Understanding the many different terms in Cult of the Lamb can get confusing quickly which is why many players ask, what are Curses? While the tutorial tooltips are helpful, it’s just too easy to lose track of what every unique term is. Especially since they’re rarely interchangeable with other games.
It didn’t take long for me to forget what a Sermon was or a Divine Inspiration and which one I needed to level up to make progress. So don’t worry, you’re far from the only person to get confused and not know what Curses are in Cult of the Lamb.
What Are Curses in Cult of the Lamb
Make sure you don’t forget to use your Curse abilities, otherwise you may struggle a bit more.
Once you make a small amount of progress in the story, you’ll start to unlock Curses for each crusade run. While they may sound like a bad thing, they’re actually extremely useful for fighting enemies and bosses. This is the ability that you get at the start of every run alongside your random weapon as well.
Aside from getting Curses early in the story, you can unlock a bunch of them by doing Sermons. You can perform one Sermon daily at your Temple in the camp to gain experience. As my 10 Best Cult of the Lamb Tips and Tricks guide mentions, Sermons become your main form of meta progression.
The Curse of the Occultist Sermon upgrade unlocks three new Curses to find during your run.
As you level up via Sermons, you can increase your max health, unlock stronger weapons, stronger Curses, and other useful upgrades too. Regarding Curses especially, you’ll want to get the Fervour of the Righteous Sermon upgrades. This increases the amount of Fervor you can get which is for using Curses.
Depending on the difficulty you pick, you can deal a lot of damage to bosses right from the start. That’s why I like to try and have full Fervor going into a boss fight. So I have as many Curse charges ready to go. But it also depends on what ability I have and whether it’s useful or not. Fortunately, most of them are.
You can also get Fervor by opening up chests after clearing a room or area.
It’s important to mention that you get Fervor during runs by defeating enemies. Killing them will drop a bunch of red orbs that you can collect by running over them. This gives you Fervor which you can check by looking at the red resource near the top-left corner. The number displayed over the red or black circle if you don’t have any Fervor reflects how many charges you have.
Also, the start of most Cult of the Lamb runs will have four wooden dummies in the first room. While you can destroy them for wood, they’ll also drop Fervor if you’re not full. This is a neat way to try and test how a Curse works if you haven’t used it yet. Just try not to use it too much as the dummies will break eventually.
Cult of the Lamb has several unique abilities and weapon types with their own modifiers. Such as the one in this screenshot that can possess enemies.
Before I finish out this guide, I’ve got another useful tip regarding how Curse abilities work. It’s important to read their description because they often work differently. While one may shoot projectiles that home in on targets, another one may just be a melee swipe in front of you.
But there are abilities that are even more unique than that. You can slow down time using certain ones if you hold the button for using that Curse. Afterward, you can usually aim where it throws something such as an oil bomb for example. Otherwise, you’ll probably panic trying to aim it and not realize you can take advantage of that slow motion.
Aiming this Curse slows down time while also showing a giant large red circle where it’ll land.
That’s all there is to this Cult of the Lamb guide on what are Curses. Make sure to check out some of the other useful guides we’ve put together on this roguelite/colony sim game. Or if you’d prefer you can take a look at our list of some of the Best Roguelikes & Roguelites to Play.
Jeff is a journalist with over 10 years of experience writing, streaming, and making content about video games. With an associate degree in journalism, he’s a sucker for RPGs, survival games, roguelikes, and more.