Let's Review LETHAL COMPANY Monsters!
Written by Jonathan Wojcik
Complicating this strangely banal treasure hunt are deadly environments, traps, and "wildlife" that can mangle, eviscerate or dissolve you at any moment, all while you scramble to meet the demands of a company quota under threat of being blasted into space.
....And why moons, exactly? Why so MANY moons, that have all seemingly been terraformed only to be abandoned? Who really runs The Company? What happened to Earth? Where, if anywhere, is the rest of the human population?
Maybe we'll find out some day, or maybe never. Answering these kinds of questions isn't really the point of Lethal Company, and it would likely only demystify its unsettling world and atmosphere. Most of the game's intended fun isn't even in the world itself, per se; it's loaded with novel mechanical gimmicks to encourage creative strategy and absurd player interactions almost as much as a springboard for improvisational, comedic roleplay as simply a sci-fi horror adventure. Failing to meet quota isn't even an avoidable failure-state, but an inevitability you can only postpone with a lot of luck on your side.
And of course, there are monsters. Not the xenomorphs and robots you might expect from its premise, though there's certainly a smattering of those, but monsters, from the almost biologically believable to impossible absurdities straight out of the nuttiest creepypasta.
JEB
So where do you actually sell your precious "scrap?" Once you've got enough of it, you'll have to head back to The Company Headquarters, where you'll find a grim, foggy landscape of concrete slabs and a single open window. Ring the bell a few times, and eventually a large metal hook will drag your finds inside. Ring the bell a few too many more times, or otherwise make too much noise, and you might hear some irritated growls and rumbles.Depending on "Jeb's" mood level and your behavior, there's a chance that he'll actually attack, revealing a couple of lumpy tentacles like pinkish, spiny tree branches. We don't know why The Company makes us sell whoopie cushions and toothpaste tubes to a monster. We don't know if there's anyone or anything else even working for The Company but this monster and ourselves. It raises all manner of wild questions about the history of the setting and the nature of what we're doing, which again, I'd honestly rather never know for certain. A few more clues might be interesting, but it's just the kind of ambiguity I love, and there's plenty more to come.
HYDROGERE
The Hydrogere is the simplest enemy in the game; a giant, round lump of transparent blue jelly that slowly creeps around, and will steadily digest you if you happen to walk through it. It's neither visually nor mechanically that exciting, but another fun part of Lethal Company is that every single enemy comes with an unlockable profile. The Hydrogere's data explains that it's actually a microscopic protozoan, but that these unicellular organisms stick together as they multiply until they've formed this enormous, roving colony.MANTICOIL
Together with a species of tiny, flying insect, the Manticoil is incapable of doing any kind of harm, existing only as set dressing or to give some players a little startle. It appears to be a little, yellowish bird with four purple-tinged wings, and I'm not sure exactly why it's called a Manticoil. My own (tabletop) game setting previously had a monster called Manticoil because I meant for it to evoke a manticore, with a coiling "tail," though it's since been renamed. Where's the "coil" in this little birdy? Where does the "manti" come from?Interestingly, it was once possible to use these birds to your advantage, since a much more dangerous entity could be distracted by them. This was apparently changed in later updates, which is too bad, since it's a pretty neat gameplay idea. Their profile also says that they can carry rabies, which doesn't factor into the game, but does make me wonder about their biology.
BUNKER SPIDER
We're basically running through the "plainest" monsters first, and of course the game has giant spiders, though I do like their strange and unnatural number of legs, including an additional pair sprouting right out of their heads. I also like them having two little close-set eyes, more like the eyes of a solifugid than most other spiders.Similar in behavior to many real spiders, these creatures aren't particularly aggressive until you actually step into their webs. I also like that their profile says they're only the second largest arachnid ever discovered, and doesn't elaborate further.
CIRCUIT BEES
These are said to be descendants of honeybees, but these aggressive Hymenoptera defend their hives by generating electricity, allowing a swarm to collectively fry you to death. Any effort to colonize a terraformed world would have likely brought domestic bees along for food production, but they probably weren't Electric Types at the time. Some bestiary entries also reference a scientific report, not accessible to the players, about "rapid speciation" in the Thistle Nebula, where the game is implied to take place.Mechanically, the bees are a threat only outdoors, and only if you get too close to the hive. If one play can distract the swarm however, another can collect the hive and sell it for a lot of cash.
THE MASKS
Resembling classic "comedy" and "tragedy" masks, these objects manifest as seemingly normal, sellable scrap items, but if a player actually wears one, it will take over their body and seek to kill their crewmates. This has to be very fun and pretty frightening when a player group goes in blind, especially when the masks were first added in an update, though it's all too easy to spoil yourself and never have to worry about their effects, or would be, except that they can also occasionally spawn already in control of a human body.If a host, or "masked," spots a human player, they'll lock onto that player and pursue them relentlessly, ignoring all other players. If they catch their target, they'll spew blood into the victim's helmet and transform them into another masked!
Personally, I still find them more intriguing as a dangerous scrap item. I'd say they should always take control of a player who dies with a mask in their inventory, and maybe make them worth a bit more money as incentive to take the risk.
GHOST GIRL
Sometimes, the abandoned moon colony is haunted by a little dead girl. Naturally! It's a simple concept for a "monster," and hits all the usual ghostly tropes of teleporting, walking through walls or turning invisible, but it's interesting in that it's visible only to whichever player it's decided to fixate on. I'm surprised there aren't a lot more multiplayer games with enemies that can do this, you'd think it'd be a major mechanic in any that include a supernatural element.SNARE FLEA
Getting into the more visually original creatures, the Snare Flea is an adorable arthropod that clings to ceilings, then drops down on players who pass under it and suffocates them to death by wrapping tightly around their faces! The creature also looks remarkably similar to a giant sized springtail (collembolla) at first glance, but springtails are six-legged hexapods, and this animal is ten-legged! It's actually supposed to be a Chilopod, and you can definitely see the centipede connection in its face, also possessing the same modified forelegs a centipede uses as "fangs." Its suffocation strategy is said to compensate for its total lack of venom, however, which is a fun detail. Overall, I love the concept of a centipede evolving into a broader, flatter, softer creature with such a novel method of ambush hunting, and especially a centipede evolving so weirdly that we name it after a flea.THUMPER
An iconic enemy, the thumper is a pale, hairless beast that walks and runs on its long forearms, while its body appears "torn off" at the waist. Its broad head is also basically that of a shark, but surrounded by some petal-like flaps lined with additional teeth. It is, in fact, officially related to sharks and rays, but has adapted to a fully terrestrial life, and some in-game text refers to these creatures as "Halves" in light of their appearance, stating that they actually must gnaw their own hindquarters off in order to escape from their egg pods. That's such a weird detail and striking image, it makes the inherently cool concept of a land-shark even cooler!Thumpers or Halves are also interesting for being completely deaf, whereas many creatures in the game will respond to whatever sound you make either in-game or through your microphone.
EARTH LEVIATHAN
Currently the absolute largest and most powerful creature in the game, the Earth Leviathan is actually stated to be a member of the Piscicolidae - fish leeches - with the genus name Hemibdella, or "half-leech," which I'd guess must refer to the lack of an anterior sucker. This is a creature so big and destructive, it can also kill any other enemy in the game and will eat absolutely every physically tangible organism in the vicinity once it bursts from the ground, which you can use to your advantage if something else happens to be chasing you.BABOON HAWK
Literally said to be related to baboons, this creature looks more like a fat, bulky pterosaur with bulging red eyes, a set of elongated beaklike jaws and "wing" membranes that hang like a cape from its two simple, single-clawed arms, though these aren't strong enough to enable flight. They also have interestingly complicated programming, spawning two at a time with a "nest" somewhere on the map and initiating a series of different behavioral phases. Baboon Hawks will start by collecting scrap items they deposit somewhere in a stash, kind of like crows or packrats, and may guard these until they fall asleep.More hostile behavior is only triggered if they evaluate a player as a threat, which takes into account your proximity, behavior and equipment. Mess around too much, too close to them, and they might decide to attack, but you can also intimidate them enough that they'll back off, which is helped by maintaining eye contact and holding a weapon. I love that this works so much like a real animal; that the key is basically to maintain a healthy respect for them, but that this still won't absolutely guarantee your safety. More video game creatures really ought to be coded this way!
FOREST KEEPER
A wonderfully terrifying one! The Keeper is a gigantic humanoid that looks formed from gnarled wood, with an empty space where its head should be, a vertical mouth on its stomach and huge eyespots on its chest, which are said to protect it from other predators (WHAT other predators?!) when they're a little younger. It's a great combination of aesthetic traits, uniquely unsettling but also endearing. All they do is generally spawn in forests after dark, chase you down, put you in their mouths and kill you, but that's more than enough, and personally I love the bestiary detail that they don't actually need to eat; they just experimentally chew on things out of curiosity, apparently. "like a toddler."BRACKEN
Our first really scary one, the Bracken is a ghastly looking alien humanoid with slimy, reddish, mottled skin, a scarred and "chipped" looking head with small, luminous white eyes, no other facial features to speak of and a number of large, yellowish petal-like or leaf-like grows along its sides. It's given a latin name, Rapax folium, which just translates to "predatory leaf," and in early design sketches, the foliage encircled its head like a giant sunflower. I think that might have been a more memorable and iconic design trait for something with such menacing behavior, but the final version is still effective.Once the Bracken kills someone, it drags their corpse away to a room designated as its "favorite" room, as far as possible from the entryway to the indoor map. It also has a simple, but very effective quirk as it silently stalks players, where it will back off if its target glances at it briefly enough, but attack if it's looked at too directly for more than a second or two. I like this, because it believably simulates an "uncertainty" that it's been noticed, erring on caution unless there's no longer any doubt that it's been spotted, another realistic predator behavior.
SPORE LIZARD
Also known as a "Puffer," the Spore Lizard is an extreme descendant of ordinary alligators, supposedly, and sort of resembles one, or maybe a large fat skink, except that its entire head is a big pink sucker, like the head of a plunger with a few sharp teeth, while its tail is a swollen, purple orb housing a symbiotic fungus, which it can shake to release a cloud of spores.It looks dangerous and it sounds dangerous, but in a lovable twist, it's really really not. It just wants to be left alone, acting aggressive only to scare you aware. The spore cloud is only used defensively as a mild distraction, like a squid's ink, but not nearly as blinding. It will actually bite if it's completely cornered, but that only does a negligible sliver of damage.
I feel like a whole lot of games have harmless wildlife, yes, but that's usually because of a clearly defined purpose: it's a collectible pet, a tameable mount, an NPC farm animal, non-interactable decoration, edible game, or maybe it drops some sort of unique loot. The Spore Lizard is a somewhat rarer case I always love to see, where you could consider it a "monster," with combat abilities and everything, but still effectively a non-threat minding its own business, without any "Video Gamey" justification for it. If it skirts such a line between enemy and NPC that you can imagine someone asking "what's the point? Why not just put in another enemy or another NPC?" then you've got an excellent addition to your virtual worldbuilding, and should do that only more often.
EYELESS DOG
Kind of opposite to the Halves, Eyeless Dogs or "breathing lions" are totally blind and rely on sound - in a game that makes heavy use of microphone communication! They also appear to hunt individually, but are actually working together with pack members all around the map. When one finds prey, it lets out a call to alert the rest!The design is on the very simple side, with a definitely doglike body, but a head consisting only of a huge flytrap-like mouth, the whole thing rusty red.
NUTCRACKER
This is one they added in an update, a giant nutcracker with a shotgun, or rather some kind of organism "piloting" a giant nutcracker with a shotgun? When it opens its mouth, there's an organic eyeball inside! And it tracks you by movement, so whenever the eye is exposed you have to stay completely still. Fun! Its shotgun is also the only firearm in the game, if you can manage to take it.By now you should already get what I mean about creepypasta-esque creatures. I love that all these moons are home to SCP-caliber abnormalities. Like what actually happened between our time and theirs that this is normal?
HOARDING BUG
"Stupid cuddle bugs" in the words of the in-universe bestiary editor, these are supposedly related to Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps) though they really have kind of a "mothman" look; squat, darkly colored, chunky creatures with very large, flat, circular red eyes, like a couple of reflectors. There appears to be two body segments with a single pair of limbs each, which is pretty odd insect anatomy, but we've already seen how distorted most animals have become.They definitely are cuddly looking little guys, and they don't want any trouble! They just want to collect scrap and take it back to their "nests," like an indoor version of the Baboon Hawks, but even less aggressive. They won't bother you if you don't bother them! It's just that, sometimes, the one thing they stole might be the one thing that can save you from the vacuum of space :(
OLD BIRD
Fully worthy of its position as the only full-blown "robotic" enemy, the Old Bird - a pretty catchy and interesting name, I have to say - is a 20 feet tall, boxy, rusty military mechanoid with a huge speaker in its chest, a blinding searchlight for a head, a winch-like claw arm and a gun arm. It can kill you by stomping on you, rocketing into the air and landing on you, picking you up and torching you with its flamethrower mode, or just launching missiles. It'll also spawn in a "group," kind of, except there'll just be several of them standing motionless and inactive until a random one eventually powers up.
They have pretty interesting lore, too, in that nobody actually knows who built them exactly, but they travel to new worlds and just sort of wait for the opportunity to kill people.
LASSO (unused!)
This poor guy was never finished, and the creator has said there are no plans to ever implement it, so nobody's quite certain what it would have done. It's so fun, though! Just a bunch of lassos and nooses in a humanoid shape! Are they animate ropes, or a bunch of wormlike organisms?COILHEAD
One of the iconic scarier threats, Coil-head works just like SCP-173 or the Doctor Who Angels, moving only when you're turned away, freezing the instant it's in your field of vision. The design is pretty fun, a a mannequin with its arms chopped off, nails driven into it, and its head attached to the top of a big, metal spring. As a few different people have discussed around the internet, this spring is actually a pretty smart and purposeful design choice, because you can never see the Coil-head moving, but when you do look back at it, the head will still be bobbling wildly!It's oddly enough given a scientific name, Vir colligerus, but are speculated to have been engineered as biological weapons. So which parts are organic??
JESTER
This was the first monster I ever saw that made me love this game. Its in-game bestiary entry is a brief blurb by someone who says he couldn't find any other record of it and jokingly puts down its "scientific" name as INSANEUS THINGUS. It's a big, colorful Jack-in-the-box with a pair of pale human legs and a single uman arm, which it uses to turn its own crank. In its box, it'll harmlessly follow you around a while until it starts playing its little song, and once it "pops," it reveals a gigantic humanlike skull on a long, boneless neck of red meat. Hilarious!The Jester will not only hunt down and kill everybody in this state, but moves faster and faster to the point that it's impossible to actually outrun. The only escape is the fact that it operates strictly indoors, but it's still liable to catch you before you can get back outside!
I LOVE the sheer zaniness of this one's design, still one of the weirdest and least explainable thing in the whole bestiary.
BARBER
This one, and all remaining monsters we're reviewing, was added within only a couple months of this article, and it's a pretty cute one! A simple, featureless blue humanoid, like an unfinished cloth doll or dummy, except for its fully lifelike fleshy hands. It's known as the Barber because it carries a giant pair of scissors, and can snip you right in half! But it's also a "pack hunter," with a bunch of Barbers normally following a "lead" Barber. The silliest part is that these guys move only by hopping forward in time with a drum roll.They are also just totally invincible.
VAIN SHROUD
This is a cool looking spiny red plant, said to be related to ferns. They're technically harmless on their own, serving only as an environment another new enemy can spawn into. This is too bad, because their development concept was to act like a "noxious weed" that slowly takes over moons and can even be spread around by your ship. That's a cool idea! I'd love to see an "enemy" that's just a really troublesome plant, without necessarily being a "monster" plant!KIDNAPPER FOX
This is the guy that only spawns when the Vain Shroud multiplies enough, a kooky canine with jaws that open sideways and a long, sucker-tipped chameleon tongue. Only one can spawn at a time, but it's a deadly outdoor threat that uses its tongue to drag players away, then kill them by ripping their heads off. Unfortunately, it proved a little too difficult to deal with, and was temporarily removed for some reworking not long after its introduction.TULIP SNAKES
Cute little buddies! They're more like long, fat lizards with comical dinosaur-like heads, multiple beady black eyes, winged forelimbs and colorful petal-like head growths. Not necessarily aggressive, they apparently like to lift and carry large objects just to show off to their mates, and they've taken a liking to trying it on humans.Once you catch a tulip snake's interest, it'll perch on you and keep trying to fly away with you, though it's not strong enough on its own, and just makes an adorable nuisance of itself as it keeps looking you in the face and "laughing." If another snake lands on you, though, the two will be able to lift you off the ground, and sometimes they might drop you off somewhere inconvenient or even deadly. Usually, though, they're just mildly bothersome and mostly cute.
BUTLER
The weirdest one since the Jester, in my opinion, the Butler is a broad, chunky humanoid with a black suit, a broom, and a bizarre lumpy head with a fat nose and two tiny, shallow pits for eyes, looking kind of like a cross between a blobfish and precisely what it really is, a wasp's nest. When a Butler dies, it spawns a swarm of hornets! Until then, it'll mind its own business as long as you're in a group of two or more. When a player is alone with a Butler for too long, it pulls out a huge kitchen knife and murders them, only to go right back to sweeping when anyone else investigates. Get it?? Like "The Butler Did It!" I love this one!MANEATER
At the time of this writing, this is the very newest creature in the game, by which I mean I was checking the wiki repeatedly to fact-check as I wrote this review, and then suddenly the wiki had a brand new entry. It's also a brand new favorite and by far one of the best concepts in this or any game, because this incredibly dangerous monster starts out as a little baby you need to actually be nice to if you want a better chance at survival.
In baby mode, it'll just follow you around like a curious toddler, but one of several possible things set it off crying, you'll want to pick it up and calm it down again by gently rocking it, like an actual baby, because it is one. A perfect, precious baby, the ideal baby! And like any baby, if you don't do this right or you keep letting it cry, it will just immediately molt into its adult phase, a monster as inescapable and deadly as anything in the game ever gets.
The Maneater is said to have evolved from cockroaches, specifically the genus Periplaneta, like the common American cockroach! As a baby it looks a lot more like a chubby termite with beady red eyes, wich is appropriate anyway, since termites are a subgroup of cockroaches themselves. As an adult, it gains larger hooked mandibles, a bulkier hunched body and extremely long limbs, still bone white and red-eyed and looking almost like a six-limbed spider wearing a bleached human skin. Its bestiary entry is interestingly the longest by far, diving into detail about its discovery and ecology, but what you want to know is what makes a baby Maneater cry, and the list is as hilariously adorable as you could have hoped, consisting of:
-Loud noises
-Getting attacked by you or another creature
-You getting attacked while holding them
-Getting rocked too fast
-Getting dropped from too high
-Being taken outdoors, where it's also impossible to stop them crying
-Falling over, which just happens sometimes while they're sitting down
-Seeing you die or seeing a human dead body
How can you not fall in LOVE with an extremely threatening monster that just needs a player to be a good enough babysitter? Even its bestiary entry includes the phrase "YOU WERE LIKE A SON."
My favorite part, by far, is that it can get so upset by someone dying, it kills everyone else.
If you've followed this site long enough, you know it's actually rare that I've had the time (or sometimes money) to play that many video games, often having to analyze bestiaries second-hand, but Lethal Company is one that I did actually play a few times. And I died, a whole whole lot, before ever seeing more than five or six of its species, but that's kind of the point, too. It's a deliberately merciless game, often still just "manageable" with a full team of players, designed primarily to generate entertaining situations and stories when players die in one unexpected blunder or another. The widely diverse mechanics of its creatures are thoughtfully crafted to further facilitate this, but they're also a lot more than just their gameplay functions; even compared to epic AAA titles, where crafting one boss represents thousands of dollars of professional labor, I get a much stronger impression from Lethal Company that its creatures are made with a lot of love. Its developer, who just goes by Zeekerss, might be one of the few developers who sound SO excited to conceive of monsters and how they fit into the game world, having essentially stated that we've barely seen anything yet in terms of the game's biodiversity; that they eventually hope to have flooded Lethal Company with so many entities, it'll "feel like an alien zoo." This is exactly the kind of thing I like to hear, and such an oddball game, with such a fascinatingly mysterious setting, really makes a perfect platform for an indefinitely expanding bestiary. I honestly can't wait to see what it might add in the future, whether or not I'm even playing it at the time, and I'd like to think its popularity and success will keep up enough that we might have plenty of material for another review, next Halloween season or even sooner.
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