|
dkirschner's Lobotomy Corporation (PC)
|
| [September 8, 2024 02:06:43 PM]
|
I feel a little bad closing Lobotomy Corporation so quickly (4 hours play time), but I see where it's going. HLTB has the Main Story at 54 hours and Main+ at 105. I know that the game is very difficult and punishing and that I will have to start over at least once, and just don't see myself spending 54-105 hours here. It's already repetitive and has some irritating features, despite piquing my interest in other ways. Apparently there is a whole popular universe that spawned from this game. They've made two more big games, plus comics and other media.
The game gives vibes of Darkest Dungeon, Cabin in the Woods, and Control, but is a management sim horror rogue-lite genre mashup. You play as the manager of this company (the Lobotomy Corporation, I guess?). You hire and train employees. Employees have various stats that govern health, combat prowess and other things, and you can equip them with weapons and armor. They can go insane, murder one another, kill themselves, be paralyzed by fear, etc., in a Darkest Dungeon kind of way.
In the facility that you manage are Abnormalities. Abnormalities are like the objects in Control or the monsters in Cabin in the Woods. They are in containment cells, and you have to send employees to work with them. Employees can do four kinds work with the Abnormalities. Each of the four kinds of work is tied to one of the four employee stats, so if you do "insight" work, for example, the character's SP increases after the day is over. But each Abnormality is also strong or weak against certain types of work, so you generally want to send employees who can handle the Abnormality's own strengths so that they don't die or go insane or suffer whatever negative effects the Abnormality can impose.
When you work with Abnormalities, the idea is that you're learning about them and extracting energy. You extract more energy the more successfully you work with them, and spend energy to unlock new information about the Abnormalities, purchase weapons and armor, and ultimately the energy you extract finishes your "day" in the facility and allows you to progress the game. So, you'll learn about what the Abnormalities do when they escape (containment breaches happen from time to time and you have to quell the Abnormalities), how to manage them (they all come with a set of rules for interacting with them, increasingly complex with the danger level of the Abnormality), and so on. You have to learn all this by just trying to work with them in different ways and accumulating energy to spend, hoping all the while that something bad doesn't happen.
And something bad WILL happen. The game is punishing! You don't know at first what a new Abnormality is strong or weak against, but you have to try to do some kind of work with them to get energy to learn about them. If they happen to be strong against that kind of work, they could straight up kill your employee. There was one where you have to keep the employee in the room for longer and longer periods to unlock information, and it kept killing my employees. I finally realized that, when I unlocked one of the management tips, after 20-30 seconds listening to the Abnormality (a music box with a ballerina figurine on top), the employee's SP will start to drain. If the employee continues listening to the music, they will go insane. Good to know.
The idea is that, even though your employees will die, and you can restart days or go back to checkpoints (losing all your progress), YOU, the player, will still have learned the information and can use it to do better next time. So, for that music box, I set a timer on my phone for 20 seconds and any time someone was in there, I started the timer and pulled them out after 20 seconds.
So, you're doing this kind of micromanagement with an increasing number of employees monitoring interactions with an increasing number of Abnormalities. I was up to Day 7 (out of 50) and 6 Abnormalities. Presumably you'll have dozens at a time by the end! And they all have specific rules and ways to interact with them, strengths and weaknesses, breach conditions, and so on. This is a lot to remember, and that's fine, that's a challenge, but managing employees was already becoming difficult.
For example, although they have HP and SP (die if HP drops, go insane if SP drops), you can't see HP and SP meters in real-time. Like, if they're in a containment room working with an Abnormality, you can't see their HP level. You can only see it when you are selecting which employees to send to containment chambers. And on the UI, when employees are wandering around the facility, their HP/SP bars are constantly obscured by little speech bubbles above their heads as they say random nonsense. In a game where it's necessary to micromanage, actually clicking on any single employee is hard, the more there are. They actually made the main thing you do in the game, micromanaging during the days, difficult to do from a UI point of view. In the last day, an employee died and I didn't even know until I completed the day. A tiny little text box window is hard to read. When you zoom out, necessary to see the whole facility at once, you can't read the employee names, so you don't know who is where unless you constantly zoom in and out to read names and pan around. When someone dies, if you didn't actually see them die, you have no idea why they died. These are all really pesky issues!
So anyway, I see where this is going. I'm going to manage more and more employees, more and more Abnormalities, which have harder and harder conditions to meet. I'm going to lose a lot of employees and have to start days and checkpoints over a lot. And I'm probably going to lose the whole game and have to start all over (although you retain your gear and knowledge). It's a rogue-lite because you do keep that stuff when you start over, and you usually get a choice of three mystery Abnormalities to choose among each day that will be added to the facility. Once you learn which ones are which, I suppose you can choose ones that are easier to deal with. So, really neat game. I love the idea. There are things I would change to make it easier to manage everything. It's kind of bogged itself down already for me, and I know that I won't see it through to the end.
add a comment 
|
|
|
 |
dkirschner's Lobotomy Corporation (PC)
|
|
Current Status: Stopped playing - Got frustrated
GameLog started on: Saturday 7 September, 2024
GameLog closed on: Sunday 8 September, 2024 |
 |
| other GameLogs for this Game |
|
This is the only GameLog for Lobotomy Corporation. |
|
