(Photo courtesy of: Steam) “”Content Warning” is the latest installment of Landfall’s April Fools series.”
Duncan Cowie
Connector Editor
The game development team Landfall Games has a long and storied history of making satiric parody games of whatever has been the most recent fad possible utilizing their ragdoll physics engine and goofy-looking characters.
Being the creators of the hit game “Totally Accurate Battle Simulator” (TABS), Landfall is famous for its semi-realistic physics engine and strange-looking character models that ragdoll all over the place, creating funny and memorable moments that carry over into each April Fools “prank” game they make, which often release at zero dollars, and then spend a few months at a higher price before being lowered back down to free.
Starting with a superhot parody in 2016, in 2018 the team hit their first piece of critical success with one of these quick parodies when they took advantage of the battle royale trend at the time, taking obvious inspiration from “Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds” when they made “Totally Accurate Battlegrounds”. This game showed a marked difference from their previous efforts, for although the team made the buggy game in three short months, players ate it up and wanted more content and updates, forcing them to keep updating and debugging for the next few years. Even more effort was starting to be put into their April Fools games.
On April 1, 2024, Landfall released “Content Warning”, their April Fools game for this year, and a blatant parody of the game “Lethal Company”, for free for 24 hours, before setting the price to eight dollars. The game has been an instant success, giving away over 6 million copies in the first day and then selling another 700,000 copies after the price went up. Just the same as the previous years, the character models are funny-looking and get thrown at the lightest touch in a way that is characteristic of Landfall.
The game has you delve down into the depths of an underground factory every day with a camera, a flashlight, and some friends to record “something scary” given to you. With only 90 seconds of film on the camera and monsters that will kill you and your friends, you must make sure to record the most funny and interesting content on the camera to bring back and upload to the game’s fake streaming platform. As you progress through the nights you make money to buy items that can help you live longer but mostly are just there to upgrade your entertainment value, if you don’t get a certain number of views in 3 days, determined by how enjoyable the game finds your footage, you lose and have to restart from day 1.
Currently, there is not too much content in the game, with only a couple of maps that you get sent to and less than twenty total monsters, as well as a lack of real endgame content that you can work towards as the number of views is required stacks up, but Landfall has promised to update with content patches in the future, already sending out multiple bug fix patches in the first couple weeks.
This game can be a blast to play with friends and can create hilarious moments with friends with the implicit goal of having as much fun as possible. It is both surprisingly scary and amazingly funny, but with just how bug-ridden the game is and the lack of long term content, your money on Lethal Company, for only two dollars more, is the better choice.
Overall Grade B-
