Barotrauma Is Pure Chaotic Genius - Kotaku Australia

I’m standing in a respawn shuttle with a friend, scurrying over to our submarine as fast as humanly possible.

Thinking they’re just blowing me off — they’re like that — I run around the rescue shuttle, looking for a fire extinguisher.

He’s in a bit of a pickle: some Cthulu-looking asshole is French kissing the hull of the ship with its 4 million pound head, in between bouts of just staring at the ship that is causing all on board to repeatedly vomit so much it’s causing organ damage?

Out now in early access, Barotrauma is principally a co-op survival sim where you play one of several roles on a submarine.

It can be played solo, and there’s some tutorials and campaign missions to get acquainted with the basics.

There’s support for up to 16 players, although some ships are designed for smaller groups, while other giant, hulking masses, might need at least 8 or 12.

These can include things like a Security Officer, who deals with threats internal and external; the Captain, who will generally be responsible for driving the ship; Mechanics and Engineers, who maintain the sub’s nuclear reactor and patch up various systems as they break down; and a Medical Officer who keeps everyone in check.

You can play through a campaign which has the length and structure of something like underwater Dungeons & Dragons.

You can also just play individual missions in multiplayer, and there’s a whole bunch of types that range from scavenging alien runes, pirate hunting, killing alien swarms, escort missions and more.

There’s also a really neat in-game proximity chat system, so you’re only communicating to the person in the same room as you (or the person travelling outside of the sub with you).

The core design of how you move about borrows a lot from games like Terraria, where you’re dragging things to and from your inventory, or holding down both mouse buttons to use a plasma cutter or a welder.

(An extreme example of this chaos is in the handcuffs. Say you’re the security officer and you want to deal with an unruly submariner. You can’t just activate the handcuffs and select the other player: you have to knock them out first, grab their body by pressing G, then drag the handcuffs from your inventory to their inventory.).

And there’s always something to deal with.

It could just be a mission that’s asked you to restart a beacon, but you’ve gone inside the beacon only to realise it’s filled with husk-infected crew members.

You might be attacked by multiple crocodiles who have breached the sub, but you’re furiously dealing with a leak on the other side that’s flooded the reactor room.

You don’t have to play with it if you don’t want to, but there’s an entire traitor mechanic afoot as well.

My party and I haven’t had a huge amount of success with it yet, simply because there’s always been other, bigger priorities.

There’s six traitor missions in total, and they’re designed so that people aren’t encouraged to just straight up troll from the beginning.

But five minutes is a long time between respawns, and then there’s the travel distance between the respawn shuttle and your last position.

So I had no choice but to venture out of the little respawn shuttle where I was, floating around in near pitch black darkness trying to find their location.

I didn’t have access to portable sonar; that wasn’t in the respawn shuttle.

And then the whole screen has a flash: a giant Cthulian jellyfish-type creature just swims by and takes a massive chomp out of my leg.

There’s no way for me to see it coming.

There’s no audio cues right until the moment it happens.