Lunch Lady is an adventure video game wherein you must survive the dark hallways of your school while a deadly employee roams about. Developed by Manic Mice, this 3D indie survival horror game features online multiplayer co-op gameplay and scaling difficulty to keep things fresh for you and your friends.

Similar to Slender: The Eight Pages, Lunch Lady has you collecting various pages in order to win the game. However, the frequency of the enemy appearing is mostly based on movement throughout the map—although it’ll get stronger and faster the more pages you have. It’s still a hard game to finish, though.

Is Lunch Lady a scary game?

In Lunch Lady, you play as one of the mischievous students who decide to steal the answer sheets for the coming final exams from your school. Sneaking in at night, you and your friends have to find all 10 pages of it. However, a murderous and grotesque lunch lady is somehow patrolling the darkened halls of the school, as well—and her idea of a punishment isn’t detention at all.

The gameplay allows up to 4 players in online co-op. It has three difficulty levels: Normal, Hard, and Insane—although even at Normal, it’s pretty tricky due to the random spawning of both the collectibles and the Lunch Lady on the map. Not only that but you have to find keys to the various locked doors, too. It doesn’t help that the enemy’s AI can be unpredictable. 

If you get caught by the Lunch Lady, you’ll end up on the ground crawling. You need to use a medkit to heal yourself—that, or use it on your teammates. The game can be pretty tense and scary, especially with the proximity voice chat and atmospheric ambient noise. However, the character models can look pretty wonky and the enemy’s catching range feels unfair.

Another monster to run from

All in all, Lunch Lady is a challenging survival horror game that you can play with your friends. While it looks strange and the AI feels like it’s cheating, the random locations make for a high replay value. It even lets you level up to unlock new playable characters. If you like more games similar to this, you can try out Devour, Phasmophobia, and Labyrinthine.