Running around an abandoned bunker in the dark with only a protective suit on your back and three of your closest friends by your side is a tough time. Oh wait, that’s not your close bud at all – it’s a grotesque, white-eyed monster that eats their corpses and uses their bodies as a puppet. Welcome to Lethal Company, a co-op survival horror game in which the main objective is to delve into the cracks of human alien history (procedurally generated and largely haunted) to retrieve the loot your group of four companions will need to figure out how to safely transport back to your ship and eventually sell to your weird bosses at the end of each round. It’s a simple but very enjoyable premise, and luckily the halls of its current Early Access version have enough mayhem to keep you immersed in its depths for an entire weekend without realizing you’ve done it. But even with such a magical loop and plenty of monsters to make it satisfyingly sneaky, Lethal Campaign still feels like a work in progress thanks to its stark graphics and little to no story to carry it.
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Each successful passage through these abandoned lunar tunnels allows everyone on your team to invest in better gear – such as flashlights and eventually powerful jetpacks – so you can take part in higher-level expeditions in places as elusive and extremely dangerous Jupiter’s moon, Titan. Inventory space is pretty limited – you’re only given four slots in total, and they run out quickly when you consider that you really need to carry a flashlight or a walkie-talkie. Both are critical to survival, but difficult to recover from if something goes wrong deep in a dungeon, where your teammates won’t have an easy time recovering your body. At least these items aren’t too expensive to replace.
Even so, everything in your inventory weighs you down, so escaping when you’re carrying a heavy load of loot will be difficult enough. With plenty of challenges and hidden dangers in Lethal Company, trying to escape is an absolute blast, even if you die horribly. Even after being blasted to pieces by a hidden turret or thundered by one of the many cosmic horrors that awaited me in the winding corridors, it was exhilarating to watch my surviving teammates stave off death. My favorite moments of comic relief even came from the comfort of the death chamber – like when one of my teammates tried to pull out a large piece of scrap while screaming at the top of their lungs in pure terror while something chased them across the map.
I’ve really enjoyed learning how Lethal Company works, getting a little smarter with each run – and even after spending about 15 hours with it, I still feel like there’s a lot more to discover. What’s hiding on Rand’s frozen moon? Anyone heard of the mysterious ghost girl who only appears to one crew member before killing them? How did that guy get eaten at the base? And on the other hand, why am I gaining experience and leveling up if there are no unlocks? It’s a little frustrating that Lethal Company raises several similar questions that it doesn’t yet have answers to. At this point, the progression does absolutely nothing, and virtually nothing is transferred between save files. This means that you will have to restart often, even if you survive long enough to reach the end game in a public group and for some reason you have to quit. But at least there are no microtransactions.
However, Lethal Company already instills a sense of wonder, subtly simulating the early days of Minecraft in a way that I had little idea what I was about to find every time I chose my destination at the start of each game day. There are eight different satellites to explore, each with a different difficulty – landing on higher difficulty satellites costs more currency, so you essentially have to place a bet before you make your run. The surface of each month is static, so you can familiarize yourself with their maps and try to plan your route before the excursion. But the real excitement begins as soon as you and your team enter the maze of underground complexes. Everything from the weather to the layout of the interiors and the locations of enemies and loot will vary depending on the setting, so there’s enough unpredictability to keep you on your toes.
For each run, you are only given three game days to find enough scrap to meet your profit quota, meaning there is a deadline and you are racing against time. When 5:30 PM rolls around, you better be ready to explode because the entire landscape becomes a living threat. Fortunately, each game day is long enough, around 10 minutes or so, and I’ve encountered countless moments where I’ve been separated from a teammate as they face what seemed like certain death, only to , for us to meet on the ship and share our wildly different stories of how we individually survived and returned to safety.
But it loses momentum a bit because there isn’t too much to carry you forward from one run to the next. There is no story to follow; progress in the campaign is entirely dependent on surviving to meet the next quota and that’s it. And even with, or maybe because of, procedural generation, the endless bunkers and basements of the lowest-level Death Company planets all look the same… and that means they can get old very quickly. It’s nice to have a few different types of indoor environments later on, but they’re locked away behind higher-level areas that take a bit of time and work to access. This means you’ll find your way through dozens or even hundreds of abandoned bunkers before finding your way to the abandoned mansion, and I wish these alternate locations had appeared sooner.
Most of the fun in Lethal Company comes from the multiplayer antics. As with any co-op game, communication and coordination are key to carefully planning and executing a safe dungeon extraction – at least keeping everyone in your party safe – and all of that underlying tension really reaches its zenith when your initial plan goes awry, your team falls apart and forces you to run for cover. Each of these terrifying opponents has different tricks and strategies that force you to adapt accordingly. For example, the shadowy Bracken stalks its prey by avoiding direct light, but it has a knack for easily navigating corridors in the dark and stalking unknown adventurers. At the same time, you have to watch out for the creepy doll head that comes towards you at lightning speed, unless you’re looking directly at it, in which case it freezes in place like the Weeping Doctor Angel Statue. Most of these enemies range from fairly difficult to impossible to kill, and that’s partly because Deadly Company rarely equips you with conventional weapons. There are no guns here; your best bet is a melee weapon like the yield sign. So combat is pretty much impossible. Especially against the toughest enemies, like the giant Guardian of the Forest or the monstrous jack-in-the-box Jester. In most cases, it is better to lighten the load and run in the opposite direction.
To spice things up even more, sounds attract the attention of these vile monsters – including any noises picked up by each player’s microphone. Setting up Push to Talk is a good way to stay hidden when you don’t need to talk, but talking to your teammates is a primary survival tool. This built-in limitation makes every bit of communication that much more important – you have to keep chatter to a minimum, especially around sound-sensitive monsters like the Eyeless Dogs that roam the outskirts of your ship at night. Conversely, talking to teammates on the walkie-talkie or in a group can prevent your avatar’s sanity meter from filling up, making monsters less likely to appear. This mechanic always makes playing Lethal Company interesting, especially since you can use a particularly loud teammate as a tool to, for example, distract monsters from valuable loot.
Things got a little easier when you can equip multiple party members with walkie-talkies, including at least one who can stay on the ship, to radio your expedition, open doors remotely, and help you navigate around potential threats by telling you where to go. However, I found that sitting on a ship and controlling everything instead of going into a dungeon is a little difficult. At least it gets a little more interesting after dark when the monsters appear near the ship. This forces the operator to remain silent, or they will attract unwanted attention from passing creatures who may swoop in and eat them.
Darkness is as antagonistic as any of the marauding creatures that haunt the corridors of the Mortal Company. Everything – even the interior of your ship – is dark, dreary, dirty and very disturbing. More often than not, the unforgiving darkness hides potential threats or even depicts distant team members as approaching monsters. As with other survival horror games like Alan Wake 2, the most powerful weapon at your disposal is often the flashlight that cuts through the darkness and allows you to safely escape from danger. It’s also very clever that Lethal Company flashlights 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 save light during one session, all four of my teammates got together and took turns walking up front with one flashlight, guiding us all to the exit as if we were a wonderfully doomed version of Scooby and the gang.
The constant tension in Lethal Company is partly due to its low-res graphical style, which obscures detail and makes everything look like it was rendered on the PlayStation 1. It’s a double-edged sword – especially when the low-res graphics, inelegant character animations and chunky monster designs work. against its otherwise exciting atmosphere. Sometimes what would be scary quickly turns into less than welcome comedy as the creature leaps through the map’s geometry. It’s a shame, because the way Lethal Company combines its built-in voice chat with its 3D-positioned audio system makes it very effective as a survival game with plenty of horror elements, from stomping monsters to the horrifying screams of your teammates and rusted doors. a sharp opening somewhere in the corridor behind you – all cleverly understated to heighten the macabre stakes.