Cheap Thrills: Lethal Company
Lethal Company is a lot of game for ten bucks.
You may have heard of it. I had not. I just picked it up as a part of a Steam Sale. Lethal Company’s “plot” Is that you are working for a deep space salvage company, called “The Company.” You go to various moons to find salvage and bring it aboard your ship… Without being eaten. That’s important because being eaten is a significant limiter on your ability to meet quota. But don’t worry about losing The Company’s expensive salvage ship. When the clock hits midnight it will fly home, whether you are on it or not. So that’s one less worry for you.
As if that wasn’t enough pressure you also have a couple of ticking clock mechanics to cope with. You have a quota to meet within a limited amount of time. Also, like I said, the ship will hot-foot it back to base if you’re not on it so you probably want to be on it because even if you have salvage on it and it has to leave without you, you (or to be exact your seemingly limitless clones) will not receive any credit for it. You lose everything if the ship leaves without you.
The game is built on the Unity engine and is tweaked to resemble an art nouveau design. I liked the surrealism of it. The moons are procedurally generated and have weather effects, which will either lower visibility or worse increase your odds of encountering a monster. This appears to have been built by a one-man-band development team. Zeekerss, was previously on the Roblox dev team. He says that he wanted to evoke the feeling of breaking into an alien zoo and letting all of the weird animals out.
Although, what he’s mostly invoked is Phasmaphobia meets Five Nights at Freddy’s in the Iron Lung. That’s pretty much what it feels like. This is at its heart, a horror game. And as this is a horror game, there will be a lopsided balance of power that strongly favors the monsters. The atmosphere is designed to create a tone of fear against a background of dread. The weapons that are most easily affordable are stun grenades and Boomboxes. Well, the shovel is the most affordable but frankly, this is not that kind of game. A very good shotgun was put into the game around Christmas, but it’s rare. You have to kill a Nutcracker to get it.
It’s got some brilliant little touches. You’re talking to a teammate and all of a sudden they aren’t saying anything to you anymore. No screams or anything, he’s just gone. The only thing you’ll find is his flashlight and a rattling noise in the near distance. You’ll have to work out in advance who carries what because you only get four cargo slots. so do you distribute it evenly or do you pick one crewman to carry all the gear leaving everyone else free to carry salvage and hope the guy with all the gear doesn’t get killed? He will. It helps to keep one crewman in the ship past 15:00, he can monitor what happening to the salvagers. Although, he can only look in on one at a time and the guy on the ship is facing the 5 Nights problem of a security door that sucks up battery reserves like a sponge.
After you’ve collected a lot of money you can afford luxuries like a teleporter. However, you’ll likely have to spend that money opening up one of the high-risk but high-reward moons.
Just to be clear: You. Will. Not. Win. You can’t win. This is a game that is played but never won. You will just keep playing until you die one way or another. Very metaphysical and philosophical I suppose but you do need to know this going in. Your only reward is more play at a higher difficulty.
It does need to be played with actual friends, if you join a pickup game of randos you’ll be met with total silence or the braying of an 8-year-old that you seriously want to punch through the screen. Hard. But if you have friends it’s a blast.
There is a huge variety of horror monsters you will encounter. Everything from a crew-eating giant to a creepy little Japanese ghost girl and they will all try to kill you. You can scan these to unlock lore (except the girl).
One of the things the players are having a lot of fun with is the lore. There’s lots of hints but nothing really concrete except for Sigurd. Sigurd and his brother worked for The Company in 1968 and you can find his little diaries. The current year is 2532. Indicating The Company has been in business for a terrifyingly long period of time. You are left trying to piece together a conspiracy theory to understand the background. The players have settled on a couple of interpretations. First, that Project Horizon was secretly a success instead of a canceled blue sky project by the Pentagon. Various planets and moons were colonized but then something went wrong. Now you are doing salvage missions on colonies that are devoid
Second, that it’s all about ‘Jeb.’ When you travel to The Company’s home office you drop off your salvage at a window and ring a bell. Then step back. A tentacle (or hook) flashes out and sweeps it in. The creature that does that is called “Jeb.” If you annoy Jeb, his tentacles whip out and drag you in. It’s fun to get the new guy to do that. There is a very popular, theory, referenced in the game, that Jeb just eats the salvage and that the first function and primary obligation of The Company is now just to keep Jeb fed. That’s the reason it exists. Jeb was the result of a weapons project that can now only be contained and fed. The reason your quota keeps going up is that Jeb keeps getting hungrier. Eventually, The Company will not be able to keep Jeb fed and it will break out to devour the universe.
The game is still in early release so there is no proper ending yet. Perhaps there never will be, it could easily be that kind of game.
It also has some soft-lock issues like getting stuck in rooms. You can be teleported out of the rooms by the guy on the ship but that has its own problems. There is also the to-be-expected issue of clipping in an early access. This is all pretty tolerable stuff in a $10 game.
Let me stress if you don’t have friends then don’t play this one. It’s just not as good by yourself.
All said and done, The Dark Herald recommends Lethal Company, it’s a cheap thrill.
