Lethal Company gets worse as you get better

So far, my main problem with Lethal Company – this month’s RPS Game Club game – is that I’m getting better at it. I’m more efficient at clearing up scrap, less prone to fear-spasming inside out when a monster attacks, and have become wise to most of the haunted houses’ deadliest tricks. All of these, it turns out, make Lethal Company a worse game.

A less enjoyable one, anyway. As a work of horror, many of Lethal Company’s emotional peaks are engineered by the game itself – the unity-breaking mind games of a Bracken, for instance, sidling into view of a single player and vanishing before their teammates can verify it. Or the straight shock of a melted butler suddenly dropping his broom to charge you down with a kitchen knife. Good stuff! Goooood stuff. But just as Jaws munching that bodyboarder kid becomes less icky with every subsequent rewatch, Lethal Company’s scares ultimately rely on player inexperience for maximum effect. That’s a resource that runs out quickly, when the whole game is structured around repeated visits to the same abandoned factories and dodging the same beasts.

My very first game, an all-RPS mission to a supposedly easy moon, went terribly. Project manager Kiera perished to a Bracken that nobody except me believed existed, I flailed around in the dark as some kind of facehugger creature dug its way into my brain, Edwin was too scared at the sight of his own teammates to collect any junk, and Alice Bee got struck by lightning. It was amazing, a proper whittling-down-the-survivors horror thriller unleaden by expectation or metagaming.

I won’t speak for my colleagues (especially Edwin, poor bloke) but personally I feel like the wide-eyed and curious James of those early runs is dead, and not just at the tendrils of some low-poly shadow creature. Now, you see, I actually know what I’m doing. I might still get lost in the occasional pitch black corridor network but otherwise, very little else seems to go wrong with me, now that I know the maps, the sound cues, the rules. Monster AI remains impressively diverse for a game of this scope but ever since I read up on their coded behaviours, I can mostly avoid them with about as much fear as sidestepping a Roomba. Get in, get scrap, get out. That’s the job, and I’ve passed my probation.

That’s all well and good if you only perceive videogames in terms of victories and rewards, but I’ve definitely lost much of what raised my heartbeat so much in those disastrous early ventures. Worse, I’ve started replacing it with a mere workmanlike duty to gather up rubbish, intentionally dodging the dangers that had made previous sessions so memorable. It’s not just the horror that fades away, either: the physical comedy of Lethal Company, so genuinely hilarious to the unfamiliar, loses its punch as well. The first time you watch your last living friend run from a forest kaiju, bolt upright like a terrified, sprinting pencil, it’s desperately funny. Within a couple of weeks it will probably be a joke you’ve heard nine times before, even with the lack of an actual script.

All that said, I do think there are simply more opportunities for laughs than for scares, so the humour shouldn’t dry up at quite the same rate. Lord knows I’m still jumping off the dropship straight into pools of quicksand. But not unlike how Darktide’s earliest missions have a unique flavour that’s eventually lost, I am worried that my best days with Lethal Company – when everything was horrible yet wondrous, and I’d fail with a smile on my face – have already passed.

I also suspect I’m not alone in this feeling, though instead of writing a sad blog post about it, others appear to cope with the loss of tension/comedy by actively undermining the horror aspect. Speedrunning, for example, or rushing shovel purchases so they can jump around thwacking the cryptids to death like they’re the TF2 Soldier.

Maybe, then, a mentality change is all I need? Rather than play Lethal Company as a real company man, I should stop figuring out how to optimise everything, stop reading the wiki, and train my brain to essentially cease absorbing any further information that could be used to play "better." Just become an orange and kind of shitty Peter Pan, never to grow or change, but living happily in a world where being eaten stays fresh and funny forever.