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Early Access Review

Intro:
The process of milking existing franchises is something that has been haunting and destroying all entertainment industries for about a decade now. The most notable victim of such ideas and actions, especially in recent memory, has been the video games industry. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the stagnation of creativity and lack of braveness to come up with new concepts and IPs by the corporal giants such as Microsoft, EA and Ubisoft. However, during these troublesome times, every once in a while, fate reaches out and extends its hands to gamers in form of indie games.
Undertale, Terraria, Hotline Miami, Cuphead and many, many more, are just some examples that have come out in the last decade, turned the Internet and the industry around, sparkling a lot of copycats and driving the attention of the world of video games towards them. One more such example has become Lethal Company - a multiplayer horror video game made by a single developer where your goal is simple - find and collect random space trash which can be sold to the imaginative megacorporation named "The Company".

Gameplay:
In Lethal Company, you, the player, assume the role of an intern in an unnamed company that sends you to various different, procedurally generated and haunted planets labeled as moons. You're given 3 in-game days, each lasting about 10 minutes total, and your and your teammates' (up to 3 by default, more if modded) goal is to scatter around the map and its facility and find space trash called Scrap Items, collect and bring them back to the ship; these include, but are not limited to, random toys like the Rubik's Cube, candy, mugs, cups, lamps and even gold bars.
Once the 3 in-game days have passed, the ship flies to The Company's headquarters - a moon named Gordion. The Company will purchase essentially any item you managed to find in exchange for a paycheck. Each item has its own value which essentially defines the price; some masks are valued more, others less. The requirement is to meet the profit quota after every sale, otherwise you and your crew are getting fired and blasted into the void of space.
Some items can only be obtained by killing certain enemies, others can be purchased at the headquarters - some can help to fight off certain enemies (shovels) while others are utilities that can help navigating the facilities (flashlights, Walkie-talkies). Communication is sometimes nearly impossible due to its proximity chat implementation, but that in itself is one of the reasons for the game's success.
Each map has one or multiple entrances placed in various outdoors areas, entering which leads to the indoors facility whose layout is procedurally generated. There's landmines, spike traps and turrets that spawn in random places in the facility and they can be monitored and temporarily turned off in the ship through the ship's computer console.

Story:
On the surface, it appears as if this is just another game with no backstory except the simple premise of collecting scrap items. However, its unsetlling lore can be explored through the game's logs, written by an unknown (likely former) coworker Sigurd, starting in the alleged year of 1968. All of the logs can be accessed via the ship's computer and they contain some brief and in some ways, "mysterious" info about The Company. The monster behind the reception wall on The Company's headquarters planet is named Jeb and it seems to feed on the trash items that you and your crewmates manage to find. For as long as the quota is met, Jeb and The Company are satisfied with you. The lore seems to imply that the idea behind feeding Jeb is to keep the monster behind the walls tame.
According to the ship's computer, the game's first day is set in the year 2532, dating over 500 years after Sigurd's first log. The computer is running on an operating system written by Halden Electronics and licensed for the duration between 2084 and 2108. The fact that the software's license expired a long time ago, The Company is likely running a pirated version of the OS or the original development team of the OS has gone defunct. The famine the universe has been going through in the last 500 years means that both scenarios are likely. The (current) final log was written in October 1968 by another crewmate Desmond, which heavily suggests Sigurd's passing and nothing has been known of since.
Lethal Company's cast of enemies and monsters is diverse. From the unkillable Resident Evil reanimated mannequins known as Coil-heads, butlers trying to kill you when nobody is watching, all the way to eyeless dogs with great hearing and robots that shoot rockets, Lethal Company is packed with all sorts of monsters and enemies, some of which will even fight each other, making the ecosystem more believable.

Other/Miscellaneous:
Sadly, the game suffers from being developed on the modern day Unity engine, which means that even though the textures are "beneath the level" of Grand Theft Auto IV, its system requirements can be high at times and if not met, there will be suffering FPS drops in certain areas on various hardware, from the GTX 1060 6GB all the way up to RTX 3060. The game does, however, aim for such an art style, which is fine when the FPS counter does not drop to 30 on modern hardware.
The game's audio is really great and very often makes the atmosphere as unsettling as it should be in a horror game. Every enemy is fairly distinct and hearing the Jester playing "Pop Goes the Weasel" can mean one thing - it's time to find the exit and run outside. Unfortunately, there are cases where one would try to search for lower volume mods due to how loud some enemies such as the Old Birds when they're triggered can be. The proximity chat feature is what truly makes the game great in that regard, though, as hearing a friend scream or laugh in the far distance without knowing how to quickly navigate there to witness the situation can provide for some fun or fearsome moments, depending on the situation.

Verdict:
All in all, Lethal Company is a game with great concepts that relies on its playerbase to drive the fun and that is what makes it amongst some of the best in recent memory. While visibly still in early access, the initial starting point is something that can and should be improved upon as it opens paths for future content, lore, more characters and features. While having a cleverly designed AI system, it can sometimes be buggy (likely due to the procedural generation of the facility layouts) in certain areas. It is short on the optimization and (some) audio side, but with a little bit more effort, these issues can be history.
For its price, it can offer some good hours of fun with people on your friends list.