Europa’salienocean
issplitintoregions.Monitor your sub’s status
with this schematic.
PREVIEW
Barotrauma
RELEASE
Spring 2019DEVELoPER
FakeFish, UndertowPubLIShER
DaedalicLINK
http://www.barotraumagame.comneed to knowSetinanalienoceanonEuropa,oneof
Jupiter’s moons, Barotrauma is
reminiscent of FTL, but on a much larger
scale. You view your sub from the side and
can freely wander around it as one of
several classes including captain,
engineer, mechanic, and medic.
There are dozens of interaction
points around the sub such as
lockers, water pumps, engines, and
other mechanical stuff that keeps
the thing running.
And, inevitably, this stuff is gonna
break. Europa’s oceans are filled with alien
horrors, and a shunt or a chomp from one
of these massive, toothy beasts will
damage the sub, letting water in or
causing machinery to malfunction. This is
when the crew has to spring to action,
plugging leaks, sealing bulkheads,
pumping water out and repairing things.
But that’s easier said than done with up to
16 players per submarine online.
You can play with bots, but multiplayer
is where you’ll probably have the most fun
in Barotrauma. The scrabble to stop water
rushing into part of the sub, trying to get
everyone to work together, is massivelychaotic. You’ll have to work together to
seal off parts of the submarine that are
filling with water. Sometimes this involves
pulling on a diving suit and swimming
down into the flooded depths of the ship.
And with every gallon of water that spills
in, the likelihood of sinking to the depths
and being crushed by the pressure rises.
If you’re joined by 15 friends,
communicating with voice chat, patiently
following the orders of the captain, you
might be alright. But when you’re online,
with strangers, you never know what
people’s intentions are. Someone might
get a kick out of sealing the engineer in a
flooding room and drowning them,
meaning no one will have the skills
necessary to repair the nuclear reactor.
Someone might just steer the submarine
into a rock, for a laugh. This kind of griefing
might be annoying, but it’ll be certain to
generate some great stories.
Any player can attempt any role on the
sub, but if their class isn’t dedicated to it,
it’ll be slower and more likely to fail. If the
medic is trying to repair an engine, they
might be able to muddle through it, but
much less efficiently than an engineer.
It’s not all terrifying sea monsters
and leaky hulls, though. There’s
exploration to be done in this ocean,
and your crew will have to work
together to steer the ship and adjust
theballasttoascendanddescend.RetuRnfiRe
If the writhing tentacles of one of these
Lovecraftian creatures do get a little too
close for comfort, you can equip your
submarine with weapons systems
including turrets and sonar. These can be
controlled by players and it’s possible to
repel an intruding alien if you work
together. But attacking an enemy will just
make it mad, and make your sub a target.
Barotrauma comes with a suite of
creation tools too, letting you create your
own submarines and sea monsters and
share them on Steam. There’s also basic
scripting in there, similar to redstone in
Minecraft, which you can use to create
mechanisms and triggers. Barotrauma
sounds like a game tailored towards player
creation and community, and if it takes off
once it enters Early Access in spring, it
could be home to some amazing stories.
Andy KellyY
ou’re probably wondering what the hell
‘barotrauma’ means. In simple terms, it
refers to injuries caused by changes in
water or air pressure. For divers that can
mean burst eardrums or drowning. The latter is
what Barotrauma is mostly concerned with, being a
game set in a leaky submarine where a watery
death awaits the crew if they don’t work together.Explore an alien ocean in a
rickety old submarineBarotrauma
SomeonemightjuSt
SteertheSubmarine into
a rock, for a laughFIRSt
Look