- Joined
- Jun 27, 2014
Ambition can be an amazing thing, Kiwis. On its wings, we can ascend to greater heights than any of us ever thought possible, and that is absolutely the case for today's entry, which consists of two versions of one game, and a hell of a story to go along with it. Today we discuss the story of the infamous Total Chaos, a humble little horror game with a very unusual origin point.
Total Chaos is a bit of an anomaly: it's another one of those games essentially helmed up by one dude, and it first rose to prominence back in like 2015, before finally becoming available and playable in 2018. Essentially playing like someone got S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and Condemned: Criminal Origins into a room and encouraging them to fuck over a PS2, it was a very novel game at the time, both because of how effective it was for its era, and another, far more incredible reason:
It was running on Doom II's engine. Yes, I'm completely serious. I have no idea how any of this shit was done, barring sorcery, but even back when it first launched, it was considered downright incredible, more so when you factored in that it played and handled nothing like Doom at all. A true testament to what was possible with the engine, though it also came with it some issues; older rigs notoriously could not run it because the game was never designed for shit like this. The dev eventually made a scaled-down version similar to its earlier releases for running better on older hardware, but the fact remains that this game was absolutely pushing an engine from 1994 to its fucking limit, and then some. It also won a 2018 Cacoward the year it came out, for completely understandable reasons.
The game was developed by Sam Prebble of Trigger Happy Interactive, who you'd probably know better from his work after Total Chaos, namely Turbo Overkill, an exceptional fast-mover boomshoot that released to critical acclaim. Total Chaos was seemingly left behind, a footnote of technological wizardry done with an engine never designed for it, and so things were until 2024, when it was revealed that the game was getting a full standalone release and remaster done with Apogee's new in-house engine, and with all the bells and whistles. Total Chaos was coming back, and now, it had a demo on Steam.
So let's check in, and see how things changed from the original version done in Doom II:
The biggest and most obvious change is the new intro. In the original Total Chaos, the initial story blurbs were handled mostly in text. In the new version, you actually get to optionally see the storm that brings the boat down, and amusingly, when starting a new game, the game gives you the option to skip it entirely if you've seen it before or want to get right into it. The new scene's nice, but it doesn't really give you anything the original didn't have, and it's solely set dressing, so let's get right into it.
Fort Oasis has changed. The layout is functionally the same, but the lighting is way better, the environments way more detailed, and the overall presentation much cleaner (if such a thing can truly be applied to the monument of urban decay that is Fort Oasis, at least). The gameplay is fundamentally the same, but there's a lot of changes that effect how the game handles - movement is a lot snappier and quicker, physics are much more reactive, and the game has a much smoother handling.
I feel like some of the original game's textbook Doom II Engine jank added to the game's horror in a few ways, including the way that it made the UI significantly clunkier, but there is zero question that the game handles better in its new form than its old. In the original enemies had a certain choppiness tothem that did make them feel more unearthly and unsettling, but also made it so you often didn't feel like you had anything to do with the fuck-up when one landed a hit on you. In this one, their movement is smoother and the "how the hell did that even hit me" issues of old are gone, but many of the enemies have new tricks (one of them used by the most common enemy in the game caught me by surprise the first time).
But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is this game about?
In Total Chaos, you are a member of the Coast Guard. One day, you receive a distress signal from a damaged boat, and head out to investigate, only for a massive storm to sweep up your boat. Ultimately, the boat comes to rest on the shores of Fort Oasis, an island-based mining colony that dated back to the war. After mostly fixing their boat, the protagonist realizes someone is trying to actively contact them, and that something dark is calling to them in this place. Unlike the original Doom II TC version, however, we now can actually hear the transmission. The voice that called us is saying that what we want most can be found within the island's depths, and like a siren's call, the player sets out to investigate.
Fort Oasis is the very model of structural decay, a massive facility being reclaimed by nature and rusting from disuse, yet the facility itself sprawls through the island like a concrete tumor. The place looks - and feels - profoundly unclean, with graffiti and old notices covering the war, broken floor tiles and spots of plants bursting up from the ground festoon the floors, and rust and grime covers every surface. It quickly becomes apparent that dark shit went down here, with a lot of the labor being forced and whatever group responsible for the excavations getting fast-and-loose with safety.
Now, inhuman things dwell down here, protecting a darker secret. The player must dig through this shithole and ultimately, work their way through this nightmare to find out what lurks beyond.
The game is a very forthright survival horror game with a focus on exploration, survival mechanics, and scavenging. The player will need to find weapons, ammo, medical supplies, and food, most of which will rarely be in particularly good condition. Melee weapons degrade and break with use, firearms have limited ammo, so a fundamental mechanic of the game is choosing your encounters where possible. Rather notably, the very first weapon you find (a pickaxe) is in terrible condition and will break almost immediately, which means avoidance is the best strategy until you can repair the damn thing. The game is trying to teach you that you should pick and choose your encounters where possible, not spend resources you don't have to, and fight smarter, not harder. This is especially important because the enemies in Total Chaos do not fuck around. The basic ones are extremely strong in close-combat, with the more unearthly things you'll face later being the kind of shit you do not want to get anywhere near. In addition to regular damage, enemy attacks can cause bleeding; bleeding in Total Chaos does not work like it does in other games (where it causes damage over time); instead, it's a debuff; the more bleeds you accrue, the less healing items will actually restore for you. Bleeding is treated with bandages, which can be found or crafted.
Fortunately, the game also gives you some advantages; when a weapon breaks (such as a pickaxe), you keep the head, so all you need to find is a new handle and something to secure it with. Find yourself a workbench and you just turned your broken weapon into a fully restored usable one. The new version of Total Chaos gives you the option of equipping certain items as throwables, including bottles, rocks, and bricks - you can throw these at enemies to do damage and stun them, or, in the case of things like flammable liquids, soak them in the shit so that getting near a source of fire sets them ablaze. Good times.
One big difference between the versions of the game is that the original, being a Doom II TC, let you save anywhere. The new demo changes things to give you save points (in the forms of record players). This also chains into a big area the two diverge, which is that this new version of Total Chaos is much closer to earlier versions of the mod than the final version people are familiar with. In the later versions of the game, you have to keep an eye out for potential radiation exposure, but in earlier versions, there was a seemingly-rarely-used Sanity stat. In the new version of Total Chaos, it returns as the Madness stat, with the Radiation stat seemingly nowhere to be found - and this time, it works very differently than you'd probably expect: In this case, it's caused directly by medications. The miners at Fort Oasis were assigned special medicines to aid their recovery, but these medicines also caused violent hallucinatory episodes that the miners called "The Brain Shivers." In-game, there are areas where you can use this medication to "leave things behind," and when the madness gets high enough, you can see things like holes open up in the terrain in an entirely impossible manner, allowing the player out of what is otherwise a sealed and unescapable area.
However, it also makes shit get insane (quite literally) and will cause you to encounter shit you otherwise wouldn't and probably shouldn't be sticking around for. The good news is that the record players you use to save your game will reduce madness when used for the first time, allowing your stay in crazytown to be a temporary visit, rather than a prolonged excursion. Good thing, too, because sanity is one of the rare places where that thing won't try to eat you.
It amuses me greatly that the Demo covers, more-or-less, the same areas that early versions of the Total Chaos Doom II TC did. It remains to be seen if Trigger Happy Interactive will stick the landing, though I generally had a decent time with it and am reasonably optimistic. As I said, there's a number of areas I feel the original nailed the atmosphere better on, but also a lot of areas where the new demo comes across as a better experience. Either way I beat the demo in about an hour and a half and I recommend it for anyone interested. If you liked Gloomwood's demo, you can probably find something to enjoy here, and it's not like the asking price is too high.
However, I do suggest going in knowing full well that the game was originally a Doom II TC, because this accounts for many oddities of its game design and how it plays. It was in development as early as 2012, and as a result many of the design ideas that went into it reflect that. It has rather linear design, owing to the way the game's individual setpieces are laid out (this was true of the TC as well). It does that shimmer-shine thing on items, because the game generally lacks a player-controlled light source. Interestingly, the bulk of the game is substantially brighter than the original, though when the new version gets dark, it doesn't fuck around.
What does strike out at me most is the pedigree of the dev that went into this. Turbo Overkill was awesome, so seeing the same dev come back and give this game some love is kind of neat.
I kind of feel like we have another David Szymanski here, albeit one who shitposts significantly less. And on that thought, I leave you, if only for now.
Total Chaos is a bit of an anomaly: it's another one of those games essentially helmed up by one dude, and it first rose to prominence back in like 2015, before finally becoming available and playable in 2018. Essentially playing like someone got S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl and Condemned: Criminal Origins into a room and encouraging them to fuck over a PS2, it was a very novel game at the time, both because of how effective it was for its era, and another, far more incredible reason:
It was running on Doom II's engine. Yes, I'm completely serious. I have no idea how any of this shit was done, barring sorcery, but even back when it first launched, it was considered downright incredible, more so when you factored in that it played and handled nothing like Doom at all. A true testament to what was possible with the engine, though it also came with it some issues; older rigs notoriously could not run it because the game was never designed for shit like this. The dev eventually made a scaled-down version similar to its earlier releases for running better on older hardware, but the fact remains that this game was absolutely pushing an engine from 1994 to its fucking limit, and then some. It also won a 2018 Cacoward the year it came out, for completely understandable reasons.
The game was developed by Sam Prebble of Trigger Happy Interactive, who you'd probably know better from his work after Total Chaos, namely Turbo Overkill, an exceptional fast-mover boomshoot that released to critical acclaim. Total Chaos was seemingly left behind, a footnote of technological wizardry done with an engine never designed for it, and so things were until 2024, when it was revealed that the game was getting a full standalone release and remaster done with Apogee's new in-house engine, and with all the bells and whistles. Total Chaos was coming back, and now, it had a demo on Steam.
So let's check in, and see how things changed from the original version done in Doom II:
The biggest and most obvious change is the new intro. In the original Total Chaos, the initial story blurbs were handled mostly in text. In the new version, you actually get to optionally see the storm that brings the boat down, and amusingly, when starting a new game, the game gives you the option to skip it entirely if you've seen it before or want to get right into it. The new scene's nice, but it doesn't really give you anything the original didn't have, and it's solely set dressing, so let's get right into it.
Fort Oasis has changed. The layout is functionally the same, but the lighting is way better, the environments way more detailed, and the overall presentation much cleaner (if such a thing can truly be applied to the monument of urban decay that is Fort Oasis, at least). The gameplay is fundamentally the same, but there's a lot of changes that effect how the game handles - movement is a lot snappier and quicker, physics are much more reactive, and the game has a much smoother handling.
I feel like some of the original game's textbook Doom II Engine jank added to the game's horror in a few ways, including the way that it made the UI significantly clunkier, but there is zero question that the game handles better in its new form than its old. In the original enemies had a certain choppiness tothem that did make them feel more unearthly and unsettling, but also made it so you often didn't feel like you had anything to do with the fuck-up when one landed a hit on you. In this one, their movement is smoother and the "how the hell did that even hit me" issues of old are gone, but many of the enemies have new tricks (one of them used by the most common enemy in the game caught me by surprise the first time).
But I'm getting ahead of myself. What is this game about?
In Total Chaos, you are a member of the Coast Guard. One day, you receive a distress signal from a damaged boat, and head out to investigate, only for a massive storm to sweep up your boat. Ultimately, the boat comes to rest on the shores of Fort Oasis, an island-based mining colony that dated back to the war. After mostly fixing their boat, the protagonist realizes someone is trying to actively contact them, and that something dark is calling to them in this place. Unlike the original Doom II TC version, however, we now can actually hear the transmission. The voice that called us is saying that what we want most can be found within the island's depths, and like a siren's call, the player sets out to investigate.
Fort Oasis is the very model of structural decay, a massive facility being reclaimed by nature and rusting from disuse, yet the facility itself sprawls through the island like a concrete tumor. The place looks - and feels - profoundly unclean, with graffiti and old notices covering the war, broken floor tiles and spots of plants bursting up from the ground festoon the floors, and rust and grime covers every surface. It quickly becomes apparent that dark shit went down here, with a lot of the labor being forced and whatever group responsible for the excavations getting fast-and-loose with safety.
Now, inhuman things dwell down here, protecting a darker secret. The player must dig through this shithole and ultimately, work their way through this nightmare to find out what lurks beyond.
The game is a very forthright survival horror game with a focus on exploration, survival mechanics, and scavenging. The player will need to find weapons, ammo, medical supplies, and food, most of which will rarely be in particularly good condition. Melee weapons degrade and break with use, firearms have limited ammo, so a fundamental mechanic of the game is choosing your encounters where possible. Rather notably, the very first weapon you find (a pickaxe) is in terrible condition and will break almost immediately, which means avoidance is the best strategy until you can repair the damn thing. The game is trying to teach you that you should pick and choose your encounters where possible, not spend resources you don't have to, and fight smarter, not harder. This is especially important because the enemies in Total Chaos do not fuck around. The basic ones are extremely strong in close-combat, with the more unearthly things you'll face later being the kind of shit you do not want to get anywhere near. In addition to regular damage, enemy attacks can cause bleeding; bleeding in Total Chaos does not work like it does in other games (where it causes damage over time); instead, it's a debuff; the more bleeds you accrue, the less healing items will actually restore for you. Bleeding is treated with bandages, which can be found or crafted.
Fortunately, the game also gives you some advantages; when a weapon breaks (such as a pickaxe), you keep the head, so all you need to find is a new handle and something to secure it with. Find yourself a workbench and you just turned your broken weapon into a fully restored usable one. The new version of Total Chaos gives you the option of equipping certain items as throwables, including bottles, rocks, and bricks - you can throw these at enemies to do damage and stun them, or, in the case of things like flammable liquids, soak them in the shit so that getting near a source of fire sets them ablaze. Good times.
One big difference between the versions of the game is that the original, being a Doom II TC, let you save anywhere. The new demo changes things to give you save points (in the forms of record players). This also chains into a big area the two diverge, which is that this new version of Total Chaos is much closer to earlier versions of the mod than the final version people are familiar with. In the later versions of the game, you have to keep an eye out for potential radiation exposure, but in earlier versions, there was a seemingly-rarely-used Sanity stat. In the new version of Total Chaos, it returns as the Madness stat, with the Radiation stat seemingly nowhere to be found - and this time, it works very differently than you'd probably expect: In this case, it's caused directly by medications. The miners at Fort Oasis were assigned special medicines to aid their recovery, but these medicines also caused violent hallucinatory episodes that the miners called "The Brain Shivers." In-game, there are areas where you can use this medication to "leave things behind," and when the madness gets high enough, you can see things like holes open up in the terrain in an entirely impossible manner, allowing the player out of what is otherwise a sealed and unescapable area.
However, it also makes shit get insane (quite literally) and will cause you to encounter shit you otherwise wouldn't and probably shouldn't be sticking around for. The good news is that the record players you use to save your game will reduce madness when used for the first time, allowing your stay in crazytown to be a temporary visit, rather than a prolonged excursion. Good thing, too, because sanity is one of the rare places where that thing won't try to eat you.
It amuses me greatly that the Demo covers, more-or-less, the same areas that early versions of the Total Chaos Doom II TC did. It remains to be seen if Trigger Happy Interactive will stick the landing, though I generally had a decent time with it and am reasonably optimistic. As I said, there's a number of areas I feel the original nailed the atmosphere better on, but also a lot of areas where the new demo comes across as a better experience. Either way I beat the demo in about an hour and a half and I recommend it for anyone interested. If you liked Gloomwood's demo, you can probably find something to enjoy here, and it's not like the asking price is too high.
However, I do suggest going in knowing full well that the game was originally a Doom II TC, because this accounts for many oddities of its game design and how it plays. It was in development as early as 2012, and as a result many of the design ideas that went into it reflect that. It has rather linear design, owing to the way the game's individual setpieces are laid out (this was true of the TC as well). It does that shimmer-shine thing on items, because the game generally lacks a player-controlled light source. Interestingly, the bulk of the game is substantially brighter than the original, though when the new version gets dark, it doesn't fuck around.
What does strike out at me most is the pedigree of the dev that went into this. Turbo Overkill was awesome, so seeing the same dev come back and give this game some love is kind of neat.
I kind of feel like we have another David Szymanski here, albeit one who shitposts significantly less. And on that thought, I leave you, if only for now.
