Lobotomy Corporation is the most missable unmissable game on my list.
It’s an absolutely incredible SCP management sim that you approach like a freeform puzzle game, while the game is absolutely trying to ruin your day at every single turn. As such, I would hardly recommend it for someone looking for a casual or even fun experience, but if you’re looking to dive deep into a game that’s equal parts inscrutable and compelling, then Lobotomy Corp is the game for you.
Full disclaimer, I modded my game to heck and back again to make it more playable, so your experiences will vary heavily from mine without a similar modpack.
So, What Makes Lobotomy Coproration Unmissable?
A Game About Suffering
Lobotomy Corporation is a game about suffering, both in its narrative and its design- and Project Moon was masterful at implementing that theme at every turn. Normally in a game like this, you’re meant to cobble together a team of scrappy heroes who can tackle every challenge, either on their own or together as a team.
In Lobotomy Corporation, you throw them in the meat grinder, both on their own and as a team- because somethings simply cannot be handled any other way. And the narrative both acknowledge and encourages it too- telling you that you generate more power when your employees die! It’s like if the leadership in Star Trek actually recognized the staggering casualty rate amongst redshirts by gleefully admitting that problems get solved faster the more bodies they throw at the problem. It’s so cruelly callous, but it’s such a fantastic detail that carries through the whole game.
And you truly have to accept sacrifices to progress through the game. Every new abnormality is a black box at first, and you have to take an entirely uninformed guess at which of the four types of work to use before you can even get started, and half the time it’ll blow up in your face. The consequences for guessing wrong or sustained mismanagement usually either involve an employee instantly dying, the abnormality escaping, or a cascade of failures that can cause one or multiple departments to fall apart entirely- forcing a reset. And even when you know exactly how to manage an abnormality, especially the higher ranked ones, a moment’s distraction or a mere mistake is all the opportunity they need to cause untold havok when you’re usually least prepared to deal with them.
Or heck, some don’t even need an opportunity. They just break out constantly because properly managing them is nearly or outright impossible. Or they’re [Redacted], who gets mad at you and escapes on a schedule unless you dedicate a chunk of your time and attention to specifically appease it.
Sure, the game gives you the ability to reset to the start of the day to redo things with fewer consequences, or to a prior checkpoint to wipe away any undesired abnormalities- but more often than not it’s better to just accept your losses if it means progressing further in your run. A pyrrhic victory is still a victory after all.
Freeform Puzzle Game
Like I said earlier, Lobotomy Corporation is a freeform puzzle game - and it’s one of the game’s best features. Most management sims let you simply outscale your challenges, and while that’s possible here with the right equipment and stats- you’ll get bodied by almost everything if you’re unprepared. And I don’t mean with gear and stats (though they certainly help), I mean with knowledge & understanding, as well as the implementation of both.
It can be as simple as knowing which management styles work best with each of the ~100 or so anomalies, to the finer complexities of wrangling the slime girl without her turning your whole facility to ooze, to when is the best time to throw in the towel because a magical girl keeps breaching and lazering half your facility to death when you’re not looking, to how to keep a mutant baby from causing every anomaly in your facility to escape while dealing with a whole new set of rules brought on by the boss you’re suppressing.
Oh yeah, there are boss fights too- sort of. They rarely exist as something you can outright kill, and more often than not simply take the preset rules you’ve been working with for hours and turning them on their head with some devious twist or reversal. Or simply by taking away your pause button- which is way more challenging than you’d expect. Even the ones you can kill directly are usually accompanied by rules and mechanics that cannot simply be ignored or overcome with sheer might.
The beauty part is that there’s always a workaround though. Either by starting fresh with a facility tailor-made to make a challenge easier, or by exploiting an obscure mechanic to nullify a foe just long enough to snag a win, or by throwing one nugget into a box and letting things descend into absolute chaos until you somehow win. A pyrrhic victory is still a victory after all.
It Only Scratches The Surface
I won’t delve too deep into the story & worldbuilding of Lobotomy Corporation, as they ultimately should be experienced either firsthand, or with a fully detailed retelling. But I cannot make this video without gushing about them all the same.
Lobotomy Corporation is about a brutalistic corporation that’s somehow figured out how to generate power by appeasing a menagerie of horrifying abominations. And rather than leave it there, Project Moon absolutely ran with the concept, fleshing it out both ingame and with multiple sequels and spinoff comics. They could have simply leaned on the novelty of being a SCP management game with the serial numbers filed off, but by fleshing out their own universe with a seemingly endless amount of lore they’ve created something deeply compelling and truly special. It’s the kind of extended universe that big-budget games and movie executives keep trying (and largely failing) to make, without any of the soulless corporate drawbacks… which is amusingly ironic considering Lobotomy Corporation’s subject matter.
The ingame storytelling is primarily told through fairly brief moments of character dialogue between every day, but despite their short nature they’re also deeply compelling portrayals of what it’s like to be stuck in a manmade hell. Each one represents a different perspective and coping mechanism when dealing with the horrors that they experience in the facility. Every cutscene also squeezes in trace amounts of lore, worldbuilding, character details, and vague references that take hours to be fully realized- and it had me absolutely hooked for the duration.
This was all enhanced yet further by countless bits of lore and worldbuilding hidden away in the abnormalities’ stories. Most were simple accounts of how nightmarish each abnormality was, but quite a few would talk at length about the places and people outside the facility. Especially the folklore, which combines elements of Japanese mythology and Grimm fairytales to create something unique but terribly familiar all the same.
If you’re a fan of the Souls series, this kind of storytelling will feel pretty familiar to you. I know the From Software style of lore and worldbuilding has been overused as of late, but I think Lobotomy Corporation and its successors are quite possibly the best implementation of the format I’ve ever seen. It’s imagination fodder, breadcrumb lore, and then fully substantiated storytelling used in equal measure so that no part of the story or world feel lacking.
And the best part is that I’m not done yet! Lobotomy Corporation is a very self-contained story that only barely touches upon what it’s like in the terrifying megacity outside as well as the other equally horrifying megacorporations and quasi-diefic leadership structure that keeps things running, and by most accounts it sounds like Project Moon explores both somewhat thoroughly.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, I’m not sure I’d ever casually recommend Lobotomy Corporation to most players. It’s not the kind of game you go into half-heartedly, and it’s also not the kind of game you can pick up and put down at your leisure. I took a year and a half hiatus and had to start over from the first day just to have a fighting chance, and then after another two month hiatus had to spend an hour reacquainting myself with the games mechanics & abnormality details before I could even attempt to finish day 49. I’m sure other players will have different experiences with their own playthroughs- but as a whole I’d truly recommend fully committing yourself to playing through this game if you do choose to play it.
Also: only use external knowledge bases as an absolute last resort. Lobotomy Corporation’s primary draw is venturing forth into the unknown and making the best of a myriad of bad situations, and spoiling the mechanics is a surefire way to make the game feel like a giant pain that isn’t really worth playing anymore.
There’s a lot more than I could say about Lobotomy Corporation, but ultimately: I didn’t really enjoy playing the game, but I’m paradoxically glad that I did. There’s nothing else even remotely like it on the market, and despite all the suffering, it was an immensely satisfying experience the whole way through.
It’s an absolutely incredible SCP management sim that you approach like a freeform puzzle game, while the game is absolutely trying to ruin your day at every single turn. As such, I would hardly recommend it for someone looking for a casual or even fun experience, but if you’re looking to dive deep into a game that’s equal parts inscrutable and compelling, then Lobotomy Corp is the game for you.
Full disclaimer, I modded my game to heck and back again to make it more playable, so your experiences will vary heavily from mine without a similar modpack.
So, What Makes Lobotomy Coproration Unmissable?
A Game About Suffering
Lobotomy Corporation is a game about suffering, both in its narrative and its design- and Project Moon was masterful at implementing that theme at every turn. Normally in a game like this, you’re meant to cobble together a team of scrappy heroes who can tackle every challenge, either on their own or together as a team.
In Lobotomy Corporation, you throw them in the meat grinder, both on their own and as a team- because somethings simply cannot be handled any other way. And the narrative both acknowledge and encourages it too- telling you that you generate more power when your employees die! It’s like if the leadership in Star Trek actually recognized the staggering casualty rate amongst redshirts by gleefully admitting that problems get solved faster the more bodies they throw at the problem. It’s so cruelly callous, but it’s such a fantastic detail that carries through the whole game.
And you truly have to accept sacrifices to progress through the game. Every new abnormality is a black box at first, and you have to take an entirely uninformed guess at which of the four types of work to use before you can even get started, and half the time it’ll blow up in your face. The consequences for guessing wrong or sustained mismanagement usually either involve an employee instantly dying, the abnormality escaping, or a cascade of failures that can cause one or multiple departments to fall apart entirely- forcing a reset. And even when you know exactly how to manage an abnormality, especially the higher ranked ones, a moment’s distraction or a mere mistake is all the opportunity they need to cause untold havok when you’re usually least prepared to deal with them.
Or heck, some don’t even need an opportunity. They just break out constantly because properly managing them is nearly or outright impossible. Or they’re [Redacted], who gets mad at you and escapes on a schedule unless you dedicate a chunk of your time and attention to specifically appease it.
Sure, the game gives you the ability to reset to the start of the day to redo things with fewer consequences, or to a prior checkpoint to wipe away any undesired abnormalities- but more often than not it’s better to just accept your losses if it means progressing further in your run. A pyrrhic victory is still a victory after all.
Freeform Puzzle Game
Like I said earlier, Lobotomy Corporation is a freeform puzzle game - and it’s one of the game’s best features. Most management sims let you simply outscale your challenges, and while that’s possible here with the right equipment and stats- you’ll get bodied by almost everything if you’re unprepared. And I don’t mean with gear and stats (though they certainly help), I mean with knowledge & understanding, as well as the implementation of both.
It can be as simple as knowing which management styles work best with each of the ~100 or so anomalies, to the finer complexities of wrangling the slime girl without her turning your whole facility to ooze, to when is the best time to throw in the towel because a magical girl keeps breaching and lazering half your facility to death when you’re not looking, to how to keep a mutant baby from causing every anomaly in your facility to escape while dealing with a whole new set of rules brought on by the boss you’re suppressing.
Oh yeah, there are boss fights too- sort of. They rarely exist as something you can outright kill, and more often than not simply take the preset rules you’ve been working with for hours and turning them on their head with some devious twist or reversal. Or simply by taking away your pause button- which is way more challenging than you’d expect. Even the ones you can kill directly are usually accompanied by rules and mechanics that cannot simply be ignored or overcome with sheer might.
The beauty part is that there’s always a workaround though. Either by starting fresh with a facility tailor-made to make a challenge easier, or by exploiting an obscure mechanic to nullify a foe just long enough to snag a win, or by throwing one nugget into a box and letting things descend into absolute chaos until you somehow win. A pyrrhic victory is still a victory after all.
It Only Scratches The Surface
I won’t delve too deep into the story & worldbuilding of Lobotomy Corporation, as they ultimately should be experienced either firsthand, or with a fully detailed retelling. But I cannot make this video without gushing about them all the same.
Lobotomy Corporation is about a brutalistic corporation that’s somehow figured out how to generate power by appeasing a menagerie of horrifying abominations. And rather than leave it there, Project Moon absolutely ran with the concept, fleshing it out both ingame and with multiple sequels and spinoff comics. They could have simply leaned on the novelty of being a SCP management game with the serial numbers filed off, but by fleshing out their own universe with a seemingly endless amount of lore they’ve created something deeply compelling and truly special. It’s the kind of extended universe that big-budget games and movie executives keep trying (and largely failing) to make, without any of the soulless corporate drawbacks… which is amusingly ironic considering Lobotomy Corporation’s subject matter.
The ingame storytelling is primarily told through fairly brief moments of character dialogue between every day, but despite their short nature they’re also deeply compelling portrayals of what it’s like to be stuck in a manmade hell. Each one represents a different perspective and coping mechanism when dealing with the horrors that they experience in the facility. Every cutscene also squeezes in trace amounts of lore, worldbuilding, character details, and vague references that take hours to be fully realized- and it had me absolutely hooked for the duration.
This was all enhanced yet further by countless bits of lore and worldbuilding hidden away in the abnormalities’ stories. Most were simple accounts of how nightmarish each abnormality was, but quite a few would talk at length about the places and people outside the facility. Especially the folklore, which combines elements of Japanese mythology and Grimm fairytales to create something unique but terribly familiar all the same.
If you’re a fan of the Souls series, this kind of storytelling will feel pretty familiar to you. I know the From Software style of lore and worldbuilding has been overused as of late, but I think Lobotomy Corporation and its successors are quite possibly the best implementation of the format I’ve ever seen. It’s imagination fodder, breadcrumb lore, and then fully substantiated storytelling used in equal measure so that no part of the story or world feel lacking.
And the best part is that I’m not done yet! Lobotomy Corporation is a very self-contained story that only barely touches upon what it’s like in the terrifying megacity outside as well as the other equally horrifying megacorporations and quasi-diefic leadership structure that keeps things running, and by most accounts it sounds like Project Moon explores both somewhat thoroughly.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, I’m not sure I’d ever casually recommend Lobotomy Corporation to most players. It’s not the kind of game you go into half-heartedly, and it’s also not the kind of game you can pick up and put down at your leisure. I took a year and a half hiatus and had to start over from the first day just to have a fighting chance, and then after another two month hiatus had to spend an hour reacquainting myself with the games mechanics & abnormality details before I could even attempt to finish day 49. I’m sure other players will have different experiences with their own playthroughs- but as a whole I’d truly recommend fully committing yourself to playing through this game if you do choose to play it.
Also: only use external knowledge bases as an absolute last resort. Lobotomy Corporation’s primary draw is venturing forth into the unknown and making the best of a myriad of bad situations, and spoiling the mechanics is a surefire way to make the game feel like a giant pain that isn’t really worth playing anymore.
There’s a lot more than I could say about Lobotomy Corporation, but ultimately: I didn’t really enjoy playing the game, but I’m paradoxically glad that I did. There’s nothing else even remotely like it on the market, and despite all the suffering, it was an immensely satisfying experience the whole way through.