When you first fire up the game Cult of the Lamb gives you the option of choosing a difficulty setting. They recommend that you play it on the "regular" setting so that is what I did. You spend a lot of time kind of figuring out what is going on, particularly in the city-building parts of the game and while that is going on some bad things happen to your villagers such as someone starting to not have faith in the cult and they refuse to work and cause problems as they try to convince other members of your cult that you and the cult are a fraud. The higher the difficulty setting is, the more problems they cause. Obviously, if you turn the difficulty level down, which you can do at any time, this has less impact on your game.
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I resisted the urge to turn the difficulty down at this point because you have a lot of options as far as dealing with dissenters is concerned, including sacrificing them to improve the morale of the rest of your cult. I found it quite funny that this was an option but it is.
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There's something quite funny about a bunch of cute cult members who look like dogs, birds, and goats suddenly donning cloaks and then ascending one of their own up to the rafters of your temple only to have them cheer as blood and meat flies all over the place. Sacrificing the followers can have a slightly negative effect on some other members of your cult, but this is easily managed. I admit I was tempted to turn the difficulty down as this one dissenter was making a mess of my otherwise wonderfully running town town and the first time I made the choice to sacrifice the guy, I saved it beforehand because I didn't know what the consequences would be. As it turns out sacrificing members of your cult is a regular part of gameplay and you shouldn't be all that worried about it. A major part of the game is getting more and more cult members along your journey and offing a few of them along the way as it turns out is a regular thing.
It's funny.
However, after I completed the very first area, I was still in the mood for gathering more resources from that area and I should have heeded the warning that they gave me before I took on this task. The screen said something along the lines of "the enemies in this area are now significantly more difficult" and once I got in there I realized they were not at all joking about this. On the regular setting these levels that I previously just breezed through were more than double the difficulty and the idea here is that you don't actually repeat these levels right away but instead return to it later in the game once you have powered up a lot.
I did make the mistake of changing the difficulty to easy after I got worked over the first run and it wasn't until I stopped repeating that level and moved on to the next one that I realized that I really shouldn't have turned the difficulty down like I did.
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The first area and the only area you have access to at the start of the game is called "Darkwood" and while the game doesn't explicitly tell you this, once you defeat the boss inside you are meant to move on, not run straight back in there and keep grinding for materials that are contained within. It is significantly more difficult, just like they say, and I figured out quite quickly that all the skills I thought I had would not work in here. I mistakenly thought that this was one of those difficulty spikes that many games have planned in the progression of the game and that everything was going to be a lot more difficult from this point forward. So when I turned the game difficulty level down to "easy" it, as you would expect, became extremely easy. Too easy in fact. It wasn't until I grew tired of breezing through this level and moved on to the next one called "Anura" that I realized that by turning the game down to easy that I had made the game too easy. Anura wasn't even a challenge and I easily defeated the boss of the level the very first time I went through it without even really having a plan.
Doing this in this game will ruin the game.
So here is a bit of advice for people playing the game: You are supposed to die every now and then. It has very little impact on your village when you do die and the negative effects can be negated by giving a single sermon to your flock.
So keep the difficulty set on regular/medium like the game recommends and NEVER turn it down to easy. If you encounter something that is in your mind, too difficult, you probably aren't supposed to be there yet and you should investigate other things to do instead.
I'm back on regular difficulty settings now and the game is much better like that.