Hundreds of meters underground, a wet fog fills the halls of an abandoned industrial complex. Switching between several flashlights is useless. The air is so thick that light, directional light is simply scattered and creates a solid white glare wall. I stumble blindly when an amber globe flashes in the distance. Then a second light flickers nearby and a third one flickers. Suddenly ominous clicks are heard all around me.
“Do not move,” says Svante Vinternatt, one of the developers of GTFO, the new multiplayer horror survival game from 10 Chambers Collective. I take my hands off the keyboard. Then the sleeper turns and emerges from the fog.
It looks vaguely human from feet to shoulders, but instead of a head there is a black, gnarled growth that looks like volcanic rock. The amber light comes from within this growth and it changes shape and intensity as the creature trills. His posture looks like it’s yawning.
The sleeper turns and lurches towards me. It stretches back and then strikes with powerful arms. The room fills up with shots. My headphones echo with screams. As soon as the smoke has disappeared, I lie on the ground and look to the side. One of the other developers comes over to revive me. About a dozen sleepers lay dead on the ground, but it took only three to bring me down. It was only thanks to the quick thinking of my teammates that I found it out alive.
So it is to play GTFO, which enters early access on Steam on Monday. It’s one of the most interesting first-person shooters I’ve played in a long time. That’s how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJFD5ud0vG4 [/ embed]
In the fiction of GTFO, players assume the role of prisoners under the watchful eye of a master named Warden. The Overseer sends groups of four prisoners onto a series of consecutively-linked missions called the Rundown, with the goal of locating and extracting valuable artifacts from an abandoned subterranean complex. In the way, these sleepers, a kind of cross between the fungus-infected zombies in The Last of Us and the deadly witches in Left 4 Dead.
As a player, always expect to be numerically superior. The goal is to stay calm for as long as possible to avoid detection as you enter the complex. To help you out, the prisoners gain access to a range of high-tech tools and weapons. For this first mission I chose an almost silent melee weapon, a massive hammer. I also have an assault rifle, a powerful but slow-moving machine gun, and a launcher that emits sticky foam. My other teammates also have a diverse range, including alien-style motion scanners, automatic turret dispensers, and more.
According to Vinternatt, players do not need to unlock these toys over time. GTFO has no reason to talk about it, and weapons and tools are freely available before each mission. The team of 10 Chambers promises a very traditional experience and this ethos will also affect the game’s monetization scheme. GTFO will not have prey boxes, season passes, or subscription fees, and there will not even be weapon modifications unlocked based on any experience points. The opponents are so tough enough and players are encouraged to experiment to find the right combination of tools for each rundown.
From there the players receive a goal. We had the task of finding a numbered item in the inventory of the complex, so Job One determined its location. After the unfortunate incident in which I was almost eviscerated, we quietly cleared some melee weapons before we hit a terminal.
There is a fairly minimalist HUD in GTFO, complemented by live screens on some tools and terminals. Other players can share these screens while looking over their shoulders. Image: 10 Chambers Collective
Items – including health and repair kits, as well as the targets players are looking for – are all indexed in a fictitious operating system in GTFO. Developers have created their own DOS-like command line, forcing you to do simple text-based searches in real time. The correct use of the syntax under attack increases the tension. You can even look over someone’s shoulder and watch as he types commands in the game.
The entire interface reminds me of Duskers, the award-winning 2016 survival game. The lock-picking system works in a similar way. It is a light skill game that is surprisingly difficult to finish as soon as your adrenaline begins to pump.
Another challenge is simply orienting yourself towards the environment. Reading cards plays a major role, and 10 Chambers has built in simple tools that players can use to draw on a shared map. Switching from one numbered chamber to another is fairly easy, but the multi-level route seems to twist and connect in an unusual way. Of course, if you live long enough to reach your destination, you will have to find your way back.
Unlocking doors is the most tense part of any card. Once triggered, doors sound an alarm that will make Sleeper run from anywhere on the map. Players must remain stationary for a biometric scan to take place. In our rundown, however, the scan became faulty and distributed the scan positions to a large space. With the divided party, it was difficult to survive the attack, especially with limited ammunition.
Our only strategy was to position our tools so as to create bottlenecks and overlapping fire fields. At some point, the developers made me use my foam to reinforce a door on our left flank. I add a touch of sticky foam to slow the sleepers as they break through. That should give us enough time to focus on the enemies who are streaming in on our exposed right flank. Meanwhile, an alternate location covered by an automated tower becomes our alamo. Friendly Fire is activated. So if you do not catch your teammates in the crossfire, you’re always ahead of the game.
The developers tell Polygon that they’ve basically built the lighting and volumetric fog system of the game from scratch. Image: 10 Chambers Collective
The team of 10 Chambers promises always new rundowns. The levels are only available for a limited time before being replaced. They can not be returned. So the game will always be different if you come back to it. It will continue to be brutally tough. Developers say that just over 1.2% of the players who tried the first rundown in a recent large alpha test made it alive.
GTFO costs $ 34.99. There is no matchmaking system and no friendly AI. So expect that you need three friends to take on your first mission. 10 Chambers claims to have a Discord server with about 80,000 registered fans.
