It took Me 5 Years to Finish the SCP Management Game Lobotomy Corporation

Reading time: 2 min

I finished the Lobotomy Corporation last week.

It's a game where you manage "abnormalities", monsters or SCPs if you will, and manage threats that occur in your facility.

I started this game in 2019. I finished in 2024.

So difficult.
So unforgiving.
And such a great story. (Also very confusing plot until they re-translated the entire game. The lore is expansive with multiple far more popular games that came after, see Library of Ruina and Limbus Corporation, along with a side story comic.)

An excellent game if you want a challenging real-time 2D management sim with both resource collection and combat.

I give it an arbitrary very high score of Aleph/10, will blow up all my employees and press retry again.

Retrying a day in Lobotomy Corporation is a mechanic built into the gameplay and story of the game.

One of my favourite sayings is "if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again."

And so I'd press retry over and over, every time I suffered major losses in my SCP facility.

The name of my memory repository project stems from this game, which has a retry system where using a multi-day retry is termed “return to the memory repository”.

By the way, a great video about the Lobotomy Corporation experience (minor spoilers):

Lobotomeme Corp 2, by ArcAngela (link to YouTube)

The game is proper hard.

Reminds me of my partner wanting to gift me a 3D puzzle-decoration set.

They said that I’d be the type of person to say:

"If I were to buy a puzzle, I might as well buy the most difficult one to maximise the investment return and enjoyment-time available from the purchase."

So they planned to get me the most difficult version.

Well, guess that explains why I enjoyed Lobotomy Corp.

Retrying is how we learn and improve in many things.

The joy of having a side project and writing… truly is a luxury with such limited time.