Medic Plays SCP: (Not So) Secret Laboratory

I have always loved the whole concept behind the SCP Foundation. The idea of this mysterious Men in Black-like agency, protecting Earth from all sorts of strange things, while hiding dark secrets from the rest of the planet. The Men in Black were always tied to aliens and space. On the other hand, the SCP Foundation covers pretty much anything, from the paranormal to aliens to C’thulu-types to just strange, extraordinary items.

More importantly though, the SCP is mostly made up of community writing. It’s basically an open source government agency. One where pretty much anything and everything can happen.

Of course, some parts of the SCP are more popular than others, and many stories are left unheard of. Or rather, unread. But because the SCP Foundation is made by the community, it’s open to having content made from its many stories. The SCP Foundation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. This basically means people are free to make pretty much anything with it.

SCP: Secret Laboratory is one such creation

Like many games I’ve played lately, SCP: Secret Laboratory is a game picked from boredom. There are three people I play games with in real life and two of them are poor and one of them owns basically nothing on Steam. Three of us are also very fussy, myself included. So it’s a challenge finding games that the four of us can both afford and play together. Outside of Risk of Rain 2.

SCP: Secret Laboratory at least scratched the itch for a little bit. It’s a multiplayer coop game that’s free. It’s also… kinda… weird, yet strangely familiar.

A cross between Cops and Robbers, Murder, TTT and a horror game?

The basic idea is simple: An incident has let loose a bunch of SCP entities, and you must either kill them or escape the facility. There’s actually a lot of factions at play here: starting the game, you have SCPs (played by humans), D-Class test subjects, Scientists and Guards, all trying to escape. The D-Class are basically expendable and start with nothing but have powers in numbers. They can try and befriend a Scientist to help them escape, but most will be killed, by guards or SCPs.

At some point, however, the ‘cops’ appear. But there’s two factions here as well. The Nine-Tailed Foxes (MTF) arrive to contain the situation and help scientists and guards escape. On the other hand, the Chaos Insurgency are here to kill SCPs and save D-Class personnel. Playing as D-Class mostly sucks because you can be easily killed or apprehended, but Scientists and Guards aren’t that much better off. Mostly because the SCPs will murder you with ease if you fuck around. The only real difference is access to tools and guns. Playing as either the MTF or Chaos isn’t a walk in the park either though, because, while you do have guns, you also easily die.

I would discuss playing as SCPs but… I never got the chance to. They… look cool, at least?

There’s a multitude of ways to finish a game. You can nuke the whole site, you can restart generators and lock areas down and you can hunt and kill anyone who opposes you.

Rather rough along the edges.

This all seems very cool but SCP: Secret Laboratory itself is rather basic. The game is made in Unity, by a rather new game developer, and it shows. The controls are basic, the UI is basic and the game’s overall look and style is basic. It’s most noticeable in the design of the maps and the characters. While the models used are good enough, the animations that player models use are very basic and T-Posing is pretty common. However the maps are mostly just dark, rather boring corridors and the maps are basically mazes.

Seriously, I got lost so easily. There’s no map to look at, you just need to learn the map layouts. I think there’s multiple maps, but since everything looks the same, there’s no real way of knowing.

That being said, it does fit the game’s atmosphere, what with it being a, well, secret laboratory. Everything is very basic but it does the job. The music however is actually not bad, considering this game is free.

The only real problem is who you play with.

SCP: Secret Laboratory is a multiplayer game that requires voice chat. There is no text chat at all in this game and you HAVE to communicate if you don’t want to die. So, for a good gaming experience, you NEED to find a server where people speak the same language as you and you need to be willing to talk and play along. Basically, the quality of a game is based on who you play with.

However, somewhat thankfully, most of the servers we played on ended up not being too bad. It’s a lot like finding TTT servers in Garry’s Mod. Most are alright, you just need to find the right one. But the people you meet on these servers WILL vary. Because that’s what people do.

Overall, it’s a bit of fun.

For the grand old price of free, I can’t complain. SCP: Secret Laboratory is a very basic game that’s heavily reliant on the people you play with. But if you’re bored and looking for Garry’s Mod-like games and fun without wanting to download a billion maps and models, then you’ll probably enjoy SCP: Secret Laboratory.