the game performs on Nintendo Switch. The hope was that it would run great as we have seen other games like Celeste, Dead Cells, Hades, Death’s Door and Diablo 3 run quite well on Nintendo Switch but that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment. We are currently playing on Switch OLED with build 1.0.2 of the game. Not everyone will experience the same but this is our experience.

To see our full review: Cult of the Lamb Nintendo Swtich Full Review

Cult of the Lamb runs at 30 frames compared to running at 60 frames everywhere else, which is a bummer since recent rogue-lite Indies have been able to run at a steady 60. There are some areas where frames get dropped and the action slows down but they aren’t too common. There are longer loading screens when going out on a new run or returning where it can take 10-15 seconds, which is likely non existent on most other platforms.

However, the most egregious issue is when playing in docked mode, Cult of The Lamb operates quite poorly to the point that when using a Pro controller there is a noticeable input lag, which is odd because usually performance is better on the Switch when docked. Every setting on the Switch and TV were in the correct position for optimal gaming and as mentioned, issues like this haven’t arose when playing other fast twitch Indies.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself do these sound like issues you can tolerate for the sake of convenience and being able to play portable? Is the Nintendo Switch the best place to play Cult of The Lamb? Absolutely not, but if you turn off the screen shake, increase the font size and only play in handheld, then it’s a serviceable port with a few concessions and the visuals look great on the OLED. Hopefully some of these issues can be ironed out with patches.

***UPDATE AUGUST 25***

Massive Monster has released patch 1.0.3, which tries to address many of the problems, mainly the followers allowed in the church at one point and the soft lock issues. After spending about ten minutes with the new game post credits, it’s much improved but still needs some work. All your followers are indeed allowed to take part in rituals and sermons etc, playing docked works much better then before and overall seems to run a bit smoother. However there are still slight frame slow downs in the dungeons, loading is still fairly long in context but its much easier to play overall.