Games Like Lethal Company: Co-op Horror Jobs With Friends

R.E.P.O. is the closest match. Up to six players control small robots that search dark buildings for valuables and carry them, carefully, to an extraction point to hit a cash target, while monsters roam each level; fragile loot and physics make every trip its own kind of panic. Content Warning, from members of the Landfall team, swaps loot for footage: up to four friends dive into an underground ruin with a camera, film as many frightening things as they can before oxygen runs out, and upload it to SpookTube for views. GRAIN ROT is the newest take on the loot run: your crew rides a cursed elevator into shifting ruins in fragile wooden bodies, smashes furniture for resources and hauls loot back to rebuild an outpost, with plenty of physics chaos.

Several newer games keep the scrap run and add their own twist. In MIMESIS four players gather valuables and race back to the tram before the contaminated rain, while monsters that copy your friends' voices and behaviour slip into the group. Murky Divers sends up to eight players by blind submarine into abandoned underwater labs to drag out the corpses of failed experiments for credits, with creatures in the dark water. KLETKA puts up to six friends in a living elevator descending through an endless building: you scavenge deadly floors for fuel to feed it and get back before an anomaly sweeps the floor. Lucid Cats turns it into a shared dream: cat-headed dreamers loot a procedurally generated nightmare for a quota and find the exit before the dream ends. Paranormal Cleanup and Ghost Janitors make the job cleaning: tidy up haunted houses for up to four players while the ghosts grow angrier, and keep the lights on to stay safe. Nuclear Nightmare is the most tense: a team crosses a frozen Arctic map for classified material, testing each other for a black goo infection while a nuclear strike draws closer.

If you like the exploring and the proximity chat, Escape the Backrooms and Inside the Backrooms take a crew into the endless liminal rooms of internet legend to solve puzzles and find the exits, with entities that can hear you talk in Escape the Backrooms. Backrooms: Escape Together does the same for up to six players, with levels that change each attempt.

If the monster is your favourite part, Phasmophobia, Demonologist and Ghost Watchers are co-op ghost hunts: gather evidence, work out what haunts the place, and get out when it turns on you. DEVOUR and Pacify are shorter and louder, a race to complete a ritual or burn possessed dolls while one enemy hunts the group. BIGFOOT sends you camping in a national park to prove the creature exists while it stalks your camp.

If what you like is the job itself, Species: Unknown sends mercenaries on paid contracts aboard an abandoned spaceship, with a motion tracker and a monster to identify, and Shift At Midnight puts up to three friends behind a gas station counter at night, deciding which customers are doppelgangers. GTFO is the hard version: a team of prisoners sent on work orders into a dark underground complex, where talking and planning are the only way through.

For something bigger and stranger, SCP: Secret Laboratory is a free online game of a containment breach where each round deals you a role, from an unarmed prisoner to an escaped creature hunting everyone.

Two games turn the run into a robbery. In Dark Hours a crew of up to four breaks into a building for a heist, the power cuts out, and one of eight monsters has the place to itself. Boo Men has you burgle homes in the dark, where every lamp you switch on drains the power and the Boo Men wait wherever the light does not reach.

Three newer crews: Subterror sends up to four to scavenge abandoned domes on the ocean floor, GONE Fishing has up to eight friends fill a fish offering by day for the creature under the lake or face it at night, and Zort takes four through dark maps whose creatures and traps can cost you limbs.

If you only try one, play R.E.P.O. for the closest feel, or Content Warning for the most laughs.

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