It’s a heck of a time, running through an abandoned bunker in the dark with nothing but a hazmat suit on your back and three of your closest buds at your side. Oh wait, that’s not your closest bud at all – it’s a grotesque, white-eyed monster eating their corpse and using their body like a puppet. Welcome to Lethal Company, a co-op survival horror game that’s all about digging deep into the (procedurally-generated and largely haunted) crevasses of exoplanetary human history for loot, which your party of up to four companions will need to figure out how to safely transport back to your ship and eventually sell to your eldritch bosses at the end of each round. This is a simple but highly enjoyable premise, and thankfully, there’s enough chaos decking the halls of its current early access version to sink an entire weekend into its depths without realizing you’ve done so. But, even with such a riveting loop and plenty of monsters to make it satisfyingly treacherous, Lethal Company does still feel like the work-in-progress it is thanks to its janky graphics and having little-to-no story to carry it.
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Each successful run through these abandoned lunar tunnels lets everyone in your squad invest in better gear – like flashlights and eventually high-powered jetpacks – so that you can take on higher-tier expeditions to places like the elusive and extremely dangerous moon of Jupiter, Titan. Inventory space is rather limited – you’re given only four slots in total, and they’re quickly strained when you factor in that you effectively need to carry a flashlight or a walkie-talkie. Both are crucial to survival but difficult to recover if something goes wrong deep inside of a dungeon, where your teammates won’t easily be able to recover your body. At least those items aren’t too expensive to replace.
Regardless, everything in your inventory weighs you down, making it appropriately tough to get away if you’re carrying a heavy load of loot. Thanks to Lethal Company’s plethora of challenges and secret dangers, it’s an absolute blast to try to escape, even when you die horrifically. Even after being blasted to bits by a hidden turret or getting chomped on by one of the many cosmic horrors awaiting me in the twisting corridors, it was still a joy to watch my surviving teammates outrun death. My favorite comic relief moments even took place from the comfort of the death cam – for instance, when one of my teammates tried to haul a big piece of scrap, screaming from the top of their lungs in sheer terror while something chased them across the map.
I’ve deeply enjoyed learning how Lethal Company works, getting a little savvier with each run – and even after spending about 15 hours with it, I still feel like there’s plenty left to discover. What’s hiding on the frozen moon of Rend? Has anyone heard about the mysterious ghost girl who only appears to one crewmate at a time before she kills them? How did that guy just get eaten back at base? And, on a side note, why am I gaining experience points and leveling up when there are no unlocks? It’s a little frustrating that Lethal Company raises a few questions like that that it doesn’t yet have answers to. Right now, progression does absolutely nothing, and virtually nothing is carried between save files. That means you’ll need to restart often, even if you survive long enough to reach the endgame in a public group and have to dip out for some reason. But hey, at least there are no microtransactions.
Still, Lethal Company already instills a sense of wonder, subtly mimicking the early days of Minecraft in the way I had almost no clue what I was going to find whenever I selected my destination at the beginning of every in-game day. There are eight different explorable moons, each varying in difficulty – with higher-difficulty moons costing more currency to land on, so you effectively have to ante up before you make your run. The surface of each moon is static, so it’s possible to familiarize yourself with their maps and attempt to plan your route ahead of an excursion. But the real excitement begins once you and your crew enter the labyrinthine underground complexes. Everything from outdoor weather to the interior layout to enemy spawns and loot locations varies between runs, so there’s enough unpredictability to keep you on your toes.
For every run, you’re only given three in-game days to find enough scrap to reach your profit quota, meaning there’s a baked-in deadline and you’re racing against the clock. Once it strikes 5:30 PM you’d better be ready to blast off, because the entire landscape becomes a living threat. Luckily, each in-game day is reasonably long, around 10 minutes or so, and I’ve encountered countless moments where I became separated from a teammate as they faced what seemed like a certain death, only for us to rendezvous back at the ship and share our wildly differing stories of how we individually survived and made our way back to safety.
But it loses some momentum because there isn’t too much to carry you forward from one run to the next. There’s zero story to follow; progress through the campaign is entirely about surviving to meet the next quota, and that’s it. And even with procedural generation, or maybe because of it, the endless bunkers and basements of Lethal Company’s lowest-tier planets all look alike… and this means they can get stale very quickly. It’s nice that there are a few different types of interior environments later on, but they’re locked behind higher-tier zones that require a bit of time and grinding to earn access to. This means you’ll scrounge your way through tens or even hundreds of abandoned bunkers before you find your way to an abandoned mansion, and I wish those alternative locations showed up earlier.
Most of the enjoyment in Lethal Company comes from multiplayer antics. Like any co-op game, communication and coordination are key to carefully planning and executing the safe extraction of loot from the bowels of a dungeon – with all of your party members intact, at least – and all that underlying tension truly reaches its zenith when your initial plan goes awry, scattering your team and sending you running for your lives. Each of these terrifying adversaries have different tricks and strategies, forcing you to adapt accordingly. For example, the shadowy Brakken stalks its prey while shying away from direct light, but it has a knack for easily skirting around corridors in the dark and flanking unaware adventurers. At the same time you have to keep an eye out for the creepy doll-esque Coil-Head, which rushes toward you at lightning speed unless you’re looking directly at it, in which case it freezes in place like a Dr. Who Weeping Angel statue. Most of these opponents range from fairly difficult to impossible to kill, and this is partially because Lethal Company rarely equips you with conventional weaponry. There are no guns here; your best bet is a melee weapon like a yield sign. Thus, combat is largely untenable. Especially against the most challenging enemies, like the giant Forest Keeper or the terrifying jack-in-the-box-like Jester. Most of the time, it’s best to lighten your load and run in the opposite direction.
Spicing things up even more, sounds attract the attention of these nefarious monsters – including any noises picked up by each player’s microphone. Setting up Push to Talk is a good way to stay covert when you don’t need to speak, but chatting with your teammates is a fundamental survival tool. This built-in limitation makes every bit of communication significantly more important – you have to keep chatter to a minimum, especially around sound-sensitive monsters like the Eyeless Dogs that prowl the outskirts of your ship at night. Inversely, talking to your teammates over walkie-talkies or while huddled in a group can keep your avatar’s sanity meter from filling up, lessening the chances of monsters spawning in the first place. This mechanic keeps Lethal Company interesting at all times, especially since you can use a particularly loud teammate as a tool to, for instance, draw monsters away from a valuable piece of loot.
It’s all made a bit simpler once you’re able to equip multiple party members with walkie-talkies, including at least one who can stay behind on the ship – directing your expedition over radio comms while opening doors remotely and helping you navigate around potential threats by telling you where to go. That said, I found it’s a bit of a chore to sit in the ship and direct everything instead of venturing into the dungeon. At least it gets a bit more interesting after dark when monsters spawn near the ship. This forces the operator to be quiet, otherwise, they’ll invite the unwanted attention of passing creatures who can break in and eat them.
Darkness is as much an antagonist as any of the marauding creatures stalking Lethal Company’s hallways. Everything – even the interior of your ship – is dark, dreary, muddy, and deeply unsettling. Most of the time, unrelenting darkness obscures potential threats or even portrays distant team members as oncoming monsters. As in other survival horror games like Alan Wake 2, the most powerful weapon at your disposal is often a flashlight, which cuts through darkness and allows you to safely navigate out of harm’s way. Also, it’s smart that Lethal Company’s flashlights both hold a limited charge and can potentially attract unwanted threats when turned on or off, forcing you to be tactical about how and when you use them. To conserve light during one session, all four of my crewmates huddled together and took turns walking in front with a single flashlight, guiding all of us toward the exit like we were a delightfully doomed version of Scooby and the gang.
Lethal Company’s constant tension is partially due to its low-fi graphical style, which obscures details and makes everything look like it was rendered on a PlayStation 1. That’s a double-edged sword – especially when low-resolution art, inelegant character animations, and chunky monster designs work against its otherwise gripping atmosphere. Sometimes, what would’ve been a scary moment rapidly devolves into a less welcome kind of comedy when a creature glitches through the geometry of the map. That’s a shame, because the way Lethal Company blends built-in voice chat into its 3D-positioned audio system makes it deftly effective as a survival game with rich horror elements – everything from stomping monsters to the terrified screams of your teammates to a rusty door jarring itself open somewhere down the hallway behind you is all skillfully attenuated to up the spooky ante.
