Lethal Company’s new arachnophobia mode is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a PC game

Viral Steam hit Lethal Company is no stranger to mixing the scary with the slapstick, as anyone who’s been dispatched with a ladder to the head or eaten by a fire exit knows. The co-op scrap scavenging game’s absurd humour might just have peaked though, thanks to one of the funniest additions I’ve ever seen in a PC game.

Lethal Company’s Patch 45 update added, among other things, an arachnophobia mode to help players with a fear of spiders confront its crawling Bunker Spider monster. Arachnophobia modes and other such sensitivity options are universally a good thing, but few make such a genuinely useful and welcome option quite so outright hilarious.

In the case of Lethal Company, devs Zeekerss took a brilliant literal approach to swapping out the Bunker Spider’s eight-legged appearance, replacing the arachnid with the word “SPIDER” in big, red capital letters. The word still moves around with the noise of scuttling legs, pausing just as the normal Bunker Spider does, which makes it all the funnier when it appears around the corner into your flashlight beam. Kill it - for example, with a few blows of a shovel in classic slapstick style - and the word will flip upside down.

Honestly, it’s just perfect - both genuinely useful for those with a fear of spiders and extremely funny for the rest of us who might just feel like adding a bit of extra comedy to the already ridiculous survival game. Consider it right up there in the newly created Arachnophobia Mode Hall of Fame alongside Satisfactory’s swapping of spiders for kitty cat faces.

Patch 45 brings plenty more to Lethal Company, which has become a true runaway hit on the back of its co-op hunt for salvage in the dark - all made that much funnier and scarier by its use of proximity chat, leading to plenty of clips shared widely across social media.

Also in the new update are useable paint spray cans and wearable masks, kindbind options, tweaked map generation for the Mansion, a new signal translator on the ship. Oh, and just in time for Christmas there are terrifying nutcrackers armed with guns.

“Arachnophobia mode will ease your fear, and I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year,” Zeekerss wrote - an understatement if I ever read one.