The Merits Of Lethal Company-Likes - Part 2: Let's Talk About Chained Together, R.E.P.O., Peak, And GAME JUICE!

Author's Note: This is the second part of a two-part series, although I am willing to explore additional parts in the future, examining and documenting the rise of cooperative "streamer games." If you missed the previous episode, a link is provided below:

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

Additionally, some of you might not be familiar with my use of the term "Game Juice," so I'll provide a general definition as a reference.

Game Juice, also called "Game Feel," is the "intangible, tactile sensation experienced when interacting with video games." These are the effects in games that direct you into knowing what actions are encouraged and which ones are not. With scaffolds and supports, the game juice in any given title makes the player realize what the core feedback loop of the game is. However, you don't simply want to shake the screen and make everything flash just for the sake of trying to "fill your game with juice" to convey that the player is in danger or taking damage. What you want is for every action the player takes to feel impactful and noticeable, and for the tactile, visual, and audio cues to assist in that endeavor.

Chained Together

What Is It?

I'm somewhat fudging the concept of this blog series by including Chained Together, but there's a method to my madness. The uncomfortable truth is that not every co-op streamer game is created by conscientious developers who strive to create interactive playgrounds that foster authentic cooperative interactions. Checking the Steam database shows that more often than not, modern co-op games are just "streamer rage bait," and it would be bereft of me not to talk about at least one such example of that. So, here we are, discussing Chained Together, a game that had its fifteen minutes of fame and has since subsided to the periphery of everyone's mind, even among those who follow the biggest names in the Vtuber world, which played a role in propping up the game. Chained Together is a cooperative platforming game set in a hellscape, where players must navigate a series of obstacles and platforms to reach an exit. In fact, the game is clear about its premise being that you are on a quest to escape Hell. The challenges in the game can send you back to the start, and predictably, the platforming itself is annoyingly fiddly. There are unwieldy vehicles to pilot and obstacles that are hard to predict and are deliberately rage-inducing. Like many "reach the summit" games, Chained Together has a definite end. It also features a dedicated solo mode, which I can confirm isn't the worst, but playing this with friends and needing to coordinate movements and jumps without harming each other is still the main appeal of this game.

What's The Game Juice?

There needs to be a greater discussion about the "game juice" of platformers that have deliberately shitty controls or masochistic challenges. I've been thinking about this topic since Octodad, a game that undeniably has "game feel" and you feel good when you finally accomplish in-game tasks or goals, but there's no denying that it controls like shit, and that's the point. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy has game juice, but it's not very pleasant to play. In that case, do you give it credit for good game design or not? With Chained Together, you have to jump on and around a series of increasingly difficult platforms with the ever-present fear that one lone mistake can cause you to lose all of your progress in an instant. You might not be a fan of these games, and I'm kind of there with you. Still, you have to admit that, despite the field becoming increasingly crowded over the years, these games continue to sell, and there's something about the core concept of them that continues to captivate audiences of all ages. In Chained Together's case, appreciated are a handful of power-ups and one-time use items that allow players to recover from especially brutal or heartbreaking setbacks. Unfortunately, there are only ten of these, so you are encouraged to use them sparingly. Correspondingly, these resources are placed in particularly perilous locations, which adds a risk-reward gameplay loop. The game also has an "Easy" and a "Hard" mode, the latter of which has lava rising to automatically kill you if you spend too much time on any given level or obstacle.

As a cooperative experience, Chained Together has a bit more substance to it. Numerous challenges when playing it multiplayer require you to coordinate movements and jumps more carefully. The more party members you have, the harder the game gets. Every additional body you add to your chain is an extra point of failure. What would be a simple jump by yourself might be a Herculean task with a chain of three to four people, as too many people mistiming a jump will cause your progress to halt or even spell disaster. Luckily, the game does have a physics engine, and one player in a team making a mistake can be something you recover from if you quickly pull them back to a safe surface or platform. Chained Together doesn't have a ton of quiet places for you to gather your thoughts or breathe, so you need to think quickly about how to approach upcoming challenges. Some of your obstacles move, and you need to move with them. While the game isn't graphically impressive, it does a workmanlike job of conveying environmental shifts that are meant to lead to different overlapping tasks or gimmicks. All of that is to say that Chained Together has a pace, especially if you are playing with friends, and it manages to maintain that pace in a single package that doesn't overstay its welcome. But the key to the game's "magic" is when you need to coordinate several party-wide actions to match the rhythm of its hazards. It's one thing when you're simply trying to hop on a floating platform, but it's another thing entirely when you need to plan three separate jumps that don't pull you and everyone else down, while giant hammers or mallets spin around you.

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

Anyone who isn't a fan of QWOP, Getting Over It, or Only Up! is not going to have a good time with Chained Together, even if you have them playing the game with a team of their best friends. Despite the game's multiplayer element adding a new layer to this style of game, it only does so much. You are still playing a game that has traps and obstacles that are always bound to get you the first time around, and these impediments are meant to be rage-bait. That, and the controls themselves, are not the best. Chained Together isn't a terrible feeling game, but it isn't exactly a refined platforming experience; that lack of precision is part of what you sign up for when you buy it. The graphics and level design also fall into the "bad, but deliberately bad" category. The game's surreal portrayal of what escaping Hell is like is comical at times, but there's no palpable rhyme or reason to its numerous plot twists. The fact that you are in Hell is a thin excuse for the hazards in the game to be messily placed together with no real unifying theme. But the real issue with Chained Together, and it is one that anyone who has played this game can attest, is that some of its hitboxes are absolute bullcrap. The game also has a significant clipping and geometry issue, wherein you can get stuck or phase through whole objects, resulting in you falling and losing substantial progress. While most will say it adds to the game's humor, I found it a major block on my enjoyment.

In terms of playing Chained Together alone, you can do it, and plenty of people have finished it alone, but the question is, should you? When you play the game alone, it becomes a modern stream rage-bait platforming game no different than Only Up! The cheap graphics become more noticeable because you only need to focus on what's in front of you, and just that. When the game is removed from its cooperative elements, it becomes a creatively bankrupt regurgitation of Unity or Unreal assets; there's just no fat on its meat; it is lean and dry as shit. Your floating platforms with moving spikes become substandard masocore schlock, and you start to see how erratically the game is put together. Also, when you play Chained Together alone, you really butt up against its design shortcomings. The hitboxes, floaty jumps, and unforgiving timing mechanics become more frustrating because when you are alone, there's no one else that can save you by hoisting you back to where you last were; every mistake automatically drops you down a level or more. In playing alone, you are much more at the mercy of the game. In the end, yelling at people on how to process or approach the nonsensical obstacle courses that are before you is part of what makes Chained Together even remotely interesting.

R.E.P.O.

What Is It?

Of the many Lethal Company-like games that have graced us, R.E.P.O. (i.e., REPO) is the game that most feels like a software "fork." Like Lethal Company, REPO requires you and the members of your party to explore a series of randomly generated environments, which are pulled from pre-sets. Upon entering a level, you need to find items and loot that have monetary value and place these in extraction points to process them and meet your quota. Each time you enter a new level or environment, there is a quota you must meet; otherwise, your party will face a "Game Over." Similar to Lethal Company, the amount of loot and the locations themselves are procedurally generated, and there are hazards in the form of monsters that spawn randomly and in different intervals as well. Unlike Lethal Company, REPO often requires you to deliver loot to multiple cash-in points, rather than a single drop-off zone, and the number of drop-offs increases as your party progresses. Additionally, when you successfully complete a mission, the game drops you in a store to mull over character upgrades, which can include increasing your overall health or adding additional strength or jumping ability to your characters, or items, which can heal you or assist you in dealing with monsters. Where REPO also differentiates itself is in how it expects you to respond to monsters. To avoid immediate death, you need to crouch or vault into pieces of furniture to hide until the monsters either despawn or move to another area so you can walk around them. It plays a lot like a comedic stealth game, which is assisted by the fact that your avatars are puppets.

What's The Game Juice?

The act of delivering items and cashing them in is as satisfying in REPO as it is in Lethal Company. Still, REPO attaches the extra element of durability and fragility to every item. If you bump objects on walls or drop them on the floor, you'll enact a financial penalty that drops the overall value of that item. The effects of adding this mechanic are immediately apparent from both a gameplay perspective and a roleplaying one. In my many times playing REPO, it has been astonishing how engrossed people become in trying to carefully guide large pieces of furniture or fragile articles of diningware, despite monsters or enemies looming in the background; that glowing money total hooks people every time and gets them to commit to the assignment. Likewise, unless you get lucky with upgrade spawns in the store, the heftier objects often require you and others to work collaboratively to make especially perilous deliveries. This usually involves a lot of shouting, but as someone who has moved residences in the last five years, those shouting matches about shifting objects to the left or right, or grabbing things from the bottom rather than the top, felt too real. The game also offers tools for expression. These implements are rudimentary and limited, but they add to the game's goofiness. There's a text-to-speech tool that sounds like Dr. Sbaitso, but it has a limited pool of swappable facial expressions as well. Their limited scope adds to that recurring element of needing to work to roleplay in these games. When you do make your fun or goofs, they immediately feel more rewarding than if the game were hyper-realistic or had better fidelity.

And this next point is going to sound weird to a lot of you, but REPO might be the most satisfying stealth game in at least five years. There's a combo system that allows you to use your movements to leap, vault, and even roll into furnishings, which enables you to hide from enemies. This system becomes even more in-depth as you invest in character upgrades and discover how the upgrades can complement each other. My favorite is tying an additional jump into a floating ability, and the game even spawns a pair of angelic wings when you trigger both upgrades at the same time during a scavenging session. The controls, despite their simplicity, are precise and work to build upon the game's tension when things get hairy. When you are in the same room as a monster, you have the comfort of knowing there are ways for you to dash and crouch around them, but your execution needs to be on point. The logic and routines of the monsters are similar to those in Lethal Company, in that they are unspoken and ones you need to learn through experience. To be honest, the inclusion of its stealth mechanic means that you feel better equipped to deal with REPO's beasts than the ones in Lethal Company. In the latter's case, I feel like too often I run into a giant or monstrous dog and have to sigh and say, "Well, I guess I'm dead now." In REPO, you at least know there's a chance you can avoid and deal with monsters, and that feels better as a player. Each monster has its gimmick in how it behaves and how you might be able to counter that. REPO allows you to kill monsters to reap financial rewards, which makes its monsters much more interactive than the ones you find in Lethal Company. Unless you are armed to the teeth, pulling this off usually requires a collective effort or a stroke of luck.

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

REPO desperately needs an update that adds more levels. Presently, the game only has four possible locations that can spawn for scavenging sessions, and while the procedural nature of the game can add some variety, there are limits. There are only so many different ways McJannek Station can make abandoned science labs feel unique or ways the Museum of Human Art can format its exhibits. Additionally, some of these environments are better than others. Headman Manor often has way too many narrow corridors, which can screw you if a monster spawns ahead of you and you don't have enough avenues to walk around them. And the larger versions of Swiftbroom Academy or the Museum of Human Art become overwhelmingly labyrinthine with haphazard drop-off spawn points that seem downright nefarious at times. The game's difficulty scaling with each sequential mission has also been the subject of massive debate, and I can't help but agree with the game's critics in many regards. Quotas, as I will explain soon, should be much more variable and at least partially influenced by how many players you have in your party. Likewise, I think it wouldn't hurt if the game had you only worrying about a single extractor for a few more missions, and not just the beginning one. And the monster spawns are all over the place. Sometimes you get monsters dropped on you within the first two to three minutes, and other times they don't drop until after you've fulfilled your last extractor's quota. Yes, the game is still in Early Access, but I don't think it hurts to mention some of these quibbles.

When it comes to playing REPO by yourself, while there is a dedicated "offline" mode that allows for it, don't even bother. It has its use in enabling you to get accustomed to the controls, but that's about it; playing REPO alone sucks. The game has the same pitfalls as Lethal Company when played without even a single companion, in that the monster spawns always immediately gravitate towards you, and without an extra set of eyes, many of these encounters spell immediate doom with next to no wiggle room. Also, the game doesn't seem to modify quota totals proportionally to how many players there are, and even if that total is representative of how much loot there is in an environment, two drop locations with two +$10,000 quotas is daunting task without at least three people, and an impossible one alone unless you have completely memorized a location's format and placement of rooms. It's a shame because, like Lethal Company, it feels like, with a few tweaks, the game could work as a solo experience. If quotas were reactive to the number of players, monster spawns a bit lower, and single extractor missions were extended for more than just the first mission, things could work. But presently, dragging the cart while also needing to duck into tables and cupboards every step of the way just isn't fun. It draws out even the simplest missions into twenty-minute-long ordeals, and even with careful play, I topped out at the third mission, which is a far cry from what I have been able to do with even a party of two.

Peak

What Is It?

Peak is a cooperative climbing game where you and whoever is joining you need to summit a series of mountains to survive a plane crash on an island that has an ominous, creeping fog that will otherwise kill you. However, Peak values communication over everything else, and while you can beat to the tune of your own drum, things go a lot smoother when you apply roles and jobs to your party members and discuss routes and paths together before attempting them. Similar to other games of this type, some items boost stats, and you have to discuss which of those items would most benefit your various playmates in-game. Additionally, almost every hazard or challenge in Peak is demonstrably easier to deal with when you have at least one other person by your side. It's not just about coordinating routes; you also need to observe cliffs and chasms and determine if you want to approach them "naturally" or instead, use an item your party might have on hand or in a backpack. Yelping to other players about spikes, poisonous plants, or sudden pits all leads to this feeling of needing to be in sync with those around you and understanding how you are all in this together. But as most of you probably know from this site's coverage or through other streams of Peak, there's also something magical about when things go south. Whether it be hearing a friend fall to their death, their spirit cursing you out, or the notes from the in-game scount master, the game's humor bleeds through at every corner.

What's The Game Juice?

Of the games covered in this series, Peak has, BY FAR, the most "Game Juice." The climbing itself is simple, while still feeling satisfying, and the additional mechanics thrown into the mix make this yet another case study in "more than meets the eye." You can assist teammates who are struggling to reach the top of a cliff by standing over the edge of it and extending a hand, which allows your friend to jump to the top without expending stamina when they wouldn't have been able to do so otherwise. But, you need to be careful or else risk falling over the edge yourself. You can boost or jump to deal with gaps or spaces that you might not be able to cross if you went at them at a normal pace. Nonetheless, you also could run the risk of running out of stamina mid-climb, and this results in your character becoming paralyzed until they land on leveled ground, which more often than not, results in fall damage. Almost everything you do is some form of a risk assessment, and this logic also applies to your companions. Every character has an energy or stamina bar that gets modified based on your actions. The green portion of your bar represents usable energy, which is expended when climbing, running, jumping, or performing any in-game action. Relatedly, there's an additional bonus energy bar you can develop based on eating certain food items. The brown portions are blocked off based on the weight of what you are carrying. The yellow portions represent your hunger, which develops after a certain amount of time passes since your last meal. Finally, some statuses can eat up your energy bar based on whether you get hurt, poisoned, burned, or more. Some items can deal with these status effects, but that depends on whether they have spawned and if you have them in the first place.

Despite the cheery visuals, there's a push-your-luck component to Peak, which adds to its underlying tension. Even in large parties, there's no way to keep everything you encounter in your journey, and instead, you need to assess what might be most beneficial to a successful session. The game is cleverly designed to encourage player interactions. Pulling items out of a backpack is easier when done by someone else, rather than by the person wearing the backpack, which is a deliberate design feature intended to encourage people to interact with each other. Bridges can collapse, and you need to coordinate how many people cross at a time, and may even need to rearrange items between party members, so that no one person causes a collapse. Peak is ultimately deceptively complex. There are many different categories of plants, luggage, and relics, which can lead to further discussions with your party. Inevitably, there might be an occasion when your group invests in approaching a side of a mountain only to discover it's a bust, and your only hope is to retrace your steps back to a point of origin before the fog creeps up. There are some legitimately unnerving moments in Peak, even if you know exactly what you need or want to do.

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

Peak's Achilles' heel is its RNG. Now, that's what makes this game "special," but it is also undeniably capricious. You see, the mountains in Peak follow the same ruleset as the daily challenges in Spelunky; they reset after 24 hours, and every day, the game spawns a new series of mountains to climb. There have been mountains that felt like a cakewalk, even when I experienced sub-optimal item spawns. Then there were times when I butted up against a sheer cliff face that seemingly required an unspoken amount of stamina or a specific combination of items that I did not have in my repertoire. The swings in Peak can be brutal, and when you feel like the challenge of the day is too much for you or your friends, your only option is to wait for a better roll of the dice.

On top of that, while I think the game looks great and its pastoral shots are awe-inspiring at times, finding some of its routes towards the tops of mountains is frustratingly oblique or obscured by terrain that doesn't immediately seem like a valid path. That can be aggravating, but what I think is even more maddening is how tied to item use some missions become, and none of these items have hints on what they do unless you have used them before. With the game having a badge system that explains your significant accomplishments, I wish Peak had an in-game encyclopedia that detailed everything you've used. The critical issue here is that food items either improve or restore your stamina or restore your health, and it's not always clear which ones fall into which category. But what about the tools that help you go further up on cliffs or sheer walls? Those things you need to learn through trial and error, and without a testing room, using tools is incredibly vexing. Trying to use something and getting a result you didn't thoroughly plan for because you're unfamiliar with how it works can be arresting.

In terms of playing Peak single player, it's doable and even enjoyable, but with one major caveat. On the positive side, the game features achievements tied to playing Peak solo, and its structure means that if you know the optimal route for any given mountain, whether you complete it by yourself or in a team is irrelevant. When going solo, you need to use what tools the game gives you more flippantly, and despite the anxiety you might have about only having inventory slots for a single character, the lack of other characters means you have to be more strategic about what you are and are not willing to bring on with you. Any item that is more about helping other players or just flavor text should be immediately dismissed in solo runs, so there's actually less analysis paralysis in playing Peak by yourself, because you cut the number of valuable items down by half. The game is also much more meditative when played alone. Any stamina-boosting items you encounter don't need to be debated, and it's easier to determine what approaches are doable or not because the lack of allies means you can't take advantage of ledge-hovering friends. Now, the catch, and this is a BIG catch, is that solo play is very much contingent on mountain RNG, and sometimes the RNG makes solo play entirely untenable. On a few occasions, I have found the optimal or only usable path on a mountain contingent on cooperative strategies or techniques that can emerge mid- or late-session, and that's a complete bummer.