Your Life For The Company
HIGH Endless unique experiences with genuine moments of horror.
LOW Two types of bugs and only one is out for blood.
WTF My neck has been snapped more times than I can count.
In the world of indie games, especially those made by one person, it’s hard to enter the arena as a contender. To compete with wide-scale advertising and large teams of people, a project has to be truly special — which is just what Zeekerss, the lone developer of Lethal Company has done. Over the last few months, the game has blown up everywhere.
First of all, it accomplishes what many horror titles of the past have only scratched the surface of — being truly horrifying.
Lethal Company is a four-person (without modding, we’ll touch on that soon) first-person survival horror action where players take on the role of an employee for the mysterious “Company” utilizing real-time gameplay. The duties of the employees are to land on a variety of moons and collect “scrap” within
abandoned facilities, each piece worth a different value. If the quota is reached at the end of three days, the players can continue with an even higher quota and extra challenge. This may seem simple, but many horrors are waiting within the facilities, and all of them are out for blood.
Words can’t adequately capture how incredibly terrifying Lethal Company can and will be, and it’s all thanks to the direction of atmosphere and technical design. Nothing in my experience could have prepared me for being alone within the facilities, the silence only being broken by strange sounds or the screams of a friend being ripped apart a few rooms down. Knowing that there are monsters in the darkness that can kill me in an instant? The title of this game is accurate.
Lethal Company is also good at instilling a need to survive within players. There are plenty of horror experiences out there where a monster is chasing the player and corners them, only for the player to grimly accept their fate and reload the last checkpoint. This diminishes fear, as there are no true consequences — nothing to fight for. In contrast, the player is constantly thinking of the quota, and how every death is a setback. That drive to succeed is a rare quality that pushes the affair into genius
territory.
Now I am truly addicted to Lethal Company and have become quite good at surviving, but it’s not without its faults.
To begin, the controls can be difficult to get used to, with not only a weight mechanic but also stamina, resulting in a lot of accidental deaths from falling or being unable to run away from the monsters. Each scrap has a weight value which incrementally slows a player’s speed, making it a balancing act of going for value over survivability.
On top of this, each facility is randomly generated, meaning that players can enter and immediately be gunned down by a firing squad of turrets — and yes, this happened to me, and yes I am still mad. Difficulty spikes like this can and will be random. It’s also worth noting that Lethal Company is still in Early Access, so bugs and glitches are quite prevalent. They’re nothing that can’t be fixed by closing and re-opening the game, but it can still be frustrating.
Thankfully, despite those few negatives, Lethal Company more than makes up for it with many unique moments that occur thanks to the horror working in concert with the random generation. Each run is different, and facilities can offer anything from a nice and easy operation to something more akin to absolute chaos when any friends who happen to be along suddenly become extras in a horror film, picked off one by one. The screams I’ve heard from friends (and the ones I’ve let loose myself!) have genuinely
shocked me.
Despite the simple premise of collecting loot in a spooky environment, Lethal Company offers so much, especially in terms of replayability, and that’s in large part to the community that’s sprung up around it.
The amount of mods that have been made for Lethal Company since its launch is honestly incredible. They range from fixing some of bugs and technical issues, to turning some of the monsters into Goku from Dragonball Z — truly a horrifying sight. With an ever-growing community, evolving gameplay, the freshness of every run and the sheer terror that the experience delivers, I can easily imagine myself laying Lethal Company far into the future. making such a splash and shaking up the horror genre this thoroughly is no small feat, and it’s even more impressive coming from such a small indie studio.
Well done, Zeekerss.
Rating: 9 out of 10
— Tom Porter
Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Zeekerss. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via paid download and reviewed on PC. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. (It’s run based.) 60 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.
ESRB Rating: This game has not been rated by the ESRB.
Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.
Deaf and Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game is dependent on sound in order to have a good experience. A large amount of the monsters have sound cues to tell the player that they are in danger, including the Jester which plays a song before giving chase. there are no subtitles for dialogue or in-
game sound. This game is not accessible.
Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls. This game does not offer a controller map diagram, but movement is on the left stick and direction is on the right stick. Interact is on the square button, running is on the left trigger and jump is on the ‘X’ button. (Playstation Controls)
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