I respect Lethal Company’s dedication to being a slapstick-fest that makes zero sense whatsoever

James made the observation that Lethal Company, a co-op game about being haunted space binmen, and this month’s pick for the RPS Game Club, gets less fun the better you are at it. This is true! It’s also janky, and the RNG on the weird, warren-like buildings prompted me to ask “Who designed this? What is this for? What kind of office is this??” out loud, as I faced yet another dead end full of pipes. And yet! There’s something about it that endears me to it far more than other similar games like Phasmophobia. Games like this all largely rely on you making your own fun with the tools they provide, but I think we should give the Lethal Company devs props for their tools, because they are weird and make no sense, and allow for some fantastic slapstick.

I’ve never before played a co-op game that generated moments of perfect comedic timing with such regularity. Phasmophobia takes itself quite seriously – as I imagine Zack Bagans takes his Ghost Adventures. It’s about running around squealing and using different kinds of paranormal walkie talkies to hear ghosts doing stuff. Lethal Company is about collecting empty Coke bottles and large screws, dying, and then watching as your friend runs away from a giant lizard with opposable thumbs, at which point he pauses and turns around at the exact moment the lizard catches up to him. The only way it could have gotten more on the level of a Home Alone paint can to the face is if Nate had manged to say “He’s behind me, isn’t he?” before turning.

This moment occurred during a short session I played with Nate and James, my podcast co-hosts. We left the fourth slot open to see what randomers turned up, and got a literal child who said he “had all the time in the world, although I’ve got school tomorrow”, and then declared “witness the power of mods!” and blasted into the air like an Olympian. We found his body later, stuck on a spike trap in the ceiling that rythmically slammed the corpse into the ground, as his legs ragdolled everywhere.

When I played with James, Kiera and Edwin, James was stalked by a Bracken. He kept seeing it in doorways and then, obviously, when anyone else came to check it had run away and was nowhere in sight. I started saying that James had Space Madness and I was going to lock him in a cell with Steve Buscemi. The situation spooked James enough that whenever he saw any of us approaching him he would yell “Ah, what’s that?” and then “Oh, it’s you!” a second later. He did this approximately every five minutes for the entire time we were playing, until the monster got him. It was great.

So yes, of course making your own fun isn’t new in games, but my point is that Lethal Company isn’t concerned with making a realistic or even coherant scenario for you to do this. Phasmophobia is like “ooh, a ghost, a haunted house, all the lights are off”, and Lethal Company is like “here is a giant Nutcracker doll with a gun, you need to get past it to collect a stop sign to give to a tentacle”. Why are there stop signs in an empty building on an alien moon? There aren’t even any roads!

The answer is, basically, who cares, it’s more fun, which is a design ethos I think should be embraced more often. It’s easier to do that in a game with no story whatsoever, of course, and it’s tempting to think that the devs came up with things like “a bug that steals trash back” or “a lumbering forest giant” by throwing darts at a wall covered in verbs. But I think you can see that more thought went into it, because a creature that runs away when you look at it, or a mask that possesses players and makes them mirror other people, seem pretty calculated to make Lethal Company a chaotic yuk-’em-up. This is a game with a useable whoopie cushion. So for all that it’s kind of janky, I salute the Lethal Company.