scooby gang

17 Nov, 2025

Despite dabbling in the video game world throughout my childhood, I have never been what anyone might call an incredible gamer. Boss fights and first person shooter-style games have remained largely outside of my realm of interest. Though I've tested the waters a few times, I've always stayed happily in my personal gaming wheelhouse, which is geared more towards solo-adventure-type games where I can build stories in-world or just spin narrative webs within my mind about the gameplay.

However, when my brother Badger¹ moved, Trout kept pushing the idea that I should build a PC to start playing co-op games with them. My brothers are much more tech savvy than I am, so I let Trout take the lead on pulling together the necessary parts², then let Badger & Trout walk me through the mechanics of the games they were suggesting. At this point, I've been playing games with my brothers for around two years, and while I still haven't quite managed to break into the games that require dropping into a random lobby with strangers, game nights with a group of friends is one of my very favorite ways to spend a evening. We play what Trout affectionately calls "friend-slop", which I have taken to mean: games that aren't too heavy story- or skill-wise and are just kind of fun to play with friends. Tired as anything after a long day at work, I am grateful to have a few social hours where I can play something with the people I love without it taking up so much brain power that I shut down immediately. It also makes it much more approachable for our friends that we're trying to psst psst psst into joining us in game nights, since most of the games are easy to learn.

While I love Escape the Backrooms, Content Warning, RV There Yet, Webfishing and the like, I confess that at the end of the day, my game of choice is always Lethal Company. We added fun mods early on in our gameplay, and even after almost two years of it being our go-to pick, it hasn't lost its shine. I have so many clips saved of us laughing so hard we can't breathe over this game. I really cannot emphasize the way that it manages to create the most incredible comedic horror.

Last week, we played a few rounds with the usual crew (Badger, Trout, Fawn, Valerie, and me), plus one of Trout's new friends.

(Wait, pause. Two quick asides to provide some necessary context:

(1) Recently, I was able to access better internet again, but there were about eight months where I had been out of commission for gaming (and apparently Lethal isn't as fun to play without me, according to my friends³, so they also took an extended break), so we came back to find that a lot of our favorite mods were outdated. Alas, what can you do?⁴ We launched up with a new mod to see if it might correct the issue but didn't see any change. Alright, that's fine, too. We kept playing with what we had loaded and just hoped in the back of our minds that maaaaaaybe, despite being out-of-date, the mods somehow might work again.

(2) If you've ever played Lethal, you are very likely already aware of the Masked. If you are unfamiliar with the game mechanics, the Masked is a monster that spawns on some maps⁵. In its vanilla/unmodded form, it looks like another player wearing a white Tragedy/Comedy-style mask on its face. With the mod that we run, it suits up to look exactly like another player (meaning, it borrows any cosmetics the player is wearing), and it can even mimic voice clips from earlier in the game. Another mod that we frequently utilize creates fake Fire Escapes (these are alternate exit doors within the map) that will kill your character if you walk through them without checking first.

Okay, asides concluded.)

Anyway, we'd run several games over the last few weeks and hadn't encountered any Masked coworkers in any of the maps. The mod we'd originally used increased the spawn-rate of Masked coworkers, so we would see them pretty frequently. Were we a little disappointed that it wasn’t working anymore? Of course! We have had some incredibly funny moments crop up from the Modded Masks, so we were certainly missing them, but we honestly have so much fun regardless, that we figured it was fine if we just ran into the vanilla Masks every so often. A sigh and a shrug and we move on.

Meanwhile, during one of the earlier games we played upon our glorious return, I had been very much convinced that the fake Fire Escape mod was out of comission, as well. For the first few games, I'd avoided going through any of the doors out of old habit. When the mod was running we'd learned to go by the rule of No shovel to check the integrity? Find another way out. I almost never carry the shovel (I've only managed to win in a shovel fight against a monster twice in all the time we've played, so I generally leave them for my more combat-ready friends), therefore I rarely try the Fire Escapes. Still, at some point I found myself very, very alone and lost in the hallways of a map with a monster a few corridors back. Serendipitously, I stumbled upon an exit. I thought, The chances that this mod is dead are pretty high, and I'm not going to be able to retrace my steps... (cue monster noises from down the hallway) Okay, I'll risk it! Wahoo, the door was real! Hm, I thought as I ran for my silly little video-game life, I guess the mod really is broken.

Fast forward to an hour and a half later. I had, at that point, successfully charged through upwards of five Fire Escapes without an ounce of fear or a teaspoon of consequence. Fawn had been with me on two runs, and I'd vehemently insisted, "The mod is definitely broken. I've gone out of every exit door I've seen and been fine!" When tested, my story held true. We made it out on both of those maps. And yet, in my hour of need (when my brother was arguing with me - UGH!) my luck ran out. Trout, Fawn, and I ended up stuck in the depths of a map again. When that beautiful red Fire Escape light appeared in the darkness, I darted forward immediately.

Trout said,"I don't have the shovel; I can't check it."
I told him, "It's not even working, dude.”
He said, "I saw it load on the run page when the game booted up!"
I rolled my eyes. "I've walked out of five of them with no issue! Just c'mon!"

Reader, you can probably imagine what happened next. I walked directly into the maw of the door-mod and died. I wish, at least, that Trout hadn't been there, because Fawn would have maybe just let me walk off the encounter with dignity...but my brother? Oh, nooooo. It was an immediate, very cheeky and exasperated sigh and a lot of, What did I tell you, Eve? I told you the mod was running! No respect at all for my bravery and self-sacrifice...(I jest.)

Maybe you're thinking, Hey, what the hell does this have to do with all of that stuff you were setting up earlier? Um, everything! Because the comedic timing of our final run the other night was the stuff that narrative dreams are made of. Also, now is the time where I have to give a nod to Valerie, who is a newer player, but pretty much the unheard prophet of our horror game nights. Every time she says, Hey, guys...I think maybe XYZ thing is happening / about to happen.... and we say, Nah, I think it's okay, Val! Don't worry about it! that thing appears in the final hour and absolutely wrecks our shit.

So: that night, we introduced ourselves to Trout's friend and showed him around the ropes of the game for a bit. As we played, we gave him the run-down of the different monsters and explained some of our favorite mods. We lamented the lack of Modded Masks to him, to which Valerie chimed in, "I swore I saw one the other day!" Fawn and I tried to ask her if she saw the regular one, with the white mask on. She said she didn't think so, but since she didn't have anything to compare it to, she wasn't sure.

The monsters seemed a little slower to spawn than usual and it was getting late in the real world, so we tried to get everything together for one final run on one of our favorite maps. The sticking point is that, to get to this particular map, you have to accrue enough money from your previous in-game loot hauls to ‘purchase’ access. One of us (cough Trout cough) lost us just enough money that we were 6 credits short of being able to hit that map. We all shuffled our feet a minute, disappointed, but decided to swing one more run on a basic map (March, for those of you that play) before calling it a night.

The run started out pretty normal. I was first one to die, and therefore the only one in the Spectator Lobby (where everyone who has died can jump between the POV of the living players and chat/talk shit). In a gorgeous turn of events, the rest of them stuck pretty closely together and so the sequence of events that followed was relatively easy for me to track. It went like this: pursued by a monster within the halls of the interior map, the group tried desperately to re-trace their steps back to the main entrance. Instead, to the melodious tune of Fawn verbally keysmashing with fear after almost running directly into a monster, they came upon a Fire Escape, which Fawn immediately barreled out of. Lucky for her, it was real. I was following Trout's point of view; as the last one out the door, he emerged to Fawn whispering a frantic, "It's bad out here, it's really bad out here!"

One of the monsters on the outer map pinged expeditiously on them and so everyone, excluding Badger, darted back inside to try to regroup. Badger made a run for it. A second later, Valerie appeared in the Spectator Lobby with me. Apparently she had turned back to the exit at the wrong moment and been grabbed by the monster outside. There was a long pause as Fawn, Trout, and friend waited for her to pop back in, before Fawn said, sorrowfully, "I think Valerie has been eaten..." (Correct!) Cue, seconds later, the very loud sound of the monster that has been chasing them inside earlier. Fawn shrieked, dropped all of her loot, and bolted back outside. It was actually very impressive. She booked it past the creature lurking near the exit, absolutely hauled ass across the map, found Badger, ran right past him (repeating to herself, "It's over! It's so over! Badger, it's soooooo over!"), and walked directly into the jaws of a monster lurking over the hill. Badger cracked up, caught the attention of the monster, and therefore was eaten about ten seconds later.

Still inside building, Trout and his friend engaged in a lightning round of strategization (by which I mean they panicked aloud to each other for sixty seconds straight). Trout told the guy, "Okay, we're going to drop our heaviest items and just try to make a run for it. Ready? I'll go first." Trout exited the door to scout ahead. As his friend stepped forward to leave, he stopped to pick up a piece of loot Fawn had dropped and was ambushed by one of the faster monsters of the evening, which caught him before he was even aware it was happening. The guy popped into the Spectator Lobby to the rest of us losing our minds over Trout's bewildered, "Dude?" when he turned around and found that no one had followed him out. Trout went back into the building to check what was up. In the Lobby, the peanut gallery was laughing so hard we were crying as he spun around inside, repeating, "Where did he go?! Hello, where did you go?!"

He realized pretty quickly that, unless Badger or Fawn had made it to the ship without his knowledge, he was likely our Horror Movie Final Girl of the hour. I always feel a little bad for the person who gets stuck as the last surviving player. Not only is there the pressure to make it back to the ship unscathed, but you have the awareness that the Lobby is in full-force popcorn commentary mode and you can't even hear what they might be saying. He cut an abnormal path back to the ship, trying to avoid the threats he was aware of. In the Lobby, the overlapping chatter continued: did we think he would run into the monster that got Badger and Fawn, or the one that got Val? The countdown to the run timing out was coming up, too. He was taking the long way around; he might not make it back before midnight.

As Trout crept along in the darkness, we heard him call out, "Hello? Are you alive?" Among all the chaos, there was a beat before Fawn quieted everyone down with a "Wait, who the hell is he talking to?" From the fog, a figure emerged, coming closer. In the Lobby, a baffled chorus of "Badger???" went up. Badger, in the Lobby, said, "Wait, what?" and then, as Trout started to say, "Dude, I thought you were dead!!!" the Perfectly Functioning Modded Masked Coworker!Badger grabbed him by the arms and Got Him.

A second of shocked silence from everyone and then we EXPLODED into noise.

Trout: That was CRAZY!
Badger: [stunned silence]
Eve: You're joking, you're joking!
Valerie: Wait, wait, wait! I told you guys I'd seen one!
Fawn: [in tears] Val is always, always right.

It was - in the real world - midnight, and the majority of us had to be up for our 9-to-5 jobs in the morning. And yet, after that climatic end, we stayed awake for another thirty minutes clipping our favorite moments into the Discord chat. Finishing this post several days later, I still break into laughter thinking about it. It was five minutes of perfect chaos, and so hilariously done. I'm not sure I've transcribed it in a way that fully captures it, but I hope I did it at least a little justice. I guess, more than anything, I find it funny and wonderful, because it's the people I really love all having a really great time together. What more could I really ask for?

Good luck out there,
Eve

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#honeybears #personal #ramblings #reveries