Creating a game that completely changes the way players approach a situation that is put in front of them is something that isn’t easy to do, let alone to pull it off in an entertaining way. Yet the team over at 10 Chambers has done so as they put players in a nightmarish zone full of monsters, provided weapons and gear to face the creatures, and a mission objective to have players complete - all of which players have been through in other titles. In GTFO, moving quickly is a great way to get you and your team killed but hanging out isn’t something you want to find yourself doing either. Who would have thought that moving slow and steady through an unknown hellscape to complete obscure objectives would end up being so much fun?

Story

While there is definitely some lore behind this game, it is pretty well hidden, and figuring it out is part of the fun of the game. For the most part, it is known that we play as a group of prisoners to a mysterious person only known as ‘The Warden’ and they are the ones sending us into the pit to complete objectives for them. The main quest line takes you through a few missions that have the players collect the Matter Wave Projector and bring it to a machine that takes players to an ultimate boss fight against a creature that can only properly be described as a giant rock squid.

You can figure out more information about the story by reading logs on the terminals, completing the secondary missions, and through the few voiced moments at the end of the key levels. For all the guesswork behind what is really going on and the details to the lore, I’ll leave that to the player’s imagination and lore-hunting YouTubers out there.

Gameplay

This game presents new levels, chapters, and details in the form of ‘Rundown’ updates rather than the usual approach of having Seasons like most games. The reason they do this is that the Rundown presents your main objective levels and your side objective levels. Main objective levels are highlighted in yellow while the rest are all white. As you complete main objective levels, you will unlock more and more levels, all of which is shown to you as you look over the level chart on the Rundown map.

Each new level is presented as A-D where D is the deepest level into the pit of whatever messed up land we are in the dark pits of. As you descend further into this pit, you will come across new creatures. To be prepared for the deepest pit of the game, you will want to quickly learn all your weapon and tool options so you know what works best for you. Coordinating with your team to have the proper equipment all around is helpful as well.

Your equipment includes a range of guns to choose from, a range of secondary (or Special) guns to choose from, a tool, and a melee weapon. While everybody is akin to having their own preferences, I found myself pairing the Burst Assault and Shotgun together for myself but saw plenty of players mixing the Pistol and Scattershot or even the doubled-up style of Assault Rifle and Machine Gun. The main thing is to make sure you don’t run out of ammo with your weapon mix. For tools, you have a Bio Tracker to scan for enemies through walls, a C-Foam gun that will let you block off a door or set a trap on the floor, a Mine Deployer, and multiple Turret styles to choose from. While it depends on which level you are going into what you should use, I would suggest a base of two Turrets, a Mine Deployer, and a C-Foam gun as a solid team setup into the unknown. Lastly, your melee weapon which provides four options for the different play styles out there. I personally like the Hammer (or Noggin Knocker as I call it), but have seen that the Dagger can be pretty powerful when well utilized.

Keep in mind, simple things can trigger the enemies to know you are there. Shining your flashlight on them, moving anywhere nearby while they are glowing, or, even worse, heart beating, and melee killing another enemy too close to them. Those are easy examples of ways to get caught while going for the stealth kills.

Every layer will have the same base creatures, however, and these include the sleepers, aka shooters and crawlers, the big boys, the snitches, and the hybrids. Sleepers can be taken out silently with a charged melee attack and so you will often come across multiples of them which a well-executed team assault can take care of a room without alerting it. The same can be said about the Snitch, but if you even slightly miss its head it will literally alert a whole wave of enemies. Then there are the Big Boys who will need the whole 4-man squad to team up and do a charged melee attack simultaneously to take out without alerting the room. I have never successfully killed a hybrid with a melee attack, including the Big Boy tactic, so just them if possible.

As for the enemies that show up later on in the game, I think I’ll let you meet them yourself and figure them out on your own. The only hint I’ll give you is “look up” and “shoot the back.”

While the levels are always the same layout when you do them, the location of items and enemies will be random every time. This makes exploration always fun and a bit challenging. Just make sure you check to see if a room is a regeneration room or not before clearing it because it might be a waste of ammo and health.

The items that can be found in a level include ammo packs, health packs, tool refills, glow sticks, long-range flashlight, fog repellers, disinfectants, and artifacts. Each item has its own use and is fairly obvious what, so make sure you see which team member needs items most before using them. As for artifacts, these items build up as team members find them and they will give a random boost to each player at the end of the level. Granted, you have to find enough to have the value of each given artifact type to be over 1.0 to get one, 2.0 to get two, and so on, so don’t expect a booster just because an artifact or two was found.

Last thing to go over is the terminals. These can be pretty confusing at first but they are easy to figure out. The first time you use one, enter the word “Commands” and you will be shown a list of what is available to use the terminal for. Most of the time it is used to locate key items with the “Query” command or you can use it to find resource items with the “List” command and it tells you what zone the terminal is currently in. So, for instance, if you have to find a terminal to locate Black_Key_748, you would enter “Query Black_Key_748” and it will tell you where it is. From there you can see the terminal is in Zone_98 so you can check what items are nearby with “List Zone_98.” From there, you can use the Ping command with the different available items to make it easy for your team to find everything. And yes, the underscores are important when shown.

Audio and Visuals

A lot of this game is played in complete silence, without music, and even in the dark. This makes it so you have to listen to sound effects that give off the location of your enemies or to let you know if you are free to roam around. All of your weapons have their own flashlights to use, so you are only in the dark as long as your flashlight is off. Given that this game is meant to be a nightmare mission in the dark, this is a very suitable setup for the game.

When you do end up in combat, regardless if it is because you got caught by an enemy or are at a key point of the level, you will have plenty of music and loud sounds around you to fill up the energy of the action sequence.

Replayability

Thanks to this game being full of Random Number Generations (RNG), there is plenty of replayability to the game. While the only thing you will gain from completing levels is more boosters to use in future missions and new cosmetics which are provided at random, the game itself is fun to play through. Once you find your favorite missions, you can replay them any time with different players and squads, and with the level having enemies and items in different places all of the time, you will only somewhat know what to expect.

Also, because of the way difficulty works in this game, there is replayability here as well. Instead of just picking a difficulty before beginning, levels will offer different difficulty options in the middle of them. The game plays at the same difficulty regardless, as far as how hard it is to kill each creature and complete missions, but in the middle of most levels, there will be a moment to choose an easy or hard path to complete it. These paths change the way the rest of the level will play out, how difficult the enemy waves will be, and show you to a different section of the map.

What Could Be Better

My only complaint is with the servers. Despite being in early access for so long and having a consistently large player base, this game is still showing a lot of bad server issues. I have had full game sessions lost because a door wouldn’t open for me while it opened for everybody else, meaning that I dropped the connection to the server but not the game. The worst case of this was in the literal last level of the game where my squad and I successfully defeated the final boss, but the server must have dropped in the middle of the fight because none of us were able to leave the fight zone and were soft locked to stay in the area. There was no way to move forward and we weren’t awarded the level completion - I had to do this level again with a different squad. Mind you, these levels take anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours, depending on the squad’s skill level and speed.

Verdict

GTFO is a unique co-op gem! This game plays so well when it comes to fluid gameplay between stealth and high-intensity action. It is a shame that the servers are having issues still, but that is something they can work on moving forward. I definitely see myself playing this game more in the future as it is a lot of fun, even when teaming up with random players. It is an easy recommendation to any fan of stealth-action titles, especially if you can thrive in a horror setting.