You’re Not Supposed To Play ‘Lethal Company’ This Way. It’s Also the Best Way To Play the Game.

I’m a bad girl. I did something with Lethal Company that no one should do.

Despite my friends insisting they wouldn’t try it, that they wouldn’t be able to handle the sensation (“I just ate two edibles,” my one friend said, “I might get psychosis”), I went ahead and did it anyway. I locked in, booted up Lethal Company, and put on a device everyone warned me not to use.

And I had a blast. Now, I can’t play Lethal Company any other way—not without this one, special attachment.

Yes, you can play Lethal Company in VR

Earlier this month, I pulled out my Oculus Quest, brushed off the dust, and started using virtual reality again. A friend plugged my VTuber avatar into VRChat, and after hanging out with some buds as an anime succubus, I quickly fell down the virtual reality rabbit hole. Just a week later, I discovered Lethal Company’s unofficial VR mod, which lets players hop into Lethal Company with a VR headset.

And all I can say is … wow. The experience is incredible.

LethalCompanyVR was developed by DaXcess, and the mod is relatively new: GitHub says its 1.0 release was only on Jan. 13, 2024. It’s incredibly easy to install; all you need is a PC VR headset, or a portable VR headset that can link up to a PC (like the Oculus Quest). From there, just use a mod manager like r2modman to install the files, boot up the game in non-VR to complete installation, and you’re done. Welcome to VR Lethal Company.

DaXcess’ mod started picking up traction over the past two weeks, thanks in part to content creators like Jameskii, who uploaded a popular YouTube video called “Lethal Company but in VR.” The video demonstrates some of the gameplay you can expect, although it’s a bit hard to explain the mod’s immersion and appeal through video alone. So where images fail, allow words to fill in the gaps.

You need to play Lethal Company with a VR headset. Now.

Lethal Company’s VR mod places players directly into the game as employees for the Company, where they can use their VR controllers to freely interact with the world. You can wave your hands and arms, point with your fingers, and even mimic that iconic Lethal Company dance, all from your chair. The game also places your UI elements right on your hands, so you can easily turn your wrist over to look at the time of day or your inventory slots.

To interact with the world, you have to manually reach over and grab things. You’ll pick up scrap by hand, shake and control a spray can with your wrist, and move your flashlight in any direction with your hands and arms. You can even swing your shovel with your own shoulders, if you’d like to simulate the real feeling of killing a Hoarding Bug with a fight-or-flight burst of adrenaline. Yippee!

The best part of VR Lethal Company isn’t its interactivity, but rather, what it provides. As you can probably imagine, playing a horror co-op exploration game in VR is extremely immersive. As I wandered through an eclipsed Experimentation, fearing for those colossal Eyeless Dogs, I was struck by how lifelike Lethal Company’s world suddenly felt. It was as if I was actually plopped on this lonely, abandoned planet, forced to do menial tasks for a Company that didn’t give a sh*t if I lived or died.

It wasn’t just the planet’s exterior that pulled me in. Lethal Company rarely scares me, but crawling through bunkers’ dark, dreary corridors, surrounded by ambient growls on all sides? I actually felt dread. When I heard a Thumper in the distance, or saw a Bunker Spiders’ outline down a dark corridor, my entire body clamped up and turned away out of terror. At one moment, I spoke too loud, and a Thumper barreled right at me. I knew I was done for, so I screamed and turned on my flashlight, pointing it directly at him.

I didn’t do this because I wanted to find a way to escape. No, I just wanted to see the Thumper’s face before he killed me. I knew it would scare me less if I saw him approaching me in the light than the dark. In a way, that’s exactly why I love Lethal Company’s VR experience. It actually heightens Zeekerss’ original intention: A quiet, ambient, but deeply unsettling horror experience that unnerves you every step of the way, be it crawling through a manor’s dark hallways or having your bones crunched by a hungry Forest Keeper.

Don’t worry, you’ll still die in VR

LethalCompanyVR opened up new ways to experience Lethal Company. Sure, that included simple things, like gesturing with my arm at a Dropship delivery in the distance while making eye contact with a friend, or landing on the Company planet and hearing the Company’s hungry gurgles from all sides. But it’s LethalCompanyVR’s freedom of movement that really drew me deeper into Zeekerss’ world. Because I could swivel my arms and head in full 360 degrees, I could peek over corners in intersections, shining my flashlight left and right in the dark before picking a direction to explore. When a monster lurked through a hallway, I could keep moving forward while checking behind me, watching for its outline in the dark while still shining my flashlight forward.

The headset provided a tactical advantage without breaking the game—like when I ran into a Coilhead, blocking the doorway out from a dead end. If you haven’t met one of these horrific, spring-necked monsters yet, they’re a bit like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. You have to keep a line of sight toward them as much as possible, halting their movement. Otherwise, they’ll lunge at you and kill you. Coilheads are as dangerous as they sound, and yet I was able to pull this Coilhead into a dead end by quickly lifting my head toward the ceiling, then staring right back at him, keeping his movements contained and controlled. Eventually, a friend came to my help, and I escaped into a catwalk.

But unfortunately, there was some miscommunication between the two of us, and I accidentally walked backwards into a Hygrodere. The slimey blob quickly consumed me, and I died. Whoopsies.

In a nutshell, that’s Lethal Company in VR. Your bedroom fades away, leaving you with the dreary, predatory world of Experimentation, March, and Dine. Those dark, dreary bunkers feel enveloping now, and reaching the ship feels like a fatiguing marathon (in part because you’ll be swinging your arms around in the dark regularly, burning a respectable amount of calories).

Lethal Company is an even lonelier world in VR, an awful, capitalistic hellscape where every threat feels more lifelike than ever. But hey, at least you can do the dance with your own arms and hands now. And that’s pretty neat.

(feature image: Zeekerss)