Consider what it’s like when you clean your room. Tedious, a mess, and downright annoying. Parents threatening and yelling at you. If you don’t do it right, they take your phone and video games. And you think to yourself, “It can’t be any worse.” Well, it could be. Instead, imagine cleaning a planet. But instead of your parents making you because you live like a slob, you have to clean to make a certain quota in a short period for a company you know nothing about. Now imagine that horrible creatures are trying to kill you while this is happening. There is just one goal: to survive. That is Lethal Company.
Lethal Company is a survival horror game designed around scavenging for junk in a post-apocalyptic world made by one man whose online username is Zeekerss, using the public Unity game engine designed for small indie games not to overtake the biggest FPS (first-person shooter) series, Call of Duty and be nominated and winning best game with friends from Steam. But Zeekerss didn’t start with Unity; he started with Roblox. Making small horror games around 2013 throughout the years, Zeekers kept releasing new games, each one better than the last, but none of them good enough to explode in mainstream media.
Zeekerss first published Lethal Company on Roblox before making a Steam version in early access for only 10 USD as of January 2024. Zeekerss published Lethal Company on October 23rd, 2023 with a steady player base before hitting its peak in December of 2023, after exploding into mainstream media with funny moments and memes.
Lethal Company captures that same feeling of Among Us, in that it provides wacky space horror and fun with friends, so it makes sense why some people call it the new Among Us, but it has solidified itself as one of the greatest games of 2023.
With any good video game comes good gameplay. Lethal Company is a first-person cooperative game with up to four other players in procedurally generated rooms, which means the layout will be the same but NPCs (non-playable characters) and loot spawns are different in every world. This makes replayability unique and worth it. Accompanying the player besides their friends are numerous creatures, all of which are trying to kill them. When traveling to distant planets you have very few resources to work with such as proximity communication, four inventory slots, and running, your only defense. To get to these planets, you need a ship and you do get one, but it’s not the greatest. It has a tiny interior, one navigation screen, a store to buy objects, and a 24-hour timer before it leaves the planet, with or without you. Once you and your friends have either hit the quota or decided to stop scavenging for scrap, you enter your spaceship (assuming you made it in time) and head off for the company’s dedicated moon where you sell scrap. After placing the scrap you scavenged on a table, you ring a bell, and be sure to back away because tentacles will come at and take your scrap, and maybe you if you, unfortunately, stand too close. you can head back to your ship and set off to fill a higher quota and buy new items to aid your journey. This is the gameplay loop with 19 entities that can show up on the planet, some of them actively hostile and some leave you alone until provoked, and eight moons to scavenge. The game ends when you fail to hit the quota in a certain amount of days, and with the quota rising each time, it serves as a good difficulty system.
With a decent year for gaming, it is amazing to see a very small indie game gain the same sort of popularity as mainstream titles like Baldur’s Gate 3.
