Worship Early Impressions – Pikmin, but Cuter

Worship has an interesting concept, taking the best features of Pikmin and turning it into a multiplayer roguelike with maniacal zealots performing bloody rituals to expand their cult. The premise sounds a bit chaotic, but it is simpler than it sounds.

We’ve obtained a couple of copies of the game, allowing us to play and test it with both single-player and multiplayer experiences. Here’s how it went.

Worship Offers an Addicting Roguelite Loop and a Unique Challenge

Most roguelite games build around giving the player one weak character and offer several ways of strengthening that character through various mechanics. Games like Hades offer Boons and unique stage encounters/pathing, and Risk of Rain 2 gives you different characters and stages to play around with, while offering item combinations to make each playthrough unique.

For Worship, you are given a choice of which God to serve and become a zealot with unique rituals or spells to play around with. Your goal is to expand the cult, offer your devotion to your God, explore the ink-sketched aesthetic world, and survive.

The mechanics should take a while to get used to, as it invites a highly unique challenge – the game tests your drawing skills. One of the biggest mechanics in the game is using blood to draw around the world. You do that by stabbing yourself or your devout followers and using blood to draw a symbol on the ground.

Each drawn symbol has corresponding spells or mechanics attached to it. The most basic one is converting potential followers by drawing a massive circle around them and casting the spell. If the circle is broken or looks horrendously drawn, the spell won’t work, and you might have wasted some blood while you are at it. While you can absorb the blood around you, there will be times when you’ll waste it by drawing the wrong symbol.

This mechanic alone almost single-handedly drew me to the game for longer, as I searched for the next spell I could draw and use. It wasn’t even about using the spell correctly, but more so if I can hilariously draw it at the cost of one unworthy follower.

The game had an addictive roguelite loop that kept me exploring, expanding, and uncovering more about the cults, all while playing with a friend. Even if we only played as two players, we can already see how enjoyable the game would be for a much bigger party since it can support up to four players on co-op.

Worship’s Early Access Technical Woes

While I rarely mention technical issues when giving an early impression on an early access game, Worship really needs to address a lot of bugs plaguing its early access press build.

The bugs were quite bad because there were several game-breaking ones. Since it is a roguelike game, any unintended interruption that forces you to start over another run is unbearable. When the game just freezes, or it abruptly disconnects and puts you back on the main menu screen, it wrecks the momentum.

While the game shows high hopes, especially the potential they could do with more cults, bosses, and even some unique base-building features, its current state still needs a ton of work. It’s better to wait and see how the game progresses and look forward to when they fix these issues, because Worship should be a lot of fun to play, especially with friends and for roguelike aficionados.