Review Nobody_Important 4/5 · Mar 8, 2023
Anxiety as a Tycoon game
I heard of this game many years ago, but I never tried it until recently when I saw a sudden explosion of fan art about Project Moon.
Lobotomy Corporation is easily one of the longest and hardest games I have ever played. I am not joking with the title, this game takes an ungodly amount of time to beat due …
I heard of this game many years ago, but I never tried it until recently when I saw a sudden explosion of fan art about Project Moon.
Lobotomy Corporation is easily one of the longest and hardest games I have ever played. I am not joking with the title, this game takes an ungodly amount of time to beat due to how much content it has, even the story summaries are 7 hours long!
The good
The game succeeds masterfully at putting you on edge. You have to be extremely careful with your abnormalities and how to farm them, because sometimes it takes a simple mistake to cause a domino effect that causes you to reset the day. For example… there is an Abnormality that forces you to switch jobs otherwise it will instantly kill the next agent that works on it using Repression, another one can curse your employees and turn your facility into a horror fest, another one can crash your game if you work on it a few times more than you should, and some Abnormalities get angry and escape if you make an agent who is too powerful work on it.
The game has really good music. It can vary from slow simple themes that wouldn’t be out of place in a chill playlist, to very epic boss-like themes, to scary orchestra music.
The game punishes you for overgrinding and undergrinding. Some Abnormalities escape or cause severe side-effects when you send an overpowered or underpowered agent to work on it, some Abnormalities lower their success rates depending on the stats of the agent or lower it after work. You have to keep a batch of overpowered and underpowered agents at all times, otherwise you will be in trouble the instant the high tier or “antigrind” abnormalities show up.
All Abnormalities are varied, distinct and work different one from the other. Some help you fully, others have a catch, others punish you god getting a good or medium result, others have time limits, etc.
No Core Suppression is the same. Some cause work effects to get swapped, others cause your game to be unwatchable, debuff you, others are normal boss fights, etc. The rewards are worthy and you can even cheese them!
The characters are very memorable, they can be funny, tragic and all of them bring a lot of information about the messed up world that is The City.
The missions needed to unlock the good ending are quite doable with the right equipment and right tools. The only one I found hard was Gebura making you suppress five ALEPHs.
The bad
It is extremely easy to make the game unwinnable. If you don’t grind to level 5 early in the game, save Lob Points and don’t get as many Abnormality equipment as possible, you are going to make the game unwinnable the instant the very first Aleph Abnormality shows up, forcing you to reset to the week before or even from day 1. Fortunately, you don’t lose the Abnormality equipment.
Some Abnormalities are just straight up noob traps. The Plague Doctor for example, if you get a good result it will curse one of your agents and if it curses eleven more it will show it’s true form and cause all of them to mutate… congratulations now you have an Aleph tier Abnormality with an army and facility wide attacks; even if you suppress it, those agents are gone, if you rewind the day the curse is still there, you have to rewind to days before… and to make things worse, you need to suppress this thing to get the true ending which requires getting 100% of everything except the backed Abnormalities.
Conclusion
Lobotomy Corporation is the best SCP game.