Lethal Company, released in October of 2023 by independent game developer Zeekerss, is a game that has become so huge in such a short amount of time that to a majority of you, it needs no introduction. It’s garnered a surprisingly massive player base for a pc exclusive indie game, and it’s for a good reason. Its horror comedy based multiplayer gameplay is easy to learn and is fun to fail at, so you don't have to be skilled to have an enjoyable time with it. It's a wonderfully funny game that, without warning, can turn into one of the scariest games I’ve played this year. Lethal Company has caused me to feel in ways I haven't yet experienced from a game, and can only draw comparisons to real life job experiences I’ve had. At first glance, it initially appears to be a social multiplayer game, much like SCP Secret Lab, in fact I’ve seen a lot of comparisons drawn between the two. While I see where the comparisons are coming from, I couldn’t disagree more with them. Not only would I not describe Lethal Company as a social multiplayer game, but what Secret Lab and games like it try to achieve is entirely different from Lethal Company.
On the surface it's easy to see the similarities, both games appear to be about exploring abandoned facilities, running from monsters instead of fighting, and trying to escape with your life intact. Both games also utilize proximity voice chat both to work together with teammates and to derive a lot of their comedic value. However once we step away from that surface their differences couldn’t be clearer. For one, it's hard to care about any given round in Secret Lab, there are no rewards for winning nor a consequence for losing.The objective feels like it doesn’t actually matter to the people playing it. The objective in Lethal Company by contrast is much more emphasized, with failing to complete it resetting your save file. The stakes of the gameplay make it so you actually care about the outcome of the expeditions you take.
When you get down to it, what makes each of these games entertaining and engaging is entirely different. The fun of Secret Lab isn’t derived from trying to win, it comes from the players interacting with its systems. The reason people play it is to see what happens when you put twenty to thirty different players into a huge bunker, all aligned with different goals and objectives, and seeing what funny or cool things happen over the course of a round. The fun of Lethal Company is more complicated than that though. You and your crew are all aligned to the same goal, and that goal is what makes the gameplay so engaging. And while yes, I'm playing it because of the silly and scary situations me and my crew can get into, I wouldn’t have gotten into those situations if I didn’t find the gameplay itself so compelling.
The goal of Lethal Company is to go to different planets, venture into abandoned facilities and extract enough scrap to meet your company assigned quota. When you meet quota your scrap is sold to your bosses for company credits which you can use to buy equipment and upgrades to help you meet the next quota. The catch here is that absolutely nothing is given to you in Lethal Company. Want to be able to communicate with your friend monitoring you and your crew from your ship? That's gonna cost you. Want some kind of weapon, no matter how basic it may be? That's gonna cost you. Want to be able to see anything inside the dark facilities? Even that has a price tag on it, and it’ll cost you extra for a flashlight that you can actually see anything with that’ll last for more than a minute. The process of cashing in on your collected loot has risk and reward to it as well. You need to make enough company credits to meet your quota, however your company doesn't always buy your scrap for its full price. Unless you sell the day before your quota is due they’ll only buy it for a percent of what it's actually worth, so you may not want to sell until then. However that means you won't be given any more credits to buy more equipment until then, and if all of your crew dies on an expedition, you lose all of the scrap that was not yet turned in. So do you live having less equipment for a while and risk potentially losing all of your valuables should you all perish? Or do you turn your scrap in early, earning less credits for selling more items then if you had just waited. Every action you take in Lethal Company always has upsides and downsides, there’s never an objectively right answer.
Your resources, if you even have any, being so expensive and easily lost makes the game much more tense then if these basic things were simply given to you. You’re trying to extract as much scrap as you can, navigating these randomized facilities, trying not to die to these monsters you know nothing about, and you’re almost never properly equipped to deal with any of it. Even if you are prepped with gear, one or two deaths can result in a major loss of funds and supplies, and very quickly leave you up creek without a paddle. In any other game, a flashlight, even if it's limited in use like in Amnesia or Outlast, is a standard item your character is always equipped with. But in Lethal Company? That flashlight is a privilege, not a right. I've had many times where my team is completely out of funds with no equipment in sight, and we just had to deal with that and meet our quota regardless. The odds are ALWAYS so stacked against you, which is part of what makes the game so scary. That Idea of “how the hell are we gonna meet quota now, we couldn't even survive with equipment, and now we have nothing” was a frequent thought that went through my head, and it made me nervous picking out our next destination. What’s so interesting to me, is the specific KIND of horror Lethal Company often evokes, because it's a kind I’ve really only ever experienced in the real world. The fear of meeting a quota.
I’m gonna get a bit personal here, but I’ve struggled to hold down a job in the past couple of years, a few of which I was let go from due in part because of failing to meet quotas. I’m neurodivergent, which makes it hard to keep pace with my coworkers, even when I’m trying my hardest to do so. I had a day at work where I pushed myself as hard as I possibly could to try to match my coworkers output, and at the end of the day I still fell short. It felt scary and demoralizing, seeing my numbers next to my peers, and always coming up behind them. It always felt like any given day could be my last and that there was no point in trying, which is why I avoid those kinds of jobs now.
Lethal Company realizes this fear of meeting a quota in a way I’ve never seen a game achieve before, which is part of why I find it so interesting. You’re forced to meet quota after quota, and the numbers only climb higher and higher as you progress, and it's very easy for your playthrough to suddenly start falling apart. Your life is cheap and expendable, and the game has so many creatures that’ll happily kill you if you don’t know what you're doing. Even tried and true methods of defense like communicating with team mates, staying low and in cover, keeping an eye on the enemy at all times, or even running away aren’t always a surefire bet. The game manages to create this abrasive and stressful environment, making you feel like you’re always working against the odds and that the company has set you up for failure. But it makes your achievements and successes that much sweeter, like you’ve gotten a leg up on this world that’s out to get you. You and your crew always celebrate your successes together while in orbit in between missions, or all laugh at your collective failures and untimely deaths. It really gives this great feeling of comradery, that you’re all in this together, and that it's worth it to keep trying. Every expedition that doesn't result in casualties feels like a real success that you can be happy about, and makes the game so much more fun and rewarding to play.
I feel it's worth noting that despite me referring to Lethal Company as stressful, it’s never felt stressful to play, which is an important distinction to make. There have been games that have environments and worlds that have scary, stressful atmospheres, but unfortunately end up creating a game that feels just as stressful to actually go and play. A good example of this is Escape From Tarkov, who’s complex controls and extraction shooter mechanics make me scared to simply load into a match. Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I feel Tarkov is appealing to its player base BECAUSE of this kind of gameplay, but it’s certainly not going to be for everyone. By being simple and approachable to play, Lethal Company manages to make a game that makes me scared while playing it, not scared about the act of playing it. A large contributor to this are its mechanics, seeming to be very punishing and unfair, but never feeling so in practice.
Dying carries such heavy consequences, but you often don’t end up thinking about it in the moment. This is because dying is often so swift and funny that you find yourself laughing and having a good time more than you’re getting discouraged or frustrated. Dying also immediately lets you talk to other dead players, so you get to have a laugh about it while you spectate whoever is still alive. It also lets you discuss what happened to you all and how to avoid and overcome it next time. Since dying is so easy and happens so fast, even experienced players die quite often, so newer players never feel like there’s this massive skill disparity between them and their crew mates. It all comes together to make a game that's stressful but rewarding. That’s cruel and unfair, yet fun and funny despite it all. In fact, I’d argue that the game ends up being more funny, because of how cruel it often is!
So many things in Lethal Company will kill you without warning. You can get shredded by turrets in a millisecond, and mines can blow you and your crew to pieces. Snare Fleas randomly fall onto your head, blinding you and causing you to unwittingly fall into a pit. A building sized worm can fly out from the earth beneath you, and devour you without a second thought. The game is just so ruthlessly and uncaringly cruel, which leads to so many funny moments that you and your friends will never forget! Looking at your friend walking down the hall in front of you, turning around to talk to another crewmate, only to look back and see his corpse flat on the floor. Trying to lead a weeping angel away from the exit and a Bracken snaps your friend’s neck because both of your attentions were elsewhere. Trying to take scrap back to your ship and getting struck by fucking lightning! There's a lot of other ways the game generates humor, like its player animations that feel like they were purposefully made to look really goofy. Or the funny ways you end up interacting with certain enemies like hoarding bugs, who seem kinda timid and like they don't want to fight, but can suddenly sprout wings and maul you if you make the mistake of trying to steal their items. It feels like the game is purpose built to generate funny clips for social media, it's no wonder it's garnered such a massive player base. So it’s interesting to me, that despite this game being so funny, that it can suddenly, effortlessly, and without warning, flip a switch and become deadly serious and shockingly terrifying.
I had a moment while playing where I could hear my friends off in the distance yelling about something so I rushed over to see what was the matter, but I got lost on the way over in the winding corridors of the mansion. Suddenly though, I stopped hearing them. They had found their way out, and I had found what they were running from. Two Coil Heads, monsters that only move when you’re not looking at them suddenly appeared from around the corner, stopping dead in their tracks as soon as my eyes met them. I was stuck, lost in this mansion, no one coming back to help me, with two creatures that I couldn’t look away from without losing my head in the process. I attempted to walk backwards, trying to navigate without looking to get away from them. However while trying to do so, I unknowingly backed myself into the corner of a dead end room. And just as my back suddenly hit the wall, and a terrible feeling made its way up my spine, my flashlight flickered off, out of batteries, and I became engulfed in the surrounding darkness.
All of that happened completely organically and naturally, and it’s one of the most tense and scary experiences I’ve ever had in a game. Now of course, I’m exaggerating this event. I’m trying to make this story more dramatic to try to get across this point in a way that I don't think simply describing gameplay can. This is why I’m writing this article, to try to show this dynamic at play in Lethal Company. How this game can be paradoxically hilarious and terrifying at the same time, and can effortlessly switch between the two. Everything will be all fun and games, just exploring and collecting loot with your friends, and just as you’re about to leave, you turn to look back only to realize you were being followed the entire time. Oftentimes coming back to the safety of your ship can be the scariest part, since you never know how many of your crew mates could still be alive, and you can’t even call out to them in the darkness in fear of what else may hear you. The proximity chat has a huge hand in this dynamic too. You can hear someone talking in the distance, but then suddenly stop, and you don’t know if it’s because they’re just too far away to hear, or if they were killed and that you might be next. It’s jarring, surprising, and freaky. It’s impressive to me not only because I’ve not experienced this in a game before, but in all honesty, I wasn’t sure that a multiplayer horror game could be all that scary.
From my experiences, I didn’t think you could make a horror game with multiplayer features where you can talk to one another and still have that game be scary. It’s all too easy for the horror experience to be suddenly thrown into the back seat, because you always have another person there to cut through the tension that the game has tried to build up. There have been games in the past like Dead by Daylight or Friday the 13th: The Game that try to be multiplayer horror games, but to me ultimately fail at fully realizing the second half of their genre title. But in utilizing proximity chat, scarcity of resources, the fear of the unknown, and forcing the player to always race against the clock, Lethal company manages to successfully make a multiplayer horror game that’s truly deserving of that title.
It makes you scared of its dark halls and the unknown creatures that lie within them, and makes you want to conquer it in spite of it all. It makes you laugh together with your crew, and will make you scream when you’re suddenly ripped away from them. It makes you feel triumphant for getting a leg up in this world out to get you, and makes a cold chill run down your spine as it presents you with another, higher quota then the last. This is the real horror of Lethal Company.