Lethal Company Isn't a Horror Game - It's a Comedy

I think charisma is more important than throwing jokes at the wall to see what sticks. If the game has a charm, a charisma to it, players are likely to become invested enough into it to find elements humorous, instead of shouting at the player 'Wasn't that funny? Doesn't that make you want to LAUGH??'

You think it’s funny watching your friends die? Psychos (sarcasm)

Excuse me, but YOU are the alien.

You forgot red alert 2
Edit: and 3

This makes me think of an italian table top RPG called "Side Effect".

The game it's not a comedy one, it has a pretty interesting lore and atmosphere, however its freedom of actions (especially in combact) and high risk high reward system allows for really comedic moments.

Every time I play Lethal with my friends we're practically dry-heaving with laughter at dumb stuff that happens in our corporate misadventures. It's absolutely a feature of the game and definitely establishes LC as a real gem. Even the tension can be funny, like watching our last surviving crewmate try to outwit two coilheads while we're all dead, panicking and rollicking with laughter in death-chat together. The game's format makes it almost impossible to not laugh or have a great time.

Zeekers (the Lethal Company dev) is just really good at comedy too. The Upturned is another example of their comedic horror style

One of my favorite funny moments of a game that I experienced recently actually came from Frostpunk of all places. I was playing a DLC scenario where you have to build one of the Generators that are the centerpiece of the other senarios, and since I’m assuming at city builders I was using cheats to give myself resources. At one point I gave myself 5000 coal (which, if you’ve never played, is a ridiculous amount) and I suddenly got a dialogue pop-up of one of my workers being concerned over my new “obsession” with stockpiling coal. That itself was pretty funny, but then I read the response options and the extra information I got from hovering over them all ended with “so you should probably start working on the Generator now.” I have no idea if it was really aimed towards people using console commands or not, but it caught me so off-guard I was just dying in my chair for several minutes.

Modern games hunor puts itself in the same situation as a coworker interrupting you to tell a joke. The joke needs to be VERY good to overcome the frustration of interrupting your flow. "I was just trying to pay attention to something that I'm invested in, and you forced me to stop" is not a receptive mindset for a laugh.

Regarding the Skyrim Giant Comment - they did fix it!!!! :D
But we the community wanted it back so they brought the glitch back XD

The stop sign in VTMB, is something i think about to this day

Having a friend that goes on a killingspree with a stop sign just to make the quota will never get old in Lethal Company.

And it's true that giving players the toolbox to experiment with systems and mechanics often results in the best comedic moments. I remember figuring out that I could just simply push the boss of the edge of the arena in Baldur's Gate 3. Seeing that boss fall into an endless pit is hilarious. Afterwards realizing that it meant that I had also pushed the loot off the clif, only made it funnier.

Another great example of this is the game called “the corridor”

so i had 2 close calls with turrets... both times followed with "im just too good"
the 3th i ran in...i dodged, "im just too good", proceeded to walk directly infront of another turret, died..
yeah my n my spectating friend had a good laugh over it
LC is an amazing game if you have the people to play it with
edit. also the "give him back" clip and edits has got to be some of the best things thats come out of games recently

This explains the joy i felt from tears of the kingdom very well

I'm so glad that the Lethal Company dev is getting the recognition they deserve, and that the gam is rightly causing laughter constantly. I'm a big fan of one of their other games, Upturned, for the exact same reason. It rightfully labels itself as both a survival horror AND a comedy, and has such a great balance between genuine run-for-your-life moments, and laugh out loud chaotic physics and silly upbeat tracks.
I think the expectation of death makes Lethal Company all the more funny, because it turns something that used to be a 'failure state' in much of gaming into a comedy of errors where you can laugh at yourself and your friends.

LC does this beautiful thing where it incentivises forgiving failure. The odds are truly stackaed against you so you WILL fail (dying, losing all loot and tools, etc). You accept this as a kind of default 'it is what it is' which is a neutral state of thinking about an event. Whats great is that these failures are usually comically timed, ironic, terrifying, ill-intened/pranked, or unique. This fact then fills that neutral moment with humor, levity, and laughing at the absurd. There may be a connection to nihilistic humor here but I am too lazy to think it out fully. Speaking of absurd, I believe that is also in play with so much of this. It is an absurd act to look at these monsters, these locations, this loot and find a reason for this company to exist and be doing this in the first place so its equally absurd that we are trying so hard to complete these tasks. Think about how silly the mobile game Spaceteam is, with its tasks.

I completely forgot this video was about lethal company midway through

Thanks for the vid

I find it really compelling that, to me, I found none of the clips of Lethal Company you showed very funny, mostly because I am detached to you and your friends. In contrast, any time I've played the game with my own friends, it is extremely involved, personal, and hilarious because I intimately know the screams across the map warning me where not to go are also my good friends who will undoubtedly share a funny story by the time the ship takes off.

Was Wile. E. Coyote versus the Road Runner really a horror cartoon?

I legit forgot this was about lc cause the slightly seperate video essay in the middle about comedy in general felt so well done

most of this video is talking about things that just aren't the video topic

I think the reason lethal company is so popular is because we’ve been craving a good party game for years. For me party games died with halo reach. This game had the Same pandaemonium and energy as Mario party. Its a great game for many reasons like with the proximity chat, the dead players voice chat and many of the ways it starves you of convenience and just the whole basis of the story/world

Im surprised anyone would consider this game a horror game at all…

What is that last game you were playing randomly shooting stuff

Many bugs are not fixed because of the humour.

Nuclear Gandhi for example, was an integer underflow bug, that caused his aggression value to be 254/10 in the original Civ game. It has since been refined into a core gameplay mechanic, where Gandhi in Civ 5 for example has "Likeliness to build and use nukes at a staggering 12/10", and in Civ 6, he has a hidden value of "nuke happy".

Like the Skyrim giant bug, which was patched at some point, but the community wanted it back.

Some bugs in games are great for causing unintentional comedy. And then you have physics that just go full wacky mode, ala Tears of the Kingdom.

What is this game at the end of the vid ?

This is late But I wanted to add that both is one of the funniest games I've ever played. And it comes from the a I being so random that I Never get to the bottom of every scenario. I once witnessed a lady get out of her car and knee a cop and get back in her car lmao.

small indie game

Ah yes. Very hidden.

Shout out to Rick the Door Technician

your point about disco elysium kinda makes sense but at that exact point where you failed to punch the kid, in my playthrough he called me a bunch of slurs and i died of embarassment and then lost over an hour of gameplay including a good 30 minute long conversation with the lady on the boat because the game didn't save before i entered what i thought was just an ordinary conversation with a random kid. i haven't played the game since as my brain does not take losing progress very well (most games i have stopped playing, like the witcher 3, i stop playing because i died and lost a bit too much progress that i wasn't engaged enough to be bothered to redo)

The comedy aspect was not something my friends and I were expecting going into the game. We make fun jokes and have laughs durning games, but this is one where we all have died of laughter together. Within our first day of playing, maybe on the 5 or 6 job we ever did we were exploring around and heard some noise. We looked around after barely escaping to see the hyper aggressive guy who seems to be dragging himself on the ground (someone we have affectionately named “Friend Shaped”) lunging towards us. We all screamed in pure terror as we didn’t know who was going to be bit, and my two friends ran towards the newly found fire escape while I tried to run around everything to get back to the main entrance. Suddenly it’s dead quiet, and I call out for them while looking around. I was sort of scared to see their bodies being munched on when I found the shadow guy staring at me. After a moment I gathered my wits and ran to the fire escape and back to the ship as my friends had just started the ship. I barely had time to hop on board around the back and say “Wait! Don’t leave without me!” They both opened the door and were like “YOUR ALIVE????” “We thought you died!!” Before Al of us started laughing at what just happened. It’s a scary game sure, but we always seem to be laughing more than screaming

Think i kinda lost interest in the longer it went to explain why some games jokes arent funny and it became a "stop having fun, its bad" meme

Reventure clip shown. Thou hast summoned me.

Eh, the reason why you can still ring the chime in GoW:R after the joke ends, is because there's bunch of side quests with the squirrel...so IMO that was a piss poor example.

"Games that make you feel like a badass."
Shows Barbie Horse game

I'm sorry, no. Not at all is Forespoken's dialogue acceptable or adequate. It's pretty garbage.

Thx for the video!

and... Chao

what they say about his company is what they say about society

Isnt this exactly what valefisk was saying a week before this video?

"its a very small indie game"

if you want to have a good laugh play Outcore I was WHEEZING after that game