Your new co-op survival horror obsession is about being underpaid and overworked space scavengers

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Nobody lives on this moon for a reason.

Newly released cooperative horror indie game Lethal Company is getting a lot of buzz from early players. It's a simple setup: You and your crew of three other scavengers drop on to an abandoned moon station, get as many valuables as you can, and get out. If that seems simple, well, there are a lot of ways for it to go wrong, and a lot of them have way more legs than I prefer anything larger than a thumbnail to have.

It's a setup that goes from mundane to horrifying at speed, as your group is increasingly forced to stretch further and further just to meet an ever-increasing income quota. Fail to make quota, or fail to make it back at all, and that's game over for your crew member and their career. Start up a new one.

The whole game's really enhanced, for me at least, by a deep-fried visual aesthetic that reeks of cheap camera equipment your prospectors have to use. It's not turning prospective players off—of the 819 Steam reviews since Lethal Company launched on October 23, 98% of them are positive.

As you earn money you can use it to upgrade your ship and buy new, fancy spacesuits, as well as spend it on gear like new lights, shovels, walkie-talkies, and deterrent stun grenades. You can also use it to travel to new moons, enabling you to go for higher risk, higher reward salvage expeditions.

One of the coolest things is how your team wants to stick together for safety in numbers, but game systems encourage you to split up. "These dangers prey upon the vulnerable and lonesome, and the protection of your crew may be your only hope. You can guide your crewmates from your ship, using the radar to call out traps and using the ship's terminal to access remotely locked doors--or you can all go in together," says the description.

You can find Lethal Company on Steam for $10 US.

Jonathan Bolding
Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.