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A new co-op horror game is flying up the Steam charts, racking in nearly 30,000 "overwhelmingly positive" reviews and becoming one of the platforms most-played games.
For the past couple of days that I've been paying attention to Steam's ranking of its top 100 most-played games, Lethal Company has stayed well within the top 20, even making it as far as the top five at one point. At the time of writing, there are more than 70,000 current players with a Tuesday, November 21 peak of 117,278. That puts it right behind Call of Duty, PUBG, and Apex Legends as the seventh most-played game on Steam.
I can't help but be reminded of Phasmophobia, an indie game so influential it's inspired a number of vaguely similar multiplayer horror games released to varying degrees of success.
The reason I bring up the viral success of Phasmophobia, which peaked at release back in October 2020 and which has remained fairly steady, is to point out that Lethal Company is even more popular. Phasmophobia's biggest peak player count was 112,241, five thousand less than Lethal Company's managed to attract in the few short weeks since launch.
That's not to say Lethal Company shares a lot in common with Phasmophobia. There's a loosely familiar structure that puts teams of four players to the task of entering a dangerous environment, but that's where the similarities end. Whereas Phasmophobia tasks you with identifying spirits, in Lethal Company you work for a probably evil company that sends you to abandoned, previously industrialized moons in search of scrap to drive profits for your employer. Naturally, all manner of horrific creatures await you hoping to, according to Steam's content warning, decapitate and/or dismember you.
The cash you earn during missions can be used to travel to new moons with higher risks and rewards, or you can dress up your ship with suits and decorations. I have to say, the player characters in Lethal Company got a pretty raw deal when they accepted a job that not only risks death by dismemberment, but also requires them to use their own money to take on new jobs.
Of the many, many glowing Steam reviews of Lethal Company, a lot of them focus on the clever use of proximity chat and how it creates a lot of moments that are terrifying and hilarious in equal parts.
"My friend was slowly being killed in a room and all I could do was listen to his horrified screams over the radio," reads one particularly unnerving review. "Anyways, we met quota....10/10."
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