At first, the Steam page for REPO was an off-putting sight; the game’s key art has only just recently been updated to move away from a macabre-looking emoji leering at the viewer with gnarled teeth and hollowed-out eyes leaking tears. But it only takes a couple of rounds to understand why this game has taken off with streamers and multiplayer groups. REPO snatches the core concept of Lethal Company, the viral 2024 co-op hit, and then adds a few fun complications. While much of REPO feels familiar, the game feels like proof that even just a few small changes to a great formula can radically change the player experience and create something fun and novel.
Developer Semiwork is a small studio based in Sweden, and the most immediately obvious change was the swap of the iconic workers of Lethal Company with little bean robot guys. This is a massive change to the experience, and it’s hard to explain just how funny it is to perish to some terrible fate, switch into the game’s observer mode, and watch your buddies wobble around with their big googly eyes.
REPO is the Retrieve, Extract, and Profit Operation: A squad of up to six enter a scary location like an abandoned facility or whimsical school for wizards, loot everything they can, and escape with every robot intact. (Death can be reset if a teammate finds your robot’s head and brings it back to an extraction point, which is another nice change.)
As soon as you start a clip compilation or watch a stream of REPO, the appeal of the robots is immediately obvious. Not only are they silly-looking, but they can shrink their chassis down in a comical way to look like a little baby bean.
The gameplay inevitably leads to clips and memes, which inspire original fan-made animations and artwork starring the beloved beans in question.
There are, of course, evil monsters, like Silent Hill-style mannequins who stumble around on spindly, lethal limbs; a horde of giggling gnomes; and a blind man with a shotgun and an itchy trigger finger. But the real threat is my teammates, especially when they’re combined with the game’s physics system. Some loot is small and easy to handle; I toss it in the profit cart and move on. Other pieces are fragile, and even an accidental fumble is enough to shatter it into worthless fragments. Large pieces are the worst, especially in narrow corridors. Every time you bump a grandfather clock or grand piano against a wall, another player, or step, you can see the profit degrade with big numbers on the screen.
This introduces a hilarious tension; some of my favorite moments in the game don’t come from the map’s scary monsters, but the process of getting super-valuable loot back to the extraction zone. I like to sit and watch my teammates slowly try and rotate a bulky instrument, snapping at each other every time it slips into a door frame, everyone doing their best to work in a methodical fashion. Then, the aforementioned gnomes make their way into the loot cart and start smashing things, or a giant, monstrous beast lurches down the hall, and everything descends into chaos.
The monsters in REPO aren’t as immediately lethal as their contemporaries in the genre, but they provide constant pressure and interesting complications. A run could be going great, until a teammate succumbs to a Spewer. These nasty little guys attach themselves to a player’s face, distorting their voice. What’s worse is that they can cause the player to shoot acid streams of vomit. This excretion can be used offensively against other monsters, or it can land on the loot cart, decaying everything within and causing thousands of dollars of property damage. This is pretty bad, especially because the team can’t get back on the ship until they meet their quota.
REPO launched at the end of February, and the game has enjoyed an “overwhelmingly positive” score on Steam, with over 80,000 reviews on record. The game’s top clips on Twitch include streams in many different languages. REPO is still in early access, but Semiwork has shared it’s working on the game’s first content update, and fans are experimenting with mods in the meantime, like a higher player count in lobbies or a selection of funny hats. REPO puts a few delightful spins on a familiar formula, and that has led to it blowing up on streaming platforms and social media this spring.
