It’s 3 a.m. and we’re desperately under the gun — the mysterious company says we need 200 more cash and we only have one more day to reach the profit quota. I’m voice-chatting with a few friends as we work to collect resources on foreign planets, grabbing steel gears and metal sheets from abandoned factories teeming with creatures that look like Minecraft mobs badly disfigured by botched plastic surgery. When it’s time to hand over the goods and collect our paycheck, we travel to a loading dock. I press a bell at the window to get the company’s attention. Suddenly, a giant tentacle flies out and mauls my body into bloody spaghetti. I put in all that sweaty effort and the company just killed me? They didn’t even learn my name?
This is how a typical run goes in Lethal Company, a massively popular new indie game by the solo developer Zeekerss. The premise is simple and weirdly addictive: Working for an unseen entity called the Company, you must harvest resources from dangerous moons, and if you fail to reach the daily quota, they kill you. Every round, the quota is raised until it’s literally impossible to succeed. There’s no Employee of the Month awards, no daily check-ins with the boss, no OSHA regulations — simply ever-escalating toil, followed by death. The game ingeniously deploys a voice-proximity function, which limits communication with teammates to nearby rooms, and shuts them off when they die. It’s goofy yet terrifying, with fried graphics that look like Roblox mixed with The Babadook.
Maybe the most meme-propelled indie title since Among Us, Lethal Company videos by popular gamers like Markiplier and Disguised Toast have amassed tens of millions of views on YouTube. A slew of humorous micro-elements — from whoopee cushions that fart to airhorns you can blare endlessly — have made it prime fodder for viral content. Fans have made compilations stitching together the most absurd moments, written silly fan fiction, and created shitpost-y hype edits collaging the game with frantic visuals. Player-producers have devised mods that add custom components (one mod apparently allows you to connect the game with IRL butt plugs; it’s unclear what effect it has — there are limits to the lengths I will go for journalism).
Lethal Company’s lack of any coherent narrative or lore has made it ripe for projection as fans turn it into whatever they want it to be. The YouTuber CircleToonsHD argued in a video that this malleability is what has made the game so successful: “It entrusted its community to define the fun, turning simplicity into a chaotic masterpiece.” The game has sparked a flurry of discourse as fans compete to come up with provocative explanations for its significance. In a popular Steam thread, one player argued that it was “consumerist capitalist propaganda” because it was desensitizing younger gamers to unethical practices.
But Lethal Company’s hyperbolic hellishness is precisely the point. While it isn’t the first game themed after a dystopian realization of capitalism, it feels bizarrely cathartic at a moment when mass layoffs are tearing across industries like tech and media. It’s like a work simulator so macabre it comes out the other end as campy genius. Or as one X user lamented, “I wanna play Lethal Company so bad but real capitalism leaves me no time to do so.” In time-pressurized modernity, leisure activities often mirror the structures and temporality of work, like nine-to-five office workers dancing all weekend to jerky techno that urges you to “work your body.” Lethal Company amplifies the fatigue of gig-economy work and mimics its patterns (working by the assignment, always fearful of being canned) but transforms the labor into a pleasure activity. The game reminds me of the duality between “Good” and “Bad” screens, or computer use that feels sweet and relaxing versus stressful work scrolling. Like one top post on the r/LethalCompany sub-Reddit goes: “I love working in dangerous and fictitious companies!”
Lethal Company is so alluring partly because it’s like microdosing a future hell — the exploitation of resources in outer space — that’s plausible and probably not far off from happening. Thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Kelly Clarkson have championed the idea of suffering painful things to make oneself stronger. Role-playing as a frantic, hapless freelancer in the cosmos could help cushion the impact of work trauma when it does happen.
Jon Etheridge of the popular YouTube squad Neebs Gaming doesn’t think the hypercapitalism theme can be credited for the game’s success, but he says “it adds a nice extra ingredient” to the stew. “Slaving away for hours trying to hit an arbitrary quota is something that anyone who has worked a corporate job can relate to.” Etheridge pinpoints Lethal Company’s standout thrill as its atmosphere, like the way sounds adapt to the environment: making voices bounce off a canyon wall or letting you “hear the distant, echoey screams of your friends as they’re getting torn apart by an unseen horror.”
As someone who just got laid off weeks ago, playing Lethal Company felt poignant. I could replicate the act of being terminated without the real-life flurry of emotions, and it helped me transform all the glum feelings I had about losing my job into adrenaline and delight as I laughed my way through the game. At one point, as the company was about to eject us from the ship for failing to meet the monetary goal, my friend commanded us to dance in the game and chant, “WE LOVE THE COMPANY!” (a meme started by Markiplier). I hadn’t played the game before, so I thought it would work — a little Easter egg.
But it didn’t, and the faceless megacorp ejected us from the ship. We couldn’t stop giggling as we watched our bodies disappear in the ether. But then we immediately fired up the game for another go-round.
