Lethal Company is a hard act to follow. A multiplayer hit so singular that it defined a whole subgenre of chaotic multiplayer survival job simulators, with REPO being the biggest recently. So what’s solo creator Zeekerss doing next? Clearly not letting the fame and money go to his head. He’s returning to finish an old project—Welcome To The Dark Place—a free text-based horror adventure due for release this October.
We reached out to the developer to see if he was willing to share any secrets or reveals about the game, but didn’t hear anything back, so all we have to go on is what’s available to the public. So, in short, it’s a horror choose-your-own-adventure experience. One that has been brewing for a long time, although slowed by writer’s block, according to a Bluesky post from last year.
Is there a Welcome To The Dark Place release date?
There’s no firm release date yet for Welcome To The Dark Place, beyond the loose ‘October’ listed on the game’s store page. Most likely, expect it sometime around Halloween, although given how long in development and already-delayed this game has been, that could easily slip further.
Welcome To The Dark Place might be the Lethal Company developer’s longest project. There’s some early alpha gameplay footage lurking around in the dark corners of the developer’s YouTube channel from way back in 2019, giving us a glimpse at an early, entirely text-based version of the game.
Welcome To The Dark Place trailers
Watch On
Judging by the gameplay footage (including the older 2019 alpha clips), Welcome To The Dark Place is a purely single-player experience. A stark choose-your-own-adventure style game of multiple dialogue choices in white against a stark black background, accompanied by unsettling music, sound effects and possibly the occasional low-fi cutscene.
Welcome To The Dark Place setting and features
What’s the setting for Welcome To The Dark Place?
As for its setting, it seems to be a contemporary, if twisted Earth, but with strange technology. The early gameplay clips show the player experimenting with a strange flying mechanical dragon, and mention of a potentially threatening phenomenon known only as The Cloud. Sounds like there’s plenty of mysteries to be unraveled here.
There’s nothing to suggest this will be tied into the world of Lethal Company or any of his older games, although the worlds he tends to create are fragmented and nebulous enough to be a bit frayed at the edges, operating mostly on dream (or nightmare) logic. This also probably means it won’t be shying away from intense situations, as the content description features mention of suicide, self-harm, deaths and ‘grotesque situations’.
It should also be noted that Lethal Company didn’t come out of nowhere. Zeekerss has been making games (and primarily horror ones at that) since he was nine years old. Starting out with making SCP-inspired adventures for Roblox, before graduating to native PC releases as a teenager. Before Lethal Company, he released three games, all of which are genuinely worth checking out. Each feels like part of the puzzle that is Lethal Company, and might provide some clue as to how Welcome To The Dark Place will feel, look and sound:
It Steals (2020) is a tense, panicky maze horror game where each stage is patrolled by a different monster. Simple conceptually, but each enemy has enough quirks to its behavior (echoing the later Lethal Company) to make each segment a really distinct challenge. Dead Seater (2021) is a free, more traditional survival horror adventure, minus the opportunity to fight back. Once a monster becomes aware of your presence in this warren of claustrophobic corridors (made all the more suffocating with fixed camera angles), running is all you can do.
But before Lethal Company, there was The Upturned (2023), a great little horror-comedy adventure about a lost soul trying to find their hotel room in the afterlife through a series of sometimes scary (and frequently slapstick) misadventures via a malfunctioning elevator into the beyond. While this is a solely single-player experience, Lethal Company’s slapstick roots clearly originate here.
So what does this all tell us? Well, Zeekerss is a one-man horror band with a penchant for situations that start out quiet, slowly build up tension and then release everything in a truly frenzied burst of energy. Whether we’ll see that echoed in the game’s prose and decisions is yet to be seen, although I’m expecting some strange vibes, given that the author himself feels like the game’s ambient soundscapes hit the same notes as Sufjan Stevens’ famously dour album Carrie And Lowell.
Lastly, on a personal note, I’m happy to see a small developer hit it big, only to act like it’s no big deal and continue treating the medium as a personal creative outlet. While I’d love to have seen what a professional team under his leadership could do, I’ve got huge respect for this move, and can’t wait to see what the Dark Place holds for us in Skeleton Appreciation Month.
Read the full article here
