This is an impossible game for me to rate. On one hand the story is phenomenal and sets up the world Project Moon explores later. The gameplay is addicting and hard to put down and I love reading all the side info about all the abnormalities. But the game designers also wanted so badly for this game to be horrible.The days get so damn long near the end some of the Core Suppression mechanics are for fucking insane people. The amount of content you need to replay is way too much, I think the rouguelite elements actively make the game worse even though it fits so well with the themes of the story. Still it's a one of a kind game and if you wanna check it out I recommend playing the first like 30 days blind and then dling the top 2 pages of mods on Nexus to save yourself some time and sanity.

after completing this game i can finally understand why its so devisive: its grindy,frustrating, unbalanced, and minor mistakes can doom your entire run, making you replay the hole game again just to have a second chance

After saying that, this game is fucking amazing i dont care. even if very flawed the gameplay loop is still really fascinating, even the easiest abno can create an inrreversible domino efect of caos if left alone, there is so many horryfing and creative surprises that each combinations of abnos can bring, and the feeling of pure terror when the third warning starts to play is just unmached.
every single abno is extremely unique and its definitely one of the hightlights of this game, in fact the creativity in this game be it on the story, gameplay, artstyle, etc is amazing, and how each of this elements carefuly complement each other even unintentionally sometimes
speaking of the story, it´s easily one of the best ive seen in gaming, slowly revealing its secrets while playing it is unforgetable, but wont say it further since its best experienced blind

my favorite game currently, i´m extremely hyped for library of ruina now

You. Yes you, the person reading this. Look into my eyes, because I'm speaking directly to you. If you've already beaten LC, congrats! You can skip this paragraph. If you haven't started, consider this a formal warning: don't try to beat this game. If you are anything like me, you will have read what other people have posted, and said "I bet I can handle it". That hubris will destroy you. By all means you should play this, as there really isn't another experience like it. But please take my advice if ever at any point you're starting to have doubts - cheat, watch a playthrough, anything. When the grind sets in, Lobotomy Corp is an agonizing, repetitive experience that I somehow still recommend.

Let's start with the basics - I'm going to split the (non-VN) game into three stages: experimentation, management, and combat. Only one of these stages, experimentation, is interesting. Probing the Anomalies for the best output while making them not slaughter an entire department is fun and rewarding as you can then work with them in safety once you have the knowledge you need.
This lead us to the management stage in which you send an employee to do the work you already know will turn out alright. And then you do it again, and again, ad nauseam until the end of the day. Unless you forget the specific trigger for a given Anomaly, the majority of your days are just going to be repeating the same steps over and over. If you do mess up, the results are usually catastrophic enough to justify restarting the entire day.
When things do get shaken up, we get the combat stage, which is also incredibly tedious. It functions like a 2D RTS, with you selecting individuals or dragging a box for multiple guys before sending them off to fight. There are no control groups, no ways to split your guys between melee and range, and often times health bars will cover each other up. Unless an enemy is weak enough to just throw guys at, the best course of action usually involves some sort of cheese. Combat comes out as a sloppy mess that is unfortunately mandatory to master for completing sidequests for the true ending.

Okay, so the game's not good, but how's the story? The part everyone says the whole is worth it for? Yeah, it's great. I'd even say it's pretty fantastic. Every character and story beat was on point, and it left me wanting more. The Lore, while not expansive, gives you the perfect amount of info that you know what's going on but are still curiously in the dark about the nitty gritty specifics. If Lobotomy Corp was just a visual novel I'd probably give it a 4/5, but I can't do that in good conscience - I'm rating the whole package here. And at the end of the day, I can't even say what the best way to experience Lobotomy Corp even is. I can only hope that, if you are reading this, you don't do what I did. Don't fly too close to the sun.

Initial disclaimer: Project Moon sucks right now, politically. This game came out well before that, but if you were to start it at the time of this writing I'd say piracy wouldn't be immoral.

It is unfortunate that PM has blemished their name, because this game is genuinely incredible. One of the most creative things I have played in years. The main concept is easy to describe; you're managing an (off brand) SCP facility. However, while SCP video games have been made, none have managed to actually provide the feeling of managing a facility full of creatures that range from innocuous to world-ending. This game manages to provide that feeling beautifully.
The gameplay loop is incredible. You start a day by picking out a new abnormality to manage. These can range from docile homebodies that never go outside to things that could single-handedly kill every single person in your facility if it got out. Across all the abnormalities in the game, every single game mechanic is interacted with in at least some way. Some act differently depending on employee stats, some are affected by the amount of real time that has passed, some act differently depending whether or not they're on your screen, etc. Until you reach near ~90% codex completion, I'd say you're on your toes almost every day. Going from Day 1 to 50 in this game is a process of picking your own poisons as the abnormalities you have to deal with get more and more annoying, and the things you need to be aware of each day begin piling up.
I do wish one thing: that the game made it more clear that it is a roguelike. Your chances of reaching Day ~30 on a first playthrough are incredibly slim, let alone Day 50, but when you reset back to Day 1, you keep many of the rewards that you've earned on previous runs, such as monster information and mission completion bonuses. Despite this I feel like a lot of players get turned off after their first run because they don't realize that you are essentially supposed to fail at first.
I know before PM exploded, a lot of PM fans would tell new players to skip this game, or to watch the cutscenes online. I greatly reject this notion, as this game is truly one of a kind and isn't something that should be missed. Additionally, the gameplay and story build on each other beautifully in terms of how you cope with employee death and how painful those multiple resets really become. It is a genuinely beautiful example of gameplay and story integration.

This game is weird, beautiful, clunky, creative, buggy, and so, so ambitious that you can just tell that the team behind it had too much ambition for their skill to have ever kept up with. I love all of it.

Love to see a game that's not afraid to REALLY make you suffer. A true work of ludonarrative excellence (and also just plain narrative excellence). Don't be afraid of the game's purported impossible difficulty, it's not actually that "hard" per se, it's just (deliberately) arbitrary and unfair (the difference being- it doesn't take a lot of skill or a huge brain to beat the game, it just takes the stubbornness to keep retrying). The ultimate goal of the game is to use the meta-progression tools at your disposal to avoid having to deal with the unfair bits.

Seed of Light complete
This game is horrific and beautiful.
It's monstrous and at the same time so human, it's a mirror to the player.
I'm at a loss for words, I love this game
Face your fear, build your future