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Barotrauma is roughly three to seven games in one; what’s remarkable about this is that they’re all enjoyable.
The premise behind Barotrauma is that you are colonists on Europa, living in cracks in the ice above the rocky core and the Abyss – an enormous liquid expanse containing creatures entirely unfriendly to human life. Fifty years ago, contact was lost with Earth so everyone has been pretty much on their own since then. As a submarine crewmember, you’re one of the many drawn towards the core: an unexplained gravity well and treasures from a lost civilization tempt you ever deeper.
At least, that’s the campaign and the first of the three games contained in Barotrauma and about what you’d expect from an SCP aficionado. Time here is spent delivering packages, killing enemies, reactivating beacons, exploring mining claims, and more. What possibly sets Barotrauma apart are the numerous roles you can play on the submarine. The captain, for example, will spend most of their time maneuvering the sub – avoiding obstacles, lining up the guns, and telling the rest of the crew where the newest leak has sprung. Alternatively, you might play as an engineer or mechanic, fixing and rewiring the things that are constantly wearing down and breaking. Or you might play as security personnel, manning the guns or fighting hand-to-hand when Crawlers invade your ship. Almost everyone will end up leaving the relative safety of the submarine to grab alien artifacts that can burst into flames, emit EMPs, or cause you to go crazy. When everyone is almost dead, you’ll probably have to work on something you’re not very good at while the medic tries to keep everyone alive and theoretically not addicted to morphine. All of this can either be done solo (good luck, and you can practically only play as captain this way) or online with strangers (for which you’ll need even better luck) or friends.
Just surviving can prove a challenge most of the time, especially as you encounter more and larger creatures venturing up from the Abyss. But understanding your role on the boat and being able to respond quickly to problems is the key to the second way you might play Barotrauma: as a paranoid crew trying to find a traitor. Admittedly, I’ve actually never played this way, but it is apparently quite popular online. Some members of your crew have a secret mission – to kill someone else on the vessel. Since it’s fairly easy to die in Barotrauma, this is a worrisome proposition. On the other hand, the traitor doesn’t want to die along with the rest of the crew, so they have to be subtle and most of the time want to help the rest of the crew in their goals.
The final “game mode” of Barotrauma is that of ship architect. While you can’t modify your ship during your travels (other than rewiring existing objects) yet, you can design a brand new ship from the ground up or adjust your favorite for convenience. I’d say the built-in ships even encourage this: they are all flawed or lacking in significant ways, so if you want a ship that works the way you think it should you’ll probably have to build it yourself. Though there are no limits to how many guns you can add, decks you can build, or how powerful your reactor is, the game itself does have some natural restricting principles: larger ships will have a tough time navigating small passages, more powerful ships may be difficult to control, more tightly packed items will be difficult to interact with, and you still need to crew all those guns – not to mention an overpowered sub might be fun for you but uninteresting to the people you’ll be playing with.
As a cohesive whole, Barotrauma is a pretty impressive and fun game. Most of the time, your best times will be had with friends (so having one or two people to play with is important), but there’s still plenty of content in the solo and sub builder modes. Failure can happen in a number of fun and interesting ways, so discovering the mechanics together is a blast. When your reactor explodes while changing fuel rods and your sub sinks to the bottom of the crevasse while being attacked by Crawlers, you can still claw your way back, limp back to port, and respawn the engineer that died in the explosion. And that’s pretty great – it’s the multiplayer version of Sunless Sea.
The inspiration for this post was a recent update (“Embrace the Abyss”) that introduced a huge number of quality of life features, rebalanced some aspects of the game (in a good way), and added in a bunch of content. I should mention: Barotrauma is still in Early Access, but I think it’s already a worthy game. Not everything is fantastic – character models have ragdoll physics which can be hilarious at first, but is often frustrating during normal movement. The variety of enemies is low – I think there’s only about 10-15 different types – though they are all dealt with in wildly different ways which may make up for it. Solo play really does limit you to just the captain role since the AI are mostly useless (and you have to reassign their tasks at every loading screen), and you can’t take on multiple missions even if they’re along the same route with similar goals (which kinda undermines the idea of a cargo submarine).
Nevertheless, I still highly recommend it as long as you can find some people to play with. Tier One, and I excitedly look towards their future updates.