Lethal Company taking a novel approach with its new arachnophobia mode

Video games love spiders but arachnophobes obviously don’t, and we’ve seen an increasing number of studios attempting to find a comfortable middle ground – usually an adorable, blobby middle ground – for all involved in recent times. Enter developer Zeekerss, which has now taken its own delightfully literal approach to solving the ongoing spider problem in its smash-hit co-op horror Lethal Company.

Lethal Company – which has proven to be an unexpectedly huge success since launching into early access in October, remaining high on Steam’s top-selling and most played charts – runs the gamut of horrors, pitting players against everything from ghost girls and mechanical bees to eyeless dogs and spring-loaded mannequins as they scavenge its moon bases.

But as of this week’s Frosty Update, players will no longer be forced to recoil in horror as its scuttling bunker spiders do their rounds. In perhaps the simplest, most effective attempt yet at making a game less of an ordeal for those with an aversion to eight-legged creatures, Zeekerss has introduced an arachnophobia mode that swaps out their scuttling heft for the word “spider”, comically overlaid where the critter in question should be.

Most game that’ve moved to incorporate arachnophobia modes have either tried to temper the horror with cuteness or abstraction to varying degrees of success. Developer Coffee Stain opted to replace spiders with adorable pictures of cats in its automation sim Satisfactory, for instance, while Obsidian’s Grounded – a game with more than its fair share of creepy crawlies – let players dial the spider details right back through ‘blob with eyes’ to ‘innocuous circle’. In all cases though, it turns out being aggressively harassed by a leaping, skittering thing you can still hear scuttling about the place isn’t all that much less terrifying.

Lethal Company’s solution, though, seems to be a bit of a winner. No matter how many different ways I watch its arachnophobia mode enabled spiders attack, there just isn’t much of a chill to be had from witnessing six capital letters march across the room like a particularly determined piece of place holder text. Unfortunately, though, if you happen to be okay with spiders but have a sweaty, cowering aversion to mechanical bees and dead-eyed ghost girls, Lethal Company’s latest update isn’t going to be of much help to you.