Turbo Overkill, the previous game from one-person studio Trigger Happy, was a gloriously unsubtle shooter blaring with defiance and energy. But the follow up, Total Chaos, seems to be a very different beast. This is a psychological horror that involves creeping around corridors to find keys to unlock doors, while panicking internally about what’s about to jump out at you next. It has survival gauges to keep an eye on, and there’s a crafting system that lets you pick up wooden sticks and glue hammer heads to them, or make bandages from alcohol and tape you find. This is a game about surviving in an oppressive place, a game of atmosphere and strangeness. On the surface, the two games seem nothing alike.
Yet underneath that you can absolutely feel the similarities. It’s a first-person game and there’s a pace to its movement that feels quietly blistering, even as you’re edging around corridors. You surge forwards with a press of the Dash key, and there’s a snap to thumping things with hammers, or stabbing them frantically with scissors (it’s an eclectic arsenal) that feels exhilarating. There’s also the suggestion of guns later in the demo, and if Turbo Overkill proved anything, it’s that developer Trigger Happy Interactive knows how to make guns. Plus, there’s a bit of madness to it – and it’s in the madness where Total Chaos really starts to stand out.
The set-up here is you’re a person with a boat who sailed into a storm to heed a distress call, only to experience something odd at sea and wake up an amount of time later in a shadowy place called Fort Oasis, a crumbling compound where something untoward seems to have gone on. Heavy steel doors and barred rooms hide letters and journals, which in turn hint towards human experimentation. Clearly nothing good happened here. And then you start to see things.
It’s eerie – a game where the expectation of bad things happening is often more pronounced than the bad things themselves, which I appreciate, though there are fights to be had as well. From what I’ve seen, it’s a mixture of fighting and running away, and there’s good imagination in how the game tries to scare you – it’s never just one thing over and over. There’s space in between heart-thumping moments for environmental puzzles and story, too, as you flick through journals or listen to a BioShock-like voice on the other end of a walkie-talkie.
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While you play, you balance a handful of survival gauges – Health, Stamina, Bleeding, Hunger and Madness – and collect things from the environment that affect them, positively or negatively or both. A tin of beans might help your Hunger and Health, for example, whereas a syringe will help Health but harm Hunger. There’s rotten meat, cigarettes, energy drinks… Working out what to ingest while in the heat of battle is a layer of strategy in itself.
The most interesting one is the medication you collect, which adds to your Madness bar – something that seems not so good at first glance, until you discover that Madness has benefits of its own. Push your Madness gauge up and you’ll begin to see things that weren’t there before, such as alternate pathways through levels that are now traversable. I only glimpsed these twisted and otherworldly tunnels in the demo, but it’s clear that finding and walking them will be a major part of the game later on. What the drawbacks are to embracing this Madness, though, I don’t really know. I can’t imagine they’re anything good.
I am intrigued. Total Chaos feels sharp to play and oozes atmosphere, and its blend of crafting and survival mechanics make me think nostalgically of games like Stalker or DayZ. What shape the final game will take – will it lean more towards being a shooter? – I can’t tell, but I’m eager to find out.
