After REPO 'kinda blew up', its developer asks the community for advice on how to make matchmaking lobbies

One of Repo's player characters, resembling a yellow pedal bin with googly eyes, encounters a skeletal, open mouthed face with glowing yellow eyes.

(Image credit: semiwork)

REPO is the latest co-op horror viral sensation, taking the template established by Lethal Company and adding wacky physics and googly-eyed robot protagonists. It's a combination that has proved wildly popular, with REPO currently positioned as the fourth highest-selling game on Steam.

Now, developer semiwork has posted its first community update since the game launched. Starting with the acknowledgement that "Our game REPO kinda blew up", the video mainly covers familiar ground for these kinds of updates. Semiwork assures players that the studio is working hard on new features for the game, like new enemies, weapons and so forth. The video also provides a sneak peek of a new level, which is in very early production and so looks fairly abstract, but appears to be either a museum or an art gallery.

The primary intent of the video, however, is a request for help from the community on the issue of matchmaking lobbies. For context, REPO launched without matchmaking lobbies, which semiwork apologised for in a previous video. The studio didn’t explain why it launched without this feature, simply stating "we had no idea". But the inference seems to be they didn't anticipate the need for them, as they didn't expect the game to be as popular as it has become.

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Provided you don't need to rely on matchmaking to get a group together, REPO is a blast to play. PC Gamer's Elie Gould took it for a spin last week, and was immediately enamoured by its physics-infused shenanigans and flappy-mouthed, pedal bin-like characters. "The proximity chat detaches your character's jaw relative to how much volume you're spitting through the mic," they wrote. "It's unspeakably funny watching one of my friends run from a killer clown while their head is completely cocked back screaming at the top of their lungs."

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.

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