Lethal Company is a co-op horror game that is best played with a group of friends. You play as a worker who is tasked with scavenging materials from across a system of moons while avoiding being killed. Despite being a horror game, Lethal Company is easily one of the funniest games I’ve ever played.
The core gameplay loop goes like this: Land on a moon, choose what tools to buy, find and enter the planet’s main building, explore and pick up items along the way, return before midnight, and sell whatever you have. Lethal Company’s main goal is to meet a profit quota that increases every time it is completed.
Throughout the expedition, players will encounter threats of varying difficulty. The threats range from monsters to traps, and environmental challenges. Some moons have unique monsters, and others can have modifiers like heavy storms, flooding, or solar eclipses. Every moon has a building that is randomly generated each time the players land, so every run of the game is different.
To help on these expeditions, players can buy all sorts of things from the store on the main ship. The items range from absolutely necessary to just plain goofy. On one hand, you can choose to spend your team’s money on a set of walkie-talkies so you can communicate effectively, or spend 700 credits on a jetpack that is basically a death sentence to whoever uses it.
Expeditions are the strongest part of the game, as it’s the main thing you do. The random map layout combined with random threats allows for both terrifying and hilarious moments. Players have to always keep time in mind, as nighttime turns the outside into a danger zone and they could be abandoned if not back by midnight. Sometimes, you’ll hear a noise from two rooms away before your friend screams and is dragged into the dark, never to be seen again. Other times, that same friend will stare directly at a landmine and jump into it. Expeditions are made even better by what I would personally consider the best feature of the game: proximity chat. How proximity chat works is that it makes it so that your voice has an actual in-game volume; people need to be close to hear you, and so do monsters. There are moments when it is necessary to stay completely silent and still or risk death.
Even in the face of all of the funny things that are bound to happen, Lethal Company does a stellar job of keeping tension. Outside of just being scared by monsters or the time crunch, the game punishes carelessness by penalizing the whole team when each player dies. When a player dies, their body will drop to the ground and, if not brought back to the ship, will take money away from the team. Worst of all, if there are no players alive on the ship, the ship will leave automatically, deleting all of the recovered items when you respawn.
Lethal Company is a must-have game to play with friends. The game manages to be simultaneously fun, scary, and comedic, all without anything feeling out of place. Lethal Company will keep you engaged throughout the entire time you’re playing it.
