>"Welcome to Lobotomy Corporation, new manager, here you-" *restarts run*
>"Welcome to L-" *restarts run*
This is merely but a glimpse of what awaits you in the hellscape that is this company.

Lobotomy Corporation is a management game about one too many things, but what stands atop it all is perseverance. Said concept is deeply rooted in the game's core, to the point where it even ties in to the developers, Project Moon, and the rough yet inspiring story behind the game's development.

The Will to Stand up Straight
Considering an unsuccessful overseas Kickstarter funding, while at least managing to get a decent Tumblbug (pretty much a Korean Kickstarter) project reception, and similar struggles, like almost going bankrupt due to their commission of a translation, it is quite evident at times that the game is short on budget, and it's made clearer by the time you see the credits, showing the names of a bunch of backers, and a seemingly scarce development team.

But what it lacks in resources, it more than makes up with sheer ambition, given it is no easy task to release a game with such a big scope...

...yet they endured the development cycle and finally did release it, so with Project Moon breaking out of their own cycle of torment and struggles, now it's the player's time to undergo their own.

The Fearlessness to keep on Living
Managing this company is no easy task, as you're dealing with weird creatures called Abnormalities, to meet the energy quota (yes, you obtain energy working with them) and call it quits for the day. This gameplay loop will keep going for a while, so you better get used to it.

However, this game wouldn't be as unabashedly difficult as it is without trying with all its might to make your management as miserable as humanly possible. With Abnormalities that range from seemingly harmless entities (Punishing Bird is the closest thing to a toxic relationship but I still love my silly little guy) to the most absolutely despair-inducing and soul-crushing gimmicks known to man, along with enemies that will pop up along the way, this games holds no punches whatsoever.

The Rationality to Maintain Discretion
But the manager does not partake in energy collection, instead, you order your employees to do so, risking their very lives in the process. However, you definitely don't want them to die, since it costs you time and points to recruit and level them up.
If you don't manage your resources properly, you might get forced to do a complete restart of your playthrough, but some upgrades carry through between runs, so everything will go faster in subsequent runs (kiiiiinda like a roguelike).

But why is such a relentlessly evil and equally obtuse experience so good, and so alluring?

The Expectation for the Meaning of Existence
Well, the game is hostile by design, not just in gameplay but also in its story. You're presented with a brutally ruthless organization that does not stop even at the face of death to fulfill its apparently corporate goals, coupled with a setting that instills the same sense of solitude that the gameplay and music that accompany it reinforce in you.

The whole experience feels just right; it nails the feeling of a very daunting and oppressive journey through the installations that comprise this corporation.

Those who are Faithful and Trustworthy
Said installations are divided into several departments, each of them spearheaded by a Sephirah. These characters will be presented to you during this play, and all of them have a story to tell, or more accurately, to unravel through their interactions, that you unlock by fulfilling missions during each day (these, for example, also get saved between runs, so you don't have to repeat them).

As expected, these missions also get very rough sometimes, and I do mean it (and well, they're also necessary for finishing the game). I don't blame anyone for dropping this game, but it is very much worth the chance, and at worst, just use mods if you can't handle the incoming waves of frustration, rather than watching a Let's Play online. A mod I do recommend right from the start that doesn't really hurt the experience is More Detailed Info, which shows you the real statistics of work success instead of vague words, among other things, so at least you can shave off a bit of that frustration and obtuseness of its systems.

The Hope to be a Better Person
The greatest highlight of this game, rather than the gameplay, is, as expected, the story and experience it provides. It is a game where I'm not even sure I appreciate the whole picture yet (I probably need Library of Ruina for this), despite having 100%ed it after a whooping 95h of playtime, epilogue included. I'm also still unsure of neither this review in its entirety, nor the rating I've given to it, so I may alter it slightly in the future.

What I can say for sure, at this moment in time, is how good this game is, including its narrative and symbolism, and how worthy it is of your time, if you can endure all of the quirks and gimmicks they will throw at you. It is, without a doubt, one of the best ludonarratives I've ever seen in a game.

Despite being as cryptic as it can get, it slowly provides you with bits of information about the characters and the world, and when everything clicks it's just amazing in hindsight. The characters do help with this, since they all have their own marked personalities and their quirks.

What may you do for them, you ask?
Well, perhaps you can somehow help.
Help them find a resolution.

Embrace the past, and help regain the Light.

i believe this game suffers from "umineko syndrome", as in, in order to finish it you /really/ have to commit to it, which in turn makes it so you're gonna give it a high rating (since you were probably already primed to do so since hour 30 or so, or otherwise you wouldn't have kept playing)

now, with that aside:

PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
FUCK BINAH
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK
PEAK

Never did a review of this but oh man...

I actually love the gameplay, the feeling of getting new abnormalities in your facilities and discovering what they do is great. Getting one that benefits your facility by having good gear or easy to train on, or one that could make your life a living hell.

Story is amazing, one of the most unique and engaging stories I've read in a video game.

"sick and twisted game for sickos" said my wife after i bought them this game, strapped them into their chair, chained to the desk and hit play
favourite game of all time. impossible to explain the uh dubious ins & outs of how this thing works or what makes it so enjoyable when it is constantly trying (and succeeding) to pull one over on you and burn itself down but
you either die a clerk or live long enough to see yourself become The Manager... face the fear, build the future... what, like it's hard?

Unreasonably cruel by design, completely decrepit and crusty as an entirely grounded virtue, and still earnestly unplayable no matter how much I or it tries to justify that as part of its core thesis. And that's soooo cool. The surface levels of its completely aware corporate, deterministic, and hellish analogues for depressive and nihilistic thought that you quite literally ascend out of is MORE than worth the thorns, but not for me. Nope. I got several days in before the realization that metagaming would be an encouraged straight-faced requirement and that's when I knew I would never get through this without hotkeyed console commands every single day so I committed the immutable sin of just... watching/reading my way to victory. Sorry! My "reviews" are glorified blogposts anyway, so it's nothing new. And I personally just don't accept this kind of design altogether, especially in the later days of this game.

I still hold so much respect for it though, both in terms of encapsulating such a stark but brutally real depiction of life through its particular lens, and grounding it all in such a way that all of the complex layers can be easily peeled back to the same pathos core. Kind of difficult to dance around a lot of the elements here without spoiling, there's quite a few character cuts that go for the throat on various levels of "how does one find that strength to continue" here that I'm going to think about a lot. I couldn't delve that much into the detail anyways, I've lived privileged, I have not been in the depths of darkness that walk the hallways here. I will say as my single form of criticism to the story that its philosophical quandaries aren't exactly hitting high above the clouds, and I don't mean that in terms of vs. philosophy I mean that the highest highs here don't hit so hard, another victim of the gameplay making you largely senseless to it but also because the pacing kind of crams some of that in all at once.

On the other hand, the music mmmmmmmmmm. Awake in Death, When It Rains, Second Trumpet are incredible. The aesthetic is lovely too, with immaculate detail that's super suitable. If nothing else I'm committed to anything Project Moon comes up with (god I'm really going to get another gacha huh) simply for its irrefutable direction over every single one of its elements, even if this game is barely managing to make its initial mechanical concepts meet by sheer tedium.

To sort of address a last elephant in the room, I'm not going to say that if you are curious you should go down the same path as me. You will ABSOLUTELY most certainly be filtered at some point to like, 90-95% of the people I know who read the shit I write, but you should try to persevere as far as you can. I think at the least everyone should like, TRY, this, to understand the full scope of what the fuck Lobotomy Corporation has in store for you.

There isn't any way I can separate this game from my own extremely personal emotional investment in it and I don't particularly want to air all of that out in public forum for strangers' viewing pleasure, so I'll keep it short:

Lobotomy Corporation's subject matter and primary themes are particularly pertinent to my own life and the kind of person I am, and in that regard it's the story I've been searching for for as long as I've been alive. I've never seen my own point of view on the matter reflected so clearly and wholly before.

It's a laborious experience, but a worthwhile one.

God, this game is so fucking cool. I assumed this to be a quirky management sim with heavy handed anti-corporate set dressing, reputable yet trite. I did not expect that base to be a vehicle to probe human's perseverance and tenacity, either by way of experience when the player is inevitably crushed by excruciatingly unfair trials and errors, or through the misery of characters bound to roots of this diabolical tree. It's such a success when anti-corporate notion isn't just handed out as sermon! It's also incredible when religious mysticism so effectively informs the story as it could just be a feeble ornament for extra style points like in many ocassions before. Even with repetition issues dulling out certain story beats I found overall tapestry enchanting, I might be hooked on Project Moon.

It's just meeting LoboCorp on its own terms is an absolute waste of time. There are ways to make pre-coded failure worthwhile as some games do with robust simulation of environment (Rain World). Constantly changing rules not letting the player slide into a comfortable strategy make sense when the game accepts mistakes and lets you roll with them forward (Pathologic 2). But as it stands, LoboCorp is too rigid and rudimentary yet completely unaccepting to errors, in a system you're supposed to explore guessing and grinding your way through! And no layers of cognition filtering will aid when micromanagement of everexpanding facility must be done using the least functional strategy UI ever. I just think I got the overall point well enough to earn my "Lobotomy Corporation Complete Story Compilation" pass.

A fantasia de um jogo de gestão de uma instalação SCP é uma que eu sempre tive mas não sabia, e poder brincar e me estressar com a enorme gama de particularidades e picuinhas que vem com este trabalho infernal foi aplicado com maestria através das mecânicas do jogo. LobCorp conecta o ato desesperador de tentar navegar uma situação exponencialmente desgraçada muito bem à narrativa, que infelizmente terei de terminar no YouTube, sem dúvidas com efeito bem diminuído. Tem ideias fantásticas e de certa forma admiro como não cede nada em sua execução. Ainda assim, acho que cobra precisão e cuidado demais para as ferramentas que dá pro jogador. Talvez dava pra ter feito tudo isso de forma mais palatável, mas meu choro é livre.

Entendo que a dita cuja da lobotomia vinha através do tédio e o desespero inepto diante da situação desgraçada em que você se encontra, implacável em sua ludonarrativa destilada. E por isso insisti, insisti e insisti de novo. Repeti fases diversas vezes, repeti playthroughs - recebia minúsculas vitórias como saborosos triunfos; o suspiro de um dia não muito merda e uma missão completada não tinha preço. Eventualmente cheguei num ponto em que o que me pegava era mais o tédio de dias extremamente longos que tinha que repetir por completo pelo menor dos erros - ou por uma cadeia de eventos inofensivos que acabavam resultando num wipe total. Por mais que tentei aproveitar a situação e abraçar o capeta, eventualmente acabei me esfriando depois de algumas dezenas de horas de engajamento honestamente inesperado, já que não sou do tipo de lidar bem com frustração. Quem sabe se os dias fossem mais curtos, ou se a repetição no late game não fosse cerceada por longos períodos de tranquilidade e eventualmente um wipe instântaneo, ou até se eu conseguisse ver a barra de vida de todo mundo que mando sem eles se sobreporem, ou um highlight melhor nos funcionários que escolhi, eu teria segurado até o fim.

Gostei bastante e me inspirou muito, mas não tenho a capacidade de zerar sem apelar pra cheats :( e ainda assim levar dezenas de horas.

Probably the only other serious review I'll write here. This review won’t contain spoilers for the story, project moon’s setting, or the Abnormalities. That being said I truly do think Lobotomy Corp is a game that’s best experienced knowing basically nothing when going in. Much of this game centers around experimentation and repetition, and I'd hate to compromise that even a little bit. That being said, LoboCorp is a harsh game. It will get easier as you begin to make more and more permanent milestones, but soft resets and day 1 reset will happen. It has that XCOM quality where it feels like every decision you make early on is the wrong one, but amped up to 11. There’s something to be said about negative experiences in games, and if that isn’t for you I can’t blame you in the slightest. What I can say though is unlike games like Spec-Ops The Line, the point isn’t to be preachy but to empower you by the end.

I mention all this now because unlike some of my other favorite games this is not a game I can so easily recommend. And I want to get all of this out of the way now because LoboCorp is a game I think is at least worth trying. It and Outer Wilds sorta encompass everything that makes games as an art form special. It’s one of the most unique experiences I've had with a game that I can forgive a lot of its unapproachability and technical hiccups. Sometimes you can tell this game was put together with duct tape and the dev’s hopes and dreams, and I may have cursed myself and the game every now and then. But the experience as a whole is something I only have fond memories of.

As stated previously, a lot of what LoboCorp comes down to is experimentation. As only an SCP management game can do, the first facility you run will be full of eldritch monstrosities that are thoroughly incompatible with each other. Every day will feel like diffusing a bomb that gets more and more complex as more Abnormalities get added to the facility. Maybe handling individual containment cells is simple, but managing many at once can get incredibly stressful. Very few finished playthroughs go through the game in a single run. However each successive run and facility will become easier and easier to manage. Not only will your repository of information expand, but so too will your ability to respond to threats as they come. No other game captures that same disparity between your position at the start and your position towards the end as well, in my opinion.

You start to develop strategies for putting down Abnormalities as they breach containment. You have specific work protocols for high threat levels. You start to realize that maybe intentionally allowing a few to escape for a few minutes actually makes your workflow easier. If a couple clerks or agents die then it’s no big deal. Sometimes that’s even the intent. Now you’re no longer responding, now you’re exploiting. Instead of being held at the whim of a monster that can tear the facility down on its own, you’re stringing it along with a carrot and stick to doing as it pleases until it’s no longer helpful. Instead of preserving the lives of your employees, you overwork or sometimes sacrifice them because it is convenient.

As you continue along the game you begin to form relationships with your colleagues. Some wish for your success, some wish for steady progress, and some have more insidious motives. You get in touch with the company gossip, and you learn the secrets that lie just out of sight. A narrative begins to form of humble days, past mistakes, a disease of the mind.

Sometimes it feels like moving forward with feet held firmly in place. Not to the point of feeling bad about all the employees that die under your watch, but wondering if this was sustainable to begin with. What’s even the point of going through these days until things don’t work out to your favor anymore. But as the weeks pass, something clicks. Not just with you, but with your colleagues. You’re not sure what it is, but you both learn something to keep moving without looking back. The end becomes just a bit clearer each time, and with it a sense of certainty that you’ll make it.

And that’s about all I'm willing to talk about when it comes to the experience as a whole. LoboCorp is a game whose story can only really be told as a game anyways. The plot and story itself accompanies that feeling of accomplishment you get through the gameplay almost perfectly. I get that going artsy fartsy with the review comes off as especially corny, but it felt like the most sincere way I could get across how much I love the experience. By the end when the credits rolled, I didn’t really think about all the frustration and stress that came with certain sections of the game. I just felt happy that I got to play it and something I hope people at least give a fair chance.

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If you like interesting lore, challenging games, creepy cool monster designs, management simulators, or morally gray anime characters that make you wonder if you're being talked down to but with enough plausible deniability to make you ignore it, look no further!

Lobotomy Corporation is an extremely addicting game where you manage the workers at an energy production company. The energy is harvested from monsters called "abnormalities" and you have to make sure you work with them in just the right way or they might eat your workers alive, break loose, or have some other awful effect on your facility. You can restart every work day in case anything goes wrong though, so if something doesn't go according to plan you can have a do over.

The monsters all have unique and really cool designs. Some of the abnormalities are pretty grotesque abominations but there are goofier ones, like some human sized shrimps vibing in their containment cell. They all have a detailed write up about them that you can unlock and read about if you work with them enough. Sometimes it's about how they came to be, sometimes it's a little story about it that happened in the facility, it varies from abnormality to abnormality. There are also monsters you can fight that will spawn in the facility and aren't abnormalities, and those are pretty cool too.

The heads of the different departments in game will give you missions that you don't really have to complete, but if you do rewards you with some of their backstory and some more information about the world. You start to get a better idea of the big picture the more you play, and it makes you want to keep playing to keep learning new information.

This isn't a game for everybody, but if you're okay with a bit of horror and some light gore, and if any of what I said interests you, I'd definitely recommend this.