Barotrauma

Great game, hardest part is getting your friends to play it.
Edit after 400 hours: You don't get your friends to play this, you make friends on public servers.

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.

Here is my most recent experience in 10 simple steps.
Step 1. Listen to the captain get mauled by crawlers
Step 2. Try to repair the sub
Step 3. Watch as the Engineer becomes husked
Step 4. Kill Engineer
Step 5. Struggle to operate the sub as one man due to mod that makes the reactor go critical easier
Step. 6. Almost make it to an outpost (practically the entire sub is destroyed and the sub is only running on backup batteries)
Step 7. Get 5 meters away from docking and run out of power whilst sinking to the abyss because another crawler busted its way into the sub
Step 8. Repair the sub again only to find that the sub is now over 550 meters away from any outpost
step 9. Set the sub to auto-pilot and man the reactor so it doesn't go critical
Step 10. The host's game crashed and my efforts were futile (I was almost there)
20/10 would suffer from barotrauma numerous times again.

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.

very fun game to play with a large group of friends and roleplay
until they beat the game without you because you arent on for 1 day out of the 20 you guys played.

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

Barotrauma is an ambitious game. That's the most honest way to describe it. It wants to do a lot. And as a result, many of its parts are undercooked. BUT...
The premise of the game and its core idea are wonderful. You are taking a long journey with your friends through the underwater hell that is Europa, piloting and maintaining a shoddy submarine, purchased at a suspiciously low price. You watch Europa's resource-starved human society crumble as a result of a natural disaster, and try to make the best of this terrible situation.
The gameplay is what you make of it. You can settle into a relatively comfortable role on a submarine, doing the intended job of your class. Or you can do a bit of everything - maintaining devices, handling navigation, manning the turrets to keep aggressive creatures away, going outside to mine and salvage materials... The class you choose doesn't limit the selection of jobs you can be competent at. And everything gets better with teamwork.
Barotrauma's developers are working tirelessly to improve the game. I've been here for a couple of years, playing the game actively and aiding the devs in its development, alongside other community regulars. In that time Barotrauma has changed a lot, with a bunch of its features getting more fleshed out. Each update bringing much needed improvements, based on the team's own vision and community feedback.
Steam Workshop support is part of the game's appeal as well. There is a lot of custom content out there. Some balanced, some not. With mods and a wide selection of in-game settings, you can craft whatever experience you want for your campaign. Though I do recommend doing a vanilla run first, all the modded stuff can keep things fresh in the future playthroughs.
Singleplayer mode is available and is actually pretty okay, but I'd really recommend playing the game with actual people. Barotrauma is a prime environment for fun social interactions. The game goes on sale relatively often, so keep an eye out for that and pick it up with your friend group. The base price is steep (thanks, Daedalic), but getting Barotrauma with a 50% discount is a good deal.