The Merits Of Lethal Company-Likes - Part 1: What Is A "Streamer Game," And Assessing Content Warning And Kletka

Preamble (i.e., My Case For Co-Op Streamer Games)

Playing games while being goofy with friends has never been better!

The indie co-op "streamer game" is a recent development in the gaming hobby, and one that I have participated in more than I'm willing to admit. I'm lucky to have a close-knit network of friends who also enjoy video games, and all of them prefer collaborative enterprises over competitive ones. They also all have the right mindset for the innate goofiness that defines these games at their core. Whether it be wonky physics, fiddly or cumbersome controls, or graphical embellishments that make figuring out what you are looking at an ordeal, none of my friends play games like Lethal Company expecting perfection nor do they have the "alpha gamer" sentimentality to throttle others down pathways they think would bring the group, but more them, glory and self-percieved fame. No, the people I have been playing these games with want goofy and sometimes mindless experiences, and if we accomplish something none of us have done before, that's just the cherry on top. And as these games expect out of us, we use their tools to make our own "fun."

But what are the specific brands of "streamer games" I'm talking about, and how are they different from some of the streamer bait you might already be familiar with? While "streamer games" certainly aren't new with PewDiePie and his ilk banking millions on horror shock like Outlast during the early days of Twitch, things indeed became different when Among Us took off. When Among Us went truly viral, it proved that games didn't need to be million-dollar productions, nor did they need to be long, mammoth-sized epics to catch the attention of millions on streaming platforms. Dogwater corridor horror games also contributed to the notion that games with modest budgets could still gain traction with the YouTube and Twitch crowd, but I'm not ceding a single centimeter of credit to them. But it was Lethal Company that added something "new" to the streamer game stew. What if, instead of worrying about opposing players or competitive shooting gameplay, you worked toward a common task, AND the task you performed was also a part of a hilarious community-linked performance? See, I added that last part because I'm certain the Deep Rock Galactic or Vermintide crowd would have my head if I tried to suggest that Lethal Company did something entirely unique in the co-op game arena. But hear me out, while there are plenty of examples of online co-op games before Lethal Company, how many modern games of this type can you list that have simple cooperative goals for groups of friends, and also ask you to partake in goofy shenanigans every step of the way?

Co-op games are not new, but Lethal Company and its likes feel different from games like Deep Rock Galactic

Lethal Company and its many clones all share a handful of commonalities. First, the games often release with partial builds or "soft launches" that are later expanded with updates of varying sizes. Second, the developers of these games usually remain committed to supporting their works for years before transitioning to a new project. Third, when the game releases, although the basic premise of what you need to do is established, the full ruleset and every detail of what is expected of you are not. All players in the game's ecosystem, worldwide, collaborate to identify the game's gaps. Think of the myriad of monsters in Lethal Company or R.E.P.O. and consider how, in both cases, it was those games' players and not the game itself that documented what the "correct" response to those encounters was.

Finally, while some games are more deliberately comedic than others, the actual humor of what you gain from these games is found through performances or activities you experience via your engagements with real people. Additionally, you need to make that fun happen yourself. These games provide tools for you to accomplish in-game goals more easily, but those same tools are also assistive in allowing you to enact a performance or engage in active roleplaying. And it is here that I must invoke the familiar phrase "your mileage may vary" as I share my love for these games. When I call Lethal Company, R.E.P.O., or Peak, some of the greatest modern comedy games I have ever played, there may also be another person who says they don't "get that" because they haven't been able to capture that same magic on their own. Streamer co-op games aren't the best at ensuring an equitable experience if you don't have the required network of online friends. Nonetheless, the appeal remains the same: these games give you different tools to humor yourself and those around you, and you have to work those tools to get the most out of them.

Spooks are to be had with most of these games, but in varying intensity levels.

And another word of caution. I will be the first to admit that none of the games I'm about to talk about are "must-play" titles that you need to have in your library. Many of these games are janky or still works in progress. But the key issue most have is the cooperative multiplayer component. It's one thing to ask someone to jump into PUBG or Fortnite and tell them to hope for the best in playing against an endless onslaught of teenagers. It's another thing entirely to tell someone to find three friends so they can MAYBE have a fun time goofing off, picking up large engines, and hoping a giant Dune worm doesn't eat them. God, I really do love Lethal Company.

Content Warning

The snail is not part of the party.

What Is It?

Content Warning is probably the first Lethal Company-like I took note of, largely thanks to Vtubers. In Content Warning, you and your team of up to four players need to use a video recorder to document your activities in a dungeon and then present clips of your last exploratory effort as "viral" posts on social media. Every session, you have a certain number of days to meet a quota of social engagement; otherwise, your game is over, and you need to try again. There are various items to assist you in making clips more engaging for the denizens of Content Warning's social media platforms, like devices that play music or party poppers, and others that will trap monsters so you can showcase them without any issues. The dungeon has various monsters and hazards in it, and you have to be careful not to document everything in your first handful of explorations because repeating content will net boos or adverse reactions, which can impact your final score. While the game doesn't have fall damage, the monsters and most environmental hazards can and will kill you if you are not careful, and like Lethal Company, as you progress further, the hazards will become more common and more dangerous. Also like Lethal Company, Content Warning has no end, and you can continue with the same session you started until you fail to meet a quota.

What's The Game Juice?

Watching clips with friends is by far the best part of the game.

Content Warning places far more emphasis on roleplaying than other games of this type, with players needing to act deliberately, in this case, like streamers or influencers, in hopes of creating clips of a spelunking effort that go viral. Of the games I will be discussing today, Content Warning feels like the most creative, as you are working collaboratively to create something rather than gathering trinkets or marching towards a singular goal. As such, you and your party need to take on unofficial roles as you play the game, and when things "work," Content Warning is a magical platform for teamwork. Maybe in one session, you have a designated DJ who splices music into video footage or raps along to every hazard you see. Perhaps you have someone willing to provide an impeccable David Attenborough impression. During the transitional moment before you jump into the dungeon, the game does an admirable job of encouraging you to plan and rehearse lines and review unwritten scripts before your filming efforts start, and that's bound to attract those of you who pine for your high school drama class days.

Filming something scary is easier said than done.

I also enjoy the game's epilogue, where you and your fellow party members gather together and stand in front of a television, watching a clip show of your best moments. It's a shared communal moment that I wish other games borrowed from, as there's something special in providing you with a quick moment where your party processes their accomplishments beyond watching a score tracker tick away. That's not to say Lethal Company and other games of this ilk don't have breathing room or quiet spaces for you to talk shop with your fellow playmates about what happened during your previous mission, which to me is another defining feature of these sorts of co-op streamer games. However, there's something distinctly authentic about the post-mission time you have in Content Warning as you are assessing and marvelling over something you and your team created and should be proud about, no matter how tough or wacky things got in the dungeon. Consistently, I found that specific moment to be one of Content Warning's most consistent positives.

What Are The Possible Pitfalls? (Also, What's Single Player Like?)

Stuff gets rough real quick in Content Warning.

This section is where I come clean about how I bounced off Content Warning after a few sessions. At the heart of my discontent is a fairly common issue with Content Warning: its scoring mechanism is a complete mystery. There are times when you think your clips will meet your virality quota, only for you to discover that your best-laid scheme is a complete dud. Likewise, you don't have a lot of influence over how the game clips your footage, and this can often be highly frustrating. Yes, manually editing clips would eat up in-game time and defeat the instant feedback loop that these games are built upon. Nonetheless, I was continually infuriated by Content Warning when it would clip an entire routine to one-tenth of its length, and the game didn't even capture the best moments. However, the bigger issue is the game's punishing swings, which come much faster and more furiously than those of Lethal Company. With your party often needing to retrieve cameras or items after someone dies, you can end up in death spirals or fail states with pointless spelunking endeavors you know will never be enough to salvage your current effort, still ahead of you. While party members do get revived at the start of a new day, the financial penalties are harsh, and the loss of items surviving members don't retrieve before ending a session can bork future missions before they even start.

In terms of Content Warning's playability with smaller groupings, be warned: this game is both impossible to play by yourself and just gets even more frustrating when played without its recommended four players. Because you need to attract a few hazards into your camera, three dominant roles emerge in Content Warning. The cameraperson becomes the team's captain, and a lot rides on their ability to predict what the game's mysterious algorithm wants and how to frame the action happening with their party. The second role is that of the narrator, who can get close to hazards and can play around with them, hopefully with one more person, so that you can net some bonuses. The final "role" is that of the shit-stirrer. This person is actively searching for random bullshit in hopes of encountering something new and kiting it towards your camera person and troupe of "actors." And because you can only go so far with just a cameraperson narrating over footage, playing Content Warning is a fool's errand as a single-player experience. If you can't think of at least two other people to play this with, then don't bother.

Kletka

What if Lethal Company had a Soviet and Eurojank-inspired edge?

What Is It?

I have already briefly covered Kletka on the site when describing an early build of the game from Next Fest in 2024. However, for those of you that may have missed that, Kletka is a game that has you and your party operating an elevator and using it to navigate further down into an abyss, at the cost of fuel and the "health" of your elevator, both of which can be replenished by finding usable objects on procedurally generated floors and levels. Unlike Lethal Company, it does have a tangible end, with there being a final floor that you can descend towards and "complete" the game. Doing so requires cooperation with your party mates, as the hazards will become more lethal as time progresses, with the game increasing the number of threats you encounter and making the necessary resources to continue your operation rarer. Likewise, similar to Lethal Company, Kletka has an aggressive timer before unlocking a character-killing deluge if you try to spend too much time on any given level. However, Kletka's timer feels more immediate than Lethal Company's equivalent, with the loud announcement that a monster is in the room, and this monster will immediately kill you if you fail to race to the elevator in time. The merchants spawn at a static interval, but everything else appears to be RNG. When you and your party die, it's game over, and you have to start from the beginning again.

What's The Game Juice?

The giant maw of Kletka the elevator who will kill you if you don't give it a steady flow of meat.

I wouldn't call Kletka "better" than Lethal Company by any stretch of the definition, but it does solve two significant problems with both it and its torrent of copycats. It sounds simple on paper, but having a tangible end-point, as I will reiterate next time with Peak, adds a lot to the Lethal Company formula. It allows you and your party to assess the types of risks you want to take, and it enables you to determine how far you want to proceed down the elevator shaft. You can break things down into digestible bits in hopes of being flush with fuel and wrenches, which will repair the elevator, before things get hairy. Likewise, Kletka does mitigate the RNG of its floors by allowing your party to assess the viability of a floor, and if things seem to be too much, you can quickly duck into the elevator to change the floor. There's no requirement for you to spend a minimum amount of time on an environment, and so long as the fabled elevator monster, Kletka, is full and not famished, and you have fuel, you can avoid entire floors you might happen into. It happens more often than you'd like in Lethal Company or R.E.P.O., wherein you roll into a new environment and almost immediately know this is "not it." And in those games, you often need to grin and bear it, and roll with the punches as the predicted consequences happen. Usually, you can't opt to skip a level or planet, even if that seems like the most logical choice, and even if you try, you place your party at such a massive deficit that you inevitably screw yourself over. Not so with Kletka! If you can move the elevator by even one floor, you don't need to do any level you walk into or encounter; that's your call.

If you want to nope out of a room because it seems like it is too much, you largely can in Kletka.

There's also a distinct "eurojank" vibe with Kletka. The game employs a low-fi graphical style reminiscent of Lethal Company, but the grimy hallways and cockroach-infested living rooms evoke the atmosphere of Soviet-era apartment complexes. The game is also loose about respecting copyright, as there are a handful of rooms that are themed to popular media. For example, I found the game's version of The Red Room from Twin Peaks. There are also Dune-inspired worms and a floor that amounts to a car barrelling towards your party down a narrow alleyway; so, all the classics are here. But those goofy moments aside, the game's more overtly horror atmosphere is immediately more forward than anything found in Lethal Company or R.E.P.O., and the monsters and enemies you encounter can take you by surprise. There's one where a doppleganger, who looks exactly like your characters, will appear and at first act like your fellow party members. However, it will slowly transition into punching you until you die, and it's one of the more overt examples of how Kletka wants to scare you. If you want a more intense edge to the Lethal Company formula, Kletka delivers that. Its worlds and environments are grimy, disgusting, and sometimes downright ugly, which feels like a thread Lethal Company hinted at but didn't quite fully enact.

What Are The Possible Pitfalls?

Narrowly avoiding a giant flesh eating worm in Kletka. Normal things.

Kletka's RNG is far from perfect, and I don't know if it will ever get better than where the game stands today. The first example stems from Kletka's floors being generally a fraction of the size of any given planet in Lethal Company or any of the buildings in R.E.P.O. There are ways in which this works to the game's benefit, as Kletka tends to provide some softballs at its start that provide basic resources in rooms with just a few doors, but there are some real notable wiffs as well. Notably, during the first dozen or so floors, the odds of you stopping at a level and finding virtually nothing are higher than you'd like. Equally frustrating is how the game deals with player death. When you or anyone in your party dies in Kletka, you must respawn them, one at a time, using vending machines that require in-game currency, in this case, beer bottles. Again, the real kicker is that the revives only impact a single party member and in the order in which they died. However, those vending machines increase their price with every character revival, and whether or not they spawn on any given floor is entirely tied to RNG, which can be a real pain. Worse, if you are at the back of the pack on your party's respawn list, you could be waiting for a while before you return, if at all.

In terms of playing the game alone, it isn't the worst experience, and unlike Content Warning, you can at the very least try. Nonetheless, solo runs aren't recommended for the layperson. You have to accept that the vending machines are pointless, and you have to navigate levels at a significantly slower pace. Kletka's lighter and smaller floors allow you to make a snap judgment of what you do and do not think is worth the risk, without any penalty unless you have pushed your luck and no longer have fuel. What becomes problematic is the game needing you to worry about multiple stats or meters rather than a single "get enough junk to meet a quota" goal. In Kletka, you need to worry about the hunger level of the elevator, its fuel, and health, on top of your own character's health and stats, and if you let any these dip to zero, you'll either be dead OR the game will force you to complete a floor, hazards and all, until you get a minimum amount of required resources. So, while Kletka has a tangible end point and that might seem like a doable goal, the game crams in a potent flurry of punches.