Barotrauma

I saw this game mentioned in the comments of a video of Sseth about Space Station 13 and wanted to play it ever since then. A few months ago, an old friend of mine and I decided to play it together while reconnecting after a long time.

I like this game because it greatly rewards good communication, realistic planning and wise decisions. The way you cooperate with others has many layers and you can learn a lot about yourself this way.

It was kinda hard to get a solid group going after my friend went back to his other games. I started visiting random private servers. But it can be hard to find a public server with a good host. So I started my own public server. I put in the effort to be a good but serious captain, to motivate earnest people and quickly sort out problematic randoms and to plan forward and keep morale high.

With a good amount of patience and diligent, perpetuous attention, I built a solid server out of the random players who came at different times during the weekend. We now have a Steam groupchat and a Discord server. We recently finished the campaign, too, which I didn't get to do with the old friend nor in singleplayer.

We bonded over all kinds of terrible situations and epic clutches. Every single one of us grew in the process. We got to know each other in our highs and lows and learned how to talk about everything with mercy as well as severity. And above all, we learned to function as a team in all kinds of situations. This is exactly the experience I was hoping for and I am very glad that I took the leap of hosting my own server.

Barotrauma is obviously a very niche game and it is a niche I uniquely enjoy. I believe that cooperative multiplayer games with great freedom and complexity like this one bring out the whole spectrum of human behaviour. That is too much for most people, but I enjoy it because it means freedom and opens up the possibility for exchanges and experiences which would otherwise not be possible.

It does take effort to take the brunt of all the strange, dishonest, sadistic or also just kinda daft and unworkable people, to fairly talk it out with all of them, give everyone their just "trial" while keeping up the energy (and managing a submarine of eight other people at the same time), but it rewards you with friends who will stick around for some really crazy unexpected rounds of Europan madness. It can feel very punishing but also very rewarding.

I haven't really played with any serious mods yet, but there are good community mods which easily add another hundred hours to the normal campaign, new enemies, weapons, pets, all kinds of items, even musical instruments and much more. The community is wacky, but I kinda like it. The memes are funny.

It's probably not for everyone, but I am very happy with this game.

Tbh i've played the game illegaly for more than 1000hr+ and just now able to paid the game after my first job, VERY RECOMENDED!

Over 550 hours playing this game, vanilla, modded, singleplayer, multiplayer, pvp, finnished the campaign about 3 times, went trough significantly traumatic events.
It is a good game.

Played this game with two buddies of mine. We get a mission to clear out a nest of crawlers. Before we can even fucking leave the station, a goddamn CLOWN attacks us and nearly kills one of my friends. So, to save his life, my other friend injects him with alien blood. This causes him to start hallucinating fires all over the ship. He just walks through them since, y'know, they're not real. But the thing is, he was carrying nitroglycerin on him for some reason. And one of the fires turns out to be real. So there goes half the ship because he turned himself into a fucking walking bomb. And then after that me and the other guy die because we cant get back in the ship because its on fire.
But finally, after reloading, we go to clear out the crawler nest. No issues, they clear it out just fine and i made sure the ship stayed intact. I was the mechanic, after all. On the way to the next outpost it does NOT go fine. A pack of mudraptors attack us, and both my friends instantly die to water pressure and vicious raptors. Leaving me, a lowly mechanic, the last one alive on the sub. Bad enough, right? It got worse.
FUCKING CHTULU HIMSELF ATTACKS ME. A giant, tentacled, 20-eyed sea monster i can only describe as lovecrafitan descends upon the sub and breaks damn near everything. So this has to be the lowest point, yea?
The sub then lands ON AN ACTIVE FUCKING VOLCANO. So now the ship is infested with raptors, being attacked by an elder god, AND being melted by goddamn pompeii.
I tried my best, and managed to stay alive for about 20 minutes by injecting myself with enough fentanyl to kill an elephant and unloading enough ordinance to level a small town. Unfortunately, i eventually ran out of fent and died.
10/10 game, would die to horrid eldritch horrors again.

> Built unstable nuclear bomb
> Put that in a railgun
> We forgot about it
> After sometime, the bomb exploded by itself after degrading
> We were fighting 2 Murlocks when this happened
> The submarine started falling and stopped on top of a volcano
> Everybody just died at the end.
> I love this game.

If you've never experienced running a nuclear reactor, going off to go fix something when the captain asks, coming back to the nuclear reactor, getting hit in the jugular by a 10 inch spike fired from outside the ship by nightmares beyond your comprehension, slowly bleeding out while the medic is trying to put out all the fires (plot twist they only exist in his head), and watch as the ship clown enters the reactor room, alarms start blaring, and the nuclear reactor detonates, instantly vaporizing the entire ship (and the contingent of immortal zombies lurking outside it). Then play this game, that'll happen

The trailers don't do this justice. Give it a try. There is a reason it's so highly rated, but they are terrible at advertising exactly what it is that makes this game so special. You won't regret trying it.