Lobotomy Corporation: Monster Management Simulation is an indie game whose mere existence is a fucking miracle. It reached 8% of its kickstarter goal, persevered onward, got scammed by people who did their text using google translate, and somehow not only did this game not collapse in on itself but it spawned an entire franchise in its wake of comic books and sequel games. They even have a themed cafe!

In the game you play the role of X, a manager of the titular Lobotomy Corporation, whose job is to research supernatural entities and farm them for energy. You expand your facility, choose what monsters to add to your arsenal, and deal with lockdowns when one of the multiple world-enders under your care inevitably break out of their cages and start wreaking havoc. I think the game is incredibly original, has great story, and is overall 100% worth playing through even if you don’t finish the main campaign. However, it’s also incredibly micro-manage-y, which is a gametype I tend to dislike: there’s like 200 systems going on at the same time which you need to keep constant track of, which appealed to some of my friends, but not to me. I ended up just watching the cutscenes on youtube.

However, one thing I think this game absolutely nailed is its sense of discovery. Every monster you encounter initially is presented as a black box with a number designation and a small quote giving you the creature’s “vibe”, for a lack of a better word.

You place the monster in your care, and you get to see what it actually looks like, but you have no goddamn idea what it does. Is it benevolent? Malicious? Eat people? Turn them into sandpaper? Intently look at them before running away? You don’t know until you act on it. Each monster has its own gameplay mechanics and quirks, and you can only fully discover these through action and experimentation, much like your virtual employees really are doing. The game does allow you to eventually unlock the “true” explanation of what most creatures do, but this initial period of blind discovery, knowing anything might be the correct answer, is really tense and a lot of fun.

The reason I remembered this was because I installed a mod for the card game Balatro today which is based on Lobotomy Corporation, and it’s a lot of fun too! It took the one part I liked about lobcorp and stripped away the rest: it’s just the discovery. Lobcorp’s been added as a mod to many other roguelikes, and in all of them the only aspect that’s truly carried over 1:1 is the method of discovery and research, which I really admire.

The developers of the game had the guts to try a lot of new ideas, and while many of them landed like a bag of wet socks, a lot of others were amazing and helped further their future games’ quality and potential.

Do I have a point to make here? Not really, I just wanted to gush about a quirky indie game I like and a mod I’ve been playing recently, but I do think more devs should learn from how Project Moon handled their game’s discovery aspect. Merely knowing more stuff is out there is nice, but it doesn’t mean much if the moment I find the new things they spill their secrets and I go back to seeing them as a clump of mechanics and numbers. Mystery is fun! Discovery is fun! Let me find out what a new sword does by smacking it against a wall and accidentally blowing myself up in the process!