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Twitch hit Lethal Company is spooky and hilarious, but it’s not quite ready for mass consumption

1K View2023-11-29

Lethal Company

8.7

Psychological HorrorDungeon CrawlerSci-fiActionProcedural GenerationFirst-PersonRealisticAliens

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SHOULD I PLAY LETHAL COMPANY?

If you aren’t already swept up in the latest viral sensation created by Roblox game developer Zeekerss, you might want to wait on this one for a bit. Lethal Company has a winning formula that’s perfectly tuned for hilarious Twitch streams, but it needs a good deal of fit and finish before it’s a game I could recommend for a general audience. That said, if you’re ready to deal with a lot of rough edges and have a dedicated squad to play with, Lethal Company is definitely worth a look.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played two hours of Lethal Company, which was plenty of time to get the basic flow of the game down. It’s pretty simple: As part of a crew of space salvagers, you land on one of several moons, collect scrap to fill a company-mandated quota, and return to HQ to sell off the haul for cash. That cash can then be used to buy essential space gear like flashlights, jet packs, teleporters, and stun guns, all of which can come in very handy on far-flung lunar factories that aren’t nearly as abandoned as advertised.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT LETHAL COMPANY

• It’s actually scary. Lethal Company may not have the visual gloss of the new Resident Evil 4, but it certainly gave me a good case of the creeps anyway. The homemade looks actually added to the dread I felt while poking around in abandoned factories and alien basements, because there was a heightened sense of there being no rules or guarantees. Safety was a distant memory, and each step I took deeper into its dark mazes made me want to go home more.

• Audio design. Lethal Company has strict rules about who can talk to whom, but those rules are at least easy to grasp. It works just like it would in real life, meaning you can hear and talk with people in your immediate vicinity, but you have to take out and use a walkie-talkie in order to talk to anyone farther away. That meant that getting separated from the group was highly nerve-racking, because I couldn’t just ask a member of my team where they were. Instead, I had to call out to them as I wandered around, retracing my steps. It’s not hard to get lost in Lethal Company, and it felt scary every time I thought it was happening.

• Fun to watch. One of the things fueling Lethal Company’s huge success right now is that it’s a blast to watch. Groups of streamers team up to explore the moons together, and because of the natural communication Lethal Company encourages, it makes for compelling viewing. There are also plenty of opportunities for squad members to play deadly pranks on each other, such as getting each other eaten by various alien monsters, which naturally makes for only-on-Twitch clippable moments.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN LETHAL COMPANY?

• Graphics. Lethal Company is being made by a solo developer, so I’m not saying it needs triple-A looks or anything, and it does a lot with a little as it is. Still, there are definitely areas that could use some work: I thought character models and animation tended to look pretty goofy, particularly my own arms when I was performing actions or using items.

• Screen options. There’s no way to pick a resolution from an in-game menu, which is a glaring oversight in a PC game.

• Matchmaking. It wasn’t easy to find an open game in Lethal Company. I had to constantly refresh the list of available sessions, and it was always blind chance that led to me jumping into a crew with more than one person on it. I’d either get an error or a message saying the session was full. Another issue is that I could see that other players were playing with mods, but not which mods they were using, or which mod loader, effectively making it impossible to join those sessions.