Move over Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. is the new king of multiplayer horror

Team-based horror games have really come into their own over the last few years. The likes of Phasmophobia and Lethal Company have set new standards for multiplayer survival tactics. But now R.E.P.O. is set to become the new darling of the genre (if it isn’t already).

At the time of writing, the game has claimed the number two spot on Steam’s Top Sellers list. Given that the Steam Deck at number one is pretty much always number one – and is a piece of hardware anyway – that basically means R.E.P.O. is the top-selling game on the platform, ahead of Counter-Strike 2, Split Fiction, and Baldur’s Gate 3.

On top of that, the third-party website SteamDB has recorded a peak concurrent player record of 230,645, achieved within the last 24 hours. To put that into perspective, Content Warning – a similar game with a focus on team survival horror – had an all-time peak of 204,439 players.

So what is R.E.P.O.?

If you haven’t played it yet, now might be a good time to give it a go. In a nutshell, R.E.P.O. is an online multiplayer game that tasks players with working together in horror environments to achieve goals; in this case, retrieving valuables.

Visually, it looks kind of goofy, with oodles of humor thrown into the mix as players collaborate using the game’s physics, all while avoiding the spooks that await. To that end, it’s kind of similar to Lethal Company, which was also the talk of the indie horror community for a while.

In fact, the developer of Lethal Company has recently played R.E.P.O., referring to it as fun. Their experience of working in a group of other players to “move a grand piano through a cramped old mansion without scraping it” is the “most funny objective for a horror game,” apparently.

It will be interesting to see how much longevity R.E.P.O. has. Typically, these types of games often enjoy brief but lucrative stints in the limelight before fading out, which is unfortunate. Developer semiwork is said to be working on an update. It’s also worth noting that the game is in early access, so it’s pretty cheap at the moment.