As a horror fan and someone who plays a lot of video games, I often find myself eagerly delving into various new titles in the genre, searching for clever ideas and unique experiences. One such game that caught my attention was Creature Lab. With its intriguing premise of unleashing monstrous creatures that you’ve frankensteined together in an underground lab on the unsuspecting public, I anticipated an exciting and immersive experience unmatched by anything else on the market right now. However, after giving the game a go, I find myself disappointed.
Creature Lab tasks players with creating their own homebrewed monsters. By combining various chemicals and ingredients in a state-of-the-art lab, you concoct a twisted potion. With terrible mutagens and cruel surgical methods you can turn your steady supply of corpses into horrifying mutant monsters of your own design. Then, in true mad scientist fashion, you unleash these abominations on the public, gathering materials, fighting the police, or simply inciting panic to serve your greater personal goals.
Conceptually, this is amazing. Playing as a mad scientist creating homemade terrors beyond recognition is an exciting and fun fantasy that horror fans like me never really see executed on in games. Monster Lab takes the immersion a step further by having the entire gameplay in the first-person, where you have to manually do everything from mixing potions and chopping up corpses to subduing your mutants in stasis vats.
Despite the game’s interesting premise, Creature Lab quickly falls victim to repetition and boredom. Once the initial excitement of creating creatures subsided, I realized that the core gameplay loop lacked variety and depth, and the initially exciting elements quickly revealed themselves to be nothing more than navigating a series of menus. The tasks and objectives quickly became monotonous, requiring repetitive actions that failed to evolve or present new challenges. My biggest disappointment in the game came from what should have been the most exciting part – unleashing your horrors on the world.
Sending your creatures to attack the public should be the ultimate experience the game has to offer. After carefully crafting your monsters with increasingly complicated bioweapons, your ultimate weapon should be more than a collection of numbers for the computer to simulate. Unfortunately, that’s all they really amount to in Creature Lab’s lackluster missions. After selecting a mission and a monster to send it on, you immediately get transferred to yet another menu that states if your monster succeeded or not, with a few generic reused cutscenes thrown in.
How exciting.
I could excuse the rest of the game for lacking many cutscenes and limited flair visual flair, but the fact that this aspect was, like the rest of the game, nothing more than a series of menu hopping left me sorely disappointed. I can’t imagine a cutscene or minigame involving your monsters attacking the city would have been hard to pull off. This lack of engaging visual storytelling robs players of the satisfaction derived from the fantasy of creating and utilizing their own unique monsters. Players miss out on the opportunity to witness their custom monsters in action, showcasing their abilities, and experiencing the thrill of seeing them interact with the game world. As far as I was concerned, my top-tier monster that I spent hours experimenting to create was about as impactful and interesting as my very first zombie, besides what some random number generators told me.
When a mission is resolved instantly, it eliminates any sense of challenge, anticipation, or strategic decision-making. Players don’t have the opportunity to witness their monsters engaging in battles or overcoming obstacles in real-time, nor do they have the chance to feel like their decisions in planning for missions matter beyond choosing the right numbers to solve an invisible math equation. The lack of gameplay involvement and the absence of any feedback or tangible rewards from a mission’s completion diminish the player’s sense of accomplishment and fulfillment.
The game also contains what many would call a steep learning curve, throwing you into a pretty complex game of pattern discovery after a fairly brief tutorial. While a certain level of complexity can be appealing, the game fails to strike a balance between accessibility and depth, making it frustrating for the player as you fail time and time again to create new concoctions and better mutants. A more gradual introduction to the game’s features, along with clearer explanations and tooltips, would have made the learning process less daunting and more enjoyable. Not only that, but the game puts you on a time limit, with a ticking clock mechanic. While this could be exciting, it kind of just serves to punish you for exploring too much of the game, as spending too much time figuring out fun mutagens will lead to the police kicking your door down.
Creature Lab is nothing if it can’t deliver a satisfying and immersive experience based on its promised premise (try saying that nine times fast.) While a super unique idea, the game failed to hook me and left me feeling disappointed. If anything, this game has inspired the idea of what a great take on this concept might be. Instead of a first-person menu hopper, maybe some kind of RTS or base-building type game, where all of your units are homemade monsters?
The Final Word
Creature Lab, while boasting an interesting premise, ultimately fails to deliver an engaging and captivating experience worthy of the concept. By lacking a visual narrative and eliminating any meaningful player involvement in missions, the game fails to provide the excitement, challenge, and sense of accomplishment that players seek when creating their ultimate bioweapons and sending them into the world. The gameplay is overall way too menu-heavy, and the repetitive and often confusing gameplay isn’t worth how short the game ultimately is.
2
Creature Lab was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Creature Lab is available on Steam.