Lobotomy Corporation

Oh boy, oh boy, I did not know what I was getting into when I decided to start playing Lobotomy Corporation. This is probably one of the most unique games I have ever played, and despite that, it's not a brief experimental experience at all. It can take around 100 hours to beat the game. Sadly, I did not get that far. The game may be unique and interesting, but that doesn't equate to it also being fun to play.

Lobotomy Corporation is a management game heavily inspired by the SCP Foundation. Unlike many SCP-based games, it doesn't actually use any SCPs, but writes their own "Abnormalities". You act as the manager of the research and containment facility, and I believe this position resonates so much more with the feeling of SCP than any first-person action game.
Each day, a new Abnormality is added, and each day, you have to interact with enough Abnormalities to meet your daily quota. The game generally doesn't run on a timer, leaving you as much time as you want to make decisions. Interacting with Abnormalities both fills your daily quota, but also teaches you about them, leading to a better understanding of how to deal with them in the future. Every abnormality is different, and requires a different approach, and possibly differently skilled Agents interacting with it. Some are nearly harmless regardless of what you do. Some are harmless once you know how to handle them. And especially as the game progresses, many are deadly if you don't know how to deal with them, or quite dangerous even after you know exactly what to do. You can't just not interact with the dangerous ones, because after every certain number of interactions, a Meltdown happens, forcing some random abnormalities to be interacted with, lest something bad happens. This really creates interesting decision-making points quite frequently, especially regarding how to approach new Abnormalities.
There are more aspects of the game, like Abnormalities escaping, training characters, harvesting equipment from the Abnormalities, and specializing your Agents to be able to deal with certain types of Abnormalities. I think the greatest strength of the game lies in how varied each new Abnormality is, and how it forces you to evolve your playstyle as the game progresses. While I would love to detail them, I wouldn't want to rob anyone of the joy of experiencing these unique mechanics themselves for the first time. I will say that they can mess with things like your save file, your time controls, depend on your camera, and more.

Now, for some of the more negative things. I think the weakest point is the lack of polish put into the game. A management game needs to give you tools to do your managing. Yet the UI and the layout makes it quite difficult to actually get a good overview of what's going on in the facility. It can be difficult to select individual characters, check their current health and sanity, or to order them around. It can also be difficult to figure out what areas currently need tending to. Many UI interactions are unclear or unpleasant to perform. This game is all about information, with knowledge being the most powerful thing, and yet it's made unnecessarily difficult to know things that we can know.
There is also a clear problem of repetition, and optimal playstyles not being fun. For example, the first weeks, the Abnormalities are quite simple to handle. There is no inherent limit to how long I can farm my Agents' stats on them, but it's a very slow process. It would be very helpful to have several maxed out agents for use later on, but it's no fun. Later on, restarting days or rewinding to an earlier day becomes a near-mandatory (and expected) thing to do, but I also find this to be poor design. I would rather my mistakes and losses be not so great I couldn't recover from them, and be forced to live through them, than to rewind and do everything again so they never happened.

In other aspects... There isn't a lot of variety in the music and sound effects, and that can get annoying after playing for dozens of hours. The art is amateurish, but visually coherent, and rather charming, so I've no compaints there.
There is also an overarching storyline and mystery that's revealed bit by bit as you complete each day. Each department's head also has their own story as you complete their questline. I didn't really see any of these to their conclusion nor to any satisfying point, but they were interesting enough to read.

Overall, an amazing idea for a game, with a lot of work put into it, and a lot of content, but really held back by the lack of polish. If you're someone who enjoys management games, enjoys SCPs and wants the most authentic experience of what it would be like to deal with them, and enjoys bashing their head against the wall, then this could actually be an amazing game for you. Personally, while I enjoy the lore aspect immensely, I'm lukewarm on management games, and the badly designed interface along with the persistant restarts I had to do killed it for me. I would love to play this exact game if it was made better, and I would still recommend trying it to see if you can handle the listed faults or not. I quit after I was no longer enjoying it, but I have no regrets playing as far as I did. So ultimately, a partial recommendation.