I was hooked on Total Chaos from my very first moment in Fort Oasis. The game’s stage is a perfect place to develop the atmospheric, visceral experience that was intended for its players. It’s grim, dark, and lonely, with nothing but the sound of crashing waves and a mysterious voice on your radio guiding you along its desolate levels.
Flashes of a past life often blip into existence, a grim reminder of events that you must uncover to learn more about what happened to Fort Oasis’s residents, and why they’re all out to bring a grisly end to your tale. But it’s in how the developer has cleverly woven a sense of anticipation into the experience that doesn’t fully go away that Total Chaos truly shines and lets you ignore a few of its flaws along the way.
“The visuals do a serviceable job of conveying desolation and entropy in Fort Oasis’s many levels.”
But they’re there, and deserve a bit of discussion. While they are not game-breaking, they do prove to be an annoyance thanks to their effect on moment-to-moment gameplay. The inventory management system, for starters, feels like it wasn’t really made for a controller.
I found myself often turning tail in the middle of a fight to find a safe spot to heal, not because of animations but because getting to the correct items in my bag was going to take a while. It’s especially annoying when you consider how easily you can access your bag with the tap of a button. Why not make the effort to make navigating between its contents seamless along the way?
The visuals do a serviceable job of conveying desolation and entropy in Fort Oasis’s many levels. while the lighting does a great job of creating dark corners for enemies to lurk in. The level design deserves a lot of praise thanks to how labyrinthine each location feels, the lack of a map forcing you to learn the lay of the land, and that knowledge sometimes being the difference between life and death.
But I couldn’t help but feel that the game could use a bit more polish, although I must say that the gameplay more than makes up for any shortcomings. The lack of any bugs and performance that did have its drops, but remained largely stable on the base PS5, does count towards making this one feel as immersive as it can be.
“The lighting does a great job of creating dark corners for enemies to lurk in”
With all of the above complaints, you might be wondering what it is about Total Chaos that had me throwing myself at its enemies for hours. The simple answer is that its gameplay loop is addictive, and rarely lets up on the tension you feel as you walk along cramped hallways, weapons at the ready as you look for the danger you know is lying in wait for you.
The visuals, level design, and excellent audio design work together to create an environment that’s immediately claustrophobic and a home to threats that lurk in the shadows, waiting to come at you from an angle you don’t expect. They hunt you in packs, trying to overwhelm you with superior numbers. Their strikes and slashes can leave you bleeding out, desperately scrambling along a level to find bandages to staunch the bleeding, or at the very least, a few rags to make some for yourself. Fort Oasis is quite stingy with its supplies, though, releasing them to you in small doses along with crafting materials, recipes, and consumables.
There are several weapons for you to find as well, giving you some options to fight back when you’re under attack. Their limited durability means you can’t have any favorites, but the combat system is quite nimble, allowing you to nip in and out of range for a few strikes and wait the subsequent recovery window for your stamina in relative safety.
But things aren’t as easy as they sound. You’re going to want to get used to the game’s rhythm quite quickly, learning to evade and shove an enemy to keep it off balance while you parry another attack to gain a sizable buff to your own attacks. Combat quickly becomes an engaging loop of attacking and retreating, a struggle to retain the upper hand in a battlefield where you’re every bit as vulnerable as your foes.
” Things could go terribly wrong if you don’t commit to a careful, calculated approach”
When taken in along with some very effective pacing in the game’s story and progression systems, Total Chaos’s beauty begins to shine through. You feel exactly how oppressive its environments can be, the desolate building you explore in the first chapter being a great example.
There are moments where the utter silence of an empty, dark hallway contrasts so well with the waves crashing on the cliffs outside. It’s a truly solid horror experience that lets you feel like the silence manages to be louder. You never know what’s lying in wait for you as you make your way to your next objective, guided along by the voice on your radio.
That voice formed a very intriguing part of the game’s narrative, a presence that was guiding us along without intruding on the solitude that works so well to build tension in Total Chaos. Just like the game’s enemies, you never know when he pops up to life on the radio, his melancholy recollections often made us wonder about his motivations as we kept going along the path he set for us.
The voice is joined by journals and other discoverable elements that paint a picture of Fort Oasis, and the murky past that has led to its ruin. This style of storytelling always works well, and it’s especially delicious in this one as you’re going to be trying to piece together a tale from tiny snippets of information, all while keeping a very sharp eye out for dangers that could stop you from finding out more.
“You’re going to want your wits about you, as this is a game that doesn’t really hold your hand”
It’s a pity, then, that an adventure this immersive didn’t pull out all the stops to make it a complete one. On the base PS5, my DualSense sat dormant in my hand, its haptics and triggers left unused in a game where they could have been a very useful part of giving players the chills. It’s such a noticeable omission, as is the lack of performance options that might have allowed for a better framerate in places where the game struggles to keep up.
Although all of its flaws are minor, they could add up for you if those are things that matter to you when you’re thinking about trying this game. But if they don’t, or if you can ignore a significant bunch of them, Total Chaos is a good horror experience in which things could go terribly wrong if you don’t commit to a careful, calculated approach, made worth it by a story and levels that made the explorer in me jump for joy. Just remember that you’re going to want your wits about you, as this is a game that doesn’t really hold your hand, instead trusting your diligence and rewarding it accordingly.
Total Chaos is a solid survival horror title that’s easy to recommend, although its issues do hold it back from being among this year’s greatest ones in the genre. It’s a great game for a weekend, and might even have enough for you to try a survivalist run the second time around.
This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.
