Proximity Voice Chat in 'Horror Comedy' Games

I've talked about proximity voice chat's role in horror games before, but what changes about building such a system when a game is trying to be scary and funny? Thankfully we have two brilliant examples of "horror comedy" games, Lethal Company and Content Warning, to help us find out!

{ ? I ♥ }

[saqvobase]

The voice chat being cut off when someone dies is pretty funny

[kuroblakka]

The laser is the funniest thing in CW because you instantly give your last breath the moment you touch it. Not even a visual cue that someone touched it, not even a little "bzzt", just instant death. The first time someone in our group touched a laser and he stopped talking it was the funniest moment we had together in the voice chat, we were crying from laughter

[twosoup]

The first time I ever played content warning, one of my friends’ mics was SUPER loud, so the intro of the video was him screaming gibberish at the camera, followed by him immediately getting taken away by the water creature and going *”OH NOOOO OH NOOOO”* followed by his voice going *”CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME”* somewhere in the distance at a volume so loud it practically echoed throughout the map. 10/10 game

[FlamingSnowflakeProductions]

The idea that the game monsters take their role seriously, while the player characters absolutely do not, kind of reminds me of live actors in Muppet movies- like Michael Cane playing Muppet Christmas Carol’s Scrooge as serious as possible, while his rat employees sing “this is my island in the sun!”
It’s truly spectacular.

[Spicygoats]

One thing I think sets LC appart from Phas is how you manage your own volume. In Phas, keeping your voice down is crucial during a hunt. When you're being chased by the ghost, you are trying your best to panic silently and prioritize a hiding spot to keep both you and your friends safe. Any peep will send an unseen horror straight to your location. But the ghost is slow enough and easy to calculate. With good composure, you could easily lose them.

In LC, the attacks are much more violent and fast (depending on the enemy of course) making you more likely to panic. Let's say you're being chased by a spider, an angry lootbug, or a thumper with no defensive items. Once they are on your tail, keeping quiet won't help you anymore. Combined with the large map and maze layout, you're less concerned with "I need to escape while keeping this thing away from my friends" and more concerned with "Holy crap, can I even recover from this?!" All the while, you're friend is just in the other room hearing monster noises and frantic high pitched screams, totally safe (for now) getting the best audio show of their life.

[superspider]

TheRussianBadger said it best in his video on Lethal Company, the Proximity voice chat takes the game from a flat 2D discord call to a dynamic 3D environment that you genuinely feel like you're inside, especially once it's taken away from you either by your friend suddenly getting snatched away for one reason or another or, as you said, playing it by yourself

[Rasminger]

another thing about lethal company are DOORS into and out of the building. Some of the funniest moments come from people entering a door and immediately disappearing from one side into the other. They‘re carrying all their emotions from whats on the other side and surprise you with it even though you don‘t have an idea why for example they sound so scared and then maybe even looking for yourself and coming back out with a sudden change in voice / expression

[ry]

I think the comedy actually amplifies the horror of these games. One moment you’re joking with your buddies, and the next moment you’re fearing the monster that recently snapped their necks. It really rips you out of the false sense of security you make with your fellow players, creating a more intense horror situation.

Your friends are dead.
It’s Solo Company now.

[alfonshedstrom]

Lethal Company has an incredible mod which lets the masked human enemies be able to copy player voices and removes their mask. You'll still be able to tell that they're fake fairly quickly with the way they ominously move and don't properly respond that gives them just a second or two to approach and kill you. The combination of hearing someone say some nonsense and then the "Wait arent you dead oh shit" realization is absolutely perfect. It makes me wish it was a basegame feature but it alone highlights why proximity chat is so underutilized for social co-op games.

There's another mod which make Brakkens not have a 100% chance to kill you but to instead drag you off into the darkness, so you'll be able to hear you friends voice be dragged away. It's the abrupt chaos this brings compared to the "Oh no I'm alone" that I really like

[TheTweedler]

Another factor may be that when you are in danger in a game like Phasmophobia, you need to be quite and hide. Where as in Lethal it's actually helpful to yell as loud as you can and sprint around when you are in danger to alert teammates that there is a monster in case you die.

[AMan-xztx]

my favorite way to describe these games is that they're emulating the entire experience of not only watching a horror movie but simultaneously being in one too:

-Act 1: everyone is aloof and doesn't take anything seriously (save, perhaps, for a couple of people), with small hints of foreshadowing dotted about, anyone dead is left to watch on as if they're the viewer and not a participant

-Act 2: the monster(s)/horror is revealed and everything slowly devolves, meanwhile your friends that died that round get to watch and laugh as if it were a producer's commentary

-Act 3: the lone survivors are left to finish the job and escape the nightmare, only to have their friends come back (either through death or success) to give a recap and make a plan for the next "film", thus wrapping up the horror comedy experience

[Fab_Cat]

The "Friendly Fire" in Lethal Company is usually lot less friendly for me and my friends, which usually always ends in a test of strength for our friendships lol.

[rbt_]

I’d like to add that phasmophobia also has the same humor/horror

I think it’s just something about the voice chat itself and how we reflect on it later. Like for example when you do something embarrassing in the moment it’s super humiliating but telling the story to people later or reminding them of it usually puts it in a more positive light. But if you have no one to tell it to or laugh about it with it isn’t such a great memory.

[jasonreed]

Horror prox chat is amazing and gives some real gems of emergent experiences.

My favorite is the cutoff, someone is either talking normally or screaming in terror and suddenly goes silent with only 1 implication.

You also get disembodied conversations where you can hear someone but be unable to find them.

Distant panic as you combine these two with you hear someone screaming in terror but otherwise don't know where they are. (Related to just hearing scary monsters like the thumper)

And of course unnerving silence, where you having been able go hear anyone for a long time and you don't know if you are just super lost in the depths of the labyrinth, everyone else left, or if everyone else died.

[lauren-kitsuneroach]

“knee destruction tutorial by scruffy” ROFL

the attention to detail and thoughtful insight in your videos always astounds me. love it

[Quicksilvir]

Content Warning is fascinating because it is a game made clearly in response to Lethal Company that ends up with an entirely different play pattern. Lethal Company is like 1st person Pac-man where your team is trying to collect enough pellets without all getting caught by the ghosts. Content Warning is like removing all the pellets, but giving a graze bonus for getting as close to the ghosts as possible. (Game and Watch Octopus might be a more apt comparison).

One thing I think Lethal Company has that few others do is it limits each players information that captures comedic and dramatic irony in a way usually seen mostly in social deduction games. It makes death spectating much more enjoyable because you now have considerably moreinformation than the people you are spectating.

[wigglaustin]

my favorite part of these systems is how instantaneously Lethal Company puts you into the dead players voice chat. you'd expect there to be a short transition, but without one, death becomes an even more effective punchline: you go from the stress of being chased to immediately hearing your friends laughing at you, and that relief of tension is just inherently funny

[crimsonDestroyer]

When I think of "horror comedy proximity chat", I instantly think of SCP: Secret Laboratory, which has its own unique take on what's been discussed here. I mentioned this in the comments of the last video about a year ago, but I wanted to voice my thoughts in more depth.
Secret Lab isn't EXACTLY a horror game, since (depending on what role you get) you may or may not have weaponry to fight back against the monsters with. However, even the most powerful weapons a single person can carry are only capable of dispatching monsters under incredibly specific circumstances, usually requiring you to keep the monster where you want them to be for an extended period of time (such as waiting out a grenade's fuse, or charging up the powerful MicroHID). However, most of the monsters are more than capable of taking on large groups of people, and a single person is almost never able to deal significant damage to their enemies before being taken down.
The reason I refer to Secret Lab as "horror comedy" is because of what makes it unique:
- Absolutely everyone is a player, including the two heavily-armed opposing task forces, the two groups of (initially) unarmed civilians trapped inside the facility (whom the task forces want to rescue), and the monsters trying to kill all of them.
- The two task forces can take the other team's targets hostage and convert them to their side.
- The mere existence of three warring factions means that sometimes, the best course of action is to work with one of the others against the third.
When you put all of this together, you get a game that simultaneously has incredible potential for bone-chilling horror, high-octane action, and some of the funniest interactions I've seen in a video game.
On the horror end of the spectrum, when you're lost and alone, wandering a section of the facility, it can be nerve-wracking. Several of the monsters have abilities that force you to act in certain ways if you think they could be around, such as avoiding eye contact or trying to remain silent. The latter, especially, can even turn ordinary, large groups of people into silent, white-knuckle horror, especially since the very same monster has an ability that's very similar to what you described as a hypothetical alternate ability for In Silence in the previous video: being able to record the last few seconds of voice chat from a player they've killed, and replay them, either directly, or remotely from a pre-set location.
When it comes to action, you get the few situations where you can genuinely fight back against the monsters. Be it a crowd of armed soldiers gunning down an unearthly abomination and overpowering it through sheer numbers, or a small pack of self-armed players going up against something far more powerful than them and beating the odds, or even a lone hostage figuring out a clever strategy to take down an overwhelming threat, getting to fight back against the horrors and WIN is always exciting.
And then, of course, you have the comedy. Since literally everyone is a player, the kind of "playing off of the other players" comedy inherent in the games discussed in this video is present in almost every interaction. Even when you're going up against an armed soldier trying to blow your head off, or an otherworldly abomination trying to crush you into paste, you know there's a real human behind the screen. You can outplay them. You can outsmart them. You can *reason* with them. And that makes every interaction into a punchline waiting to happen. Maybe you and one of the monsters get stuck going up and down a pair of elevators over and over, as the monster tries to catch you and you refuse to be caught. Maybe one of the monsters makes a stupid mistake, and you get to lock them in a room and take off running. Maybe you convince the monster to spare you. you're able to reason with the opposing faction and let yourself be taken hostage so you can join the winning side. Hell, maybe you even team up with the monsters themselves. One of them is able to convert recently dead human players into additional teammates, and even besides that, sometimes the other faction is too much to handle, and the best move is to call a truce and team up against them. There's something inherently funny about standing around next to a monster that should be trying to kill you, complete with the game playing the constant scare chords that accompany their appearance, and knowing that you can trust them. It's a lot of the same kind of comedy you get from a game like Team Fortress 2, when you encounter a friendly on the opposing team - someone you'd expect to be a threat who instead chooses to be kind. When every single enemy is human, you get that many more opportunities for funny, human interactions. It's a very unique kind of "horror" game, and it's a lot of fun. Secret Lab really is is a great game.

[TheHotDogGuy.]

I love how the intro comes off "scary" then you just get the friendliest "hello :)" to follow up the spooky start

[Manavine]

what I like is, CW is meant to be comedic in design, but Lethal Company was designed to actually be a horror game. It shows because in CW, you might get spooked towards the end if you're alone, but at the end, you'll still do some level of stupid shit because you're still wanting to fuck around and find out. And well, it is technically your fault you're here.

Meanwhile, in LC, you're... *alone*. That roleplaying of the role suddenly flips on its head. No one alive will help, never mind wants to. There's no one to bounce off of, and your mission is a lot harder regardless of where you are.