{What I Love!}
Hello! I’m Scruffy, and today, I’d like to follow up on a previous video I made
about proximity voice chat in horror games. I mentioned that communicating with friends is one
of the easiest ways to mitigate the horror in media. So some horror games developers,
like those for Phasmophobia and In Silence, use a voice chat with volume based on proximity,
and tamper with the rules of that voice chat during a game session. That both immerses
and sometimes isolates the players, keeping the atmosphere properly spooky and unpredictable. But
what if the point of a game is to be equal parts scary… and funny? How does proximity voice chat,
and the greater approach to sound design, work differently in a horror comedy game? We’ve got
two brilliant examples of this niche game genre to help us explore that today: Lethal Company
and Content Warning. In Lethal Company, a group of hazmat-clad employees delve into procedurally
generated, labyrinthine, abandoned moonbases to collect scrap for a sinisterly opaque “Company,”
while avoiding ubiquitous deadly monsters and hazards. With each mission the Company demands
a higher scrap quota, pushing the team to visit more dangerous moons and command a
tight budget of supplies and tools. But the most powerful tool in your arsenal is your voice,
which you use in Lethal Company very similarly to how you use it in Phasmophobia. You can only hear
other players and they can only hear you across a certain distance, and your volume attenuates
the further you get. It’s also affected by global reverb and diffusion filters, so near the exterior
of a moonbase you’ll hear other players’ voices rebounding off the towering walls, or if you’re a
room or two away from another player, their voice is muffled with a low-pass filter. A walkie-talkie
can bypass these setbacks, especially useful for someone at the hub spaceship’s radar feed
to communicate with an expedition about doors they can open and enemies or scrap nearby… as long as
all parties keep their walkie-talkies powered. And if you perish in any way, you are removed from the
“alive” player proximity voice chat and into a distinct normal voice chat. You can hear the
other players as you spectate them, but only other players who meet their doom can hear you. So far,
that’s all very similar to the proximity voice chat system I explained in Phasmophobia, so
here’s a little more context for this one. Unlike Phasmophobia or In Silence, and likely on account
of the procedural maps and health meterd for each player, there aren’t scripted jumpscares when
you’re caught by a monster. Instead, the monsters of Lethal Company are designed to create… shall we
say, “emergent jumpscares,” where their sudden presence, unnerving appearance and movement,
and especially their deliberately loud sounds create moments of shock just by getting your
attention. Like, take my favorite and least favorite example: the Coil-Head. Its distorted
humanoid form would be enough to put you off appearing in the darkness, but it also runs at
superhuman speeds when it’s not being watched, and it stops so abruptly that its spring neck wobbles
with a very loud, sharp spring release sound. That’s just the sound of some old industrial
spring, that with a sudden change in a creature’s running speed is all you need to scare someone,
whether they expected it or not. The reason I bring this up is that these sounds also fall under
the proximity filter system: you can hear them as far as you can hear player voices, and they
get muffled accordingly across rooms. So while they’re designed to frighten us, they also make
great signals for players who aren’t getting their neck replaced by a metal coil. But has this system
really been designed to facilitate comedy? Aside from a couple scrap items that make silly noises,
like the bulb horn, and some silly decorations you can purchase for the scavenger spaceship,
there are few inherently “funny” sounds in the game. And the sounds attract the attention of
monsters anyway. It’s strikingly similar to most other horror games with proximity chat… so let’s
see if Content Warning does it any differently. Content Warning has you play as these cartoonish
humanoid characters with customizable ASCII glyphs for faces. Cute and simple characters.
You fill the role of content creators, venturing out from a cozy facade of a normal world into “the
Old World,” a dark, cavernous, monochromatic, procedurally generated, labyrinthine complex.
This time you aren’t looking for scrap, you’re looking for the deadly monsters, because filming
them and publishing a video will earn you clout on the game’s fictional video sharing site,
SpookTube. What could go wrong? Well, all the expert content creators know, the best audio
tool at your disposal is once again your voice, and once again, the system works rather like what
we’ve seen. Voice volume is based on distance, and perishing moves your voice to an isolated
voice chat until the end of an expedition. But, here there are no sound filters through walls,
and I think that’s for two reasons. One is that the space here isn’t cramped rooms but yawning
chambers with high ceilings, clearly not designed for our player characters. And two is that you’re
often going to stay together anyway, even if you pick up the reporter-style microphones that
function like Lethal Company’s walkie-talkies. And that’s because there’s an extra VIP member of this
proximity voice chat: the camera used to film the expedition. Like, just take a moment to appreciate
that this object is a separate audio listener from any player, and it records voices, sound effects,
and visuals from its own perspective, and renders them down into a single composition that the game
can not only play back on Spooktube, but save to your real-life computer as a lightweight
video file. All that while up to four players are synchronized in a generated world instance. That’s
impressive stuff. That aside, the stuff this camera is capturing is not directly designed
to make you laugh. The nightmarish monsters in this world don’t offer any silly sounds,
and if any of them catch you, you can’t interact with other players. It’s fascinating to me that
this is just how one would design a serious horror game’s sound and voice chat… so why is
it funny when these games do it? Well, because the comedy comes from something else: a setting
and gameplay that encourage funny interactions on proximity voice chat. Characters in these games
are cartoonishly designed and pushed to fill roles that are obviously dangerous for them:
cogs in a monstrous corporate entity that only communicates to them through automated recordings,
or content creators capitalizing on putting themselves in mortal danger. Both situations are
inherently making fun of the player characters’ circumstances, so players already have material
for something to joke about. Y’know, you could lean right into the role, complaining
about a non-safety-compliant workspace as you’re getting chased by circuit bees in Lethal Company,
or putting on a YouTuber voice to thank and plug a video sponsor as you just barely escape a monster
in Content Warning. The best parodies know to play their parts straight and avoid winking at
the audience, because comedy will emerge from the situations that emerge. So that’s exactly
what the sound design and voice chat in these games do: play it as though it were all horror,
so that you can find the humor in it. Now ther’s laughing at the folly of the characters and their
situation, but there’s also just plain laughing at the folly of your friends. These yawning corridors
with enemies that pop up and give chase mean that you’ll hear your friends screaming often,
and after the fact, it’s funny to reflect on that momentary panic and suspension of disbelief.
Content Warning lets you literally rewatch it from a different perspective, thanks to the camera.
Lethal Company in particular adds an element of potential comedy-by-folly by making friendly fire
possible, accidental or otherwise. Content Warning doesn’t feature physical friendly fire… but
there’s certainly potential “social” friendly fire through the camera-holder subjugating the fear,
or even the demise, of other players, for the content. It’s certainly a comedy that can test
the tensile strength of your friendships, but those person-to-person funny bits are
the parts of these games you’ll remember the most. And it would not function at all without
a horror-grade voice chat, serious unnerving sound design, and most of all multiple players
communicating with each other. Like, try playing either of these games as a single player, no one
to interact with. They become very different games. Not in a bad way, mind you, you just
might not laugh as much. I hope you enjoyed this little analysis of horror comedy games,
and I hope more games of this type come along that experiment with the roles players fill, the ways
they interact, and the dramatic irony that ties the experience together. And as always, I’d like
to thank my patrons on Patreon, who help keep my video making process sustainable. If you'd like to
support my work directly, and get perks like your credit here, seeing videos early, a vote on what
music I arrange, and more behind-the-scenes content, you can visit my Patreon link in
this video's description. And with that, I’m Scruffy, and thank you very much for watching.