Lethal Company is video game comedy in its purest form

Gaming’s answer to Red Dwarf doesn’t need a script.

Image credit:Zeekerss

Video game comedy is as old as the medium itself. There were text adventures running on mainframes over forty years ago that were packed with gags, and even sophisticated meta humour about fantasy tropes. Ask any Old Git to name a genuinely funny video game and they’ll probably cite Monkey Island, maybe Conker’s Bad Fur Day, or perhaps The Stanley Parable if they’re a connoisseur. There are countless others. Half of them involve Tim Schafer in some capacity.

Idiots Play Lethal Company Episode One: “guys, I think we’re bad at games"Watch on YouTube

The vast majority of gags in video games are delivered in a way that is borrowed from other mediums. That is to say, you either read them or hear them spoken aloud. Jokes are often delivered in parallel with gameplay, but seldom as an expression of the medium’s fundamentals. Lethal Company may be one of the most pure expressions of comedy in gaming that has ever been conceived. It has excellent comic timing and a capacity for ambulatory based humour that compares to the likes of Rowan Atkinson or John Cleese.

And make no mistake: it’s designed to be funny in some very specific and crafty ways that go way beyond the emergent fun time laughs that can arise from any kind of multiplayer session with friends. Check out our latest video series above, in which we fail repeatedly to meet our sales quota, but are too busy laughing at the various comic misadventures, silly walks, and absurdist situations (all this effort for a brass bell? Seriously?) to really be all that cut up about our shocking lack of progress.

The player looks at a clipboard while aboard the ship in Lethal Company - 4

You’re on report, m’laddo. |Image credit:Zeekerss

While we were recording, my colleague Mark die after getting on the wrong end of a radiation leak, and quipped that it was a “very Red Dwarf death”. And it hit me in that moment that Lethal Company is gaming’s direct answer to Red Dwarf, the celebrated sci-fi sitcom that so many of us in the UK were brought up on. The tech barely works. Everything looks grimy and uninviting. Mankind has made it to the stars, but it’s a far cry from the utopian vision peddled by the likes of Star Trek: in fact, every terrible thing about life in the present (capitalism obviously) is dialled up to extremes. The Company’s “disciplinary procedure” is to flush you out of an airlock. What’s that? You need oxygen to live? Regrettably, you do not have enough credits.

Lethal Company is video game comedy in its purest form - 5

Four misfits carting about the galaxy scavenging derelicts, avoiding freakish monsters, and surviving at the whim of a faceless corporation? Sounds like Red Dwarf to me. |Image credit:BBC

Lethal Company is a sitcom with barely a handful of written lines. Instead of language, it uses the tools of the interactive medium to convey its best gags, anticipating the player’s actions, and leveraging their innate understanding of the medium in order to violate their expectations with hilarious.

And yes, it is better with friends. But every comedy show is.

Lethal Company

Video Game

Wishlisted - Our 10 Best Steam Next Fest Demos

Another Next Fest kicks off soon, but we’ve already done the digging for you.

Welcome to Wishlisted, a showcase of our favourite demos from Steam Next Fest: June 2024. Check the video above or watch on YouTube .

Finding the Best NextFest Demos is all about the joy of discovery, but with so many Steam Next Fest demos getting released in such a short amount of time, it can be bewildering. So we’ve decided to show you our ten Best Steam Next Fest games which we think deserve your attention. These are all upcoming Steam Next Fest games that we’re genuinely excited for, and that we think should play nicely on PC handhelds too!

This is just the start of our Next Fest coverage. This week we’ll be previewing loads of upcoming demos across the entire network - right here on VG247, of course, but also over on our sister sites Eurogamer and Rock Paper Shotgun. Bookmark our Wishlisted Steam Fest hub to stay in the loop. And this is well before Next Fest actually starts, so you, dear reader, get to bask for a solid fortnight celebrating all the wonderful new games that are just around the corner. Enjoy!