BY LOGAN SCHLOSSER
WEBMASTER
Throughout the majority of our waking moments, we wish for companionship. Put into simpler terms, we wish for just a few good buddies. Maybe your choice of activity is going to that newest slasher film, or a midnight fishing trip where no one actually catches anything. No matter the activity, it can’t hurt to have a few friends beside you to support you with whatever life throws your way. Even if “life” is an analogy for a massive space cooperation called “The Company” that sends you and your buddies on essentially suicide missions to fund said company. With that forward out of the way, let’s get right into it.
Lethal Company was a game that essentially just sprung up out of nowhere, with little to no knowledge of what the game was about in the slightest. However, it was a massive success within the first month of its release, dragging in one thousand average players. Later, in December of 2023, it would see a staggering 68,922.8% uptake in consistent active players. Ending to where we are now, with an incredibly active player base of over one hundred thousand. At the state we are in now, the game is still in early access, meaning there is still much more to go development-wise. While it is a very polished game, even in its beta, there is still an incredibly flourishing modding community that keeps this game fully updated.
With that popularity, the game must be incredibly complex and full of incredible narrative or gameplay, right? To be honest, not really. To put it simply, it’s a game that really succeeds with the notion that you will play it with a good group of friends. Implementing proximity chat, an in-game chat system in which you can only interact with your friends if you are close to them, the game truly is an immersive experience. The plot is rather simple. You, the character, are an employee of “The Company,” and are tasked with shuttling down to various moons within Jupiter’s orbit to collect scrap from various abandoned research facilities. However, there are plenty of monsters that live within the grounds of these facilities, each with their own unique methods of attack, along with complex ways to evade them. Lethal Company is unique in that it truly does make you feel hopeless and genuinely scared, as it’s more useful to learn how to evade rather than to fight, as many of the entities in this game have incredibly specific ways to defeat them, some even being immortal.
For example, one of the original entities of the game known as the “Bracken” or “Flower-Man”, is known for being especially hard to deal with. It will creep up upon you from the back, being only visible from its bright, white eyes. If you do not look at it in time to scare it off, it will snap your neck and bring your body to a pre-designated “Bracken Room,” where it will attempt to lure your fellow crewmates back. The only way to truly defeat it is to stun it with the rather expensive and bulky taser and get one of your friends to whack it three times with a shovel. With that complex of an extermination process, it’s no wonder that it can just be more useful to learn how to evade these monsters.
However, some of them cannot even be evaded, just noticing one of these entities can be your last move. The “Ghost Girl” entity will only be visible to one player, and can even follow them outside of the compound, with the only true way to defeat her is to leave the moon entirely. She will hum and dance behind you until you are unlucky enough to look behind yourself, where she will fully charge at you, killing you instantaneously. After that, the cycle repeats, locking onto the next paranoid crewmate.
If you were lucky enough to make it out alive, you must have enough scrap collected from the compound within three days to satisfy the quota. If not, you and the rest of your crew will be terminated, ending your playthrough.
This game was truly a wonderful experience that I did not expect from the end of 2023. With a fanbase that is constantly growing, along with a terrifying but incredibly fun premise, there is no doubt that I will keep coming back to this game. For it only comes with a price of ten dollars currently, there is no reason not to pick up this game. So, what are you waiting for? Come and join the Lethal Company.
Statistics Credit: https://steamcharts.com/app/1966720