“They’re gone. They are all just . . . gone. My paradise, something has taken it over. This isolation . . . it’s killing me.”
Some of my favorite games do things I simultaneously love and hate. For some odd reason, this seesaw of extremes really fascinates me — maybe it’s that mix of anticipation and frustration that appeals to my weirdly-wired brain, or maybe it’s that constant feeling of critical examination that lingers in the back of my mind. It’s the kind of feeling that slowly erupted to the surface as I managed to traverse Total Chaos‘ fleshy corridors.
Originally a solo project by Sam Prebble (aka Trigger Happy Interactive), Total Chaos is a game that’s been more than 20 years in the making. It had begun life as a visually stunning mod for Doom 2, one that traded colorful sprites and Hellish demons on Mars for 3D models and a genuine attempt at a serious, unsettling atmosphere. Years upon years of development hell and scrapped progress would lead Prebble to eventually release the mod in its first full incarnation on Halloween in 2018, where it quickly drew the attention of Doom enthusiasts and horror fans alike. Its ensuing praise was certainly warranted. Its punishing gameplay, surprising scope, and genuine scares would quickly establish Prebble as a prominent name in the burgeoning boomer shooter movement, even going so far as to win a 2018 Cacoaward within the Doom modding community. His first commercial project, Turbo Overkill, would debut in 2023 to even more success.
But two years later, Trigger Happy Interactive has returned to their humble roots by not only revisiting Total Chaos, but fully remaking it as its own standalone game with Apogee Entertainment publishing. Its bigger, bolder, and arguably better than it’s ever been before. But in a genre saturated with some of the hardest-hitting games you can ever play, can Total Chaos stand on its own as a full game? Or is this return to a cult classic nothing but a grimy mirage?
Fort Oasis, April 1972
Compelling narratives often hold together most horror games, and while Total Chaos doesn’t necessarily break the mold here, it thankfully sticks to its strengths. Things don’t take long to get going as you’re treated to a brief prologue sequence. It’s 1972, and you’re a coastguard tasked with monitoring the roaring waves for anything out of the ordinary. On this day, a distress signal from an errant boat prompts you to act accordingly. You set out to sea in search of the signal. That is, however, until the roaring waves fling you and your boat way off course.
Battered and fatigued, you eventually find yourself washing ashore onto the remains of Fort Oasis, an isolated mining community that has fallen into complete disarray. A familiar feeling hits you, climbing up through your fingers and toes and into your sensory organs. You’ve been here before. But things are different. Everything’s a little more depressing than it should be. Strange sounds are filling Fort Oasis’ vacant corridors. And as soon as you start receiving strange transmissions on your radio, you can’t help but feel a pair of eyes burning a hole in the back of your head. Someone else is here. Maybe putting a face to the voice will make everything feel normal again.
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The game spans nine chapters in total, a substantial increase from the original mod’s six. There’s also an attempt to elevate the storytelling found in the original mod. Diary entries, the occasional map, tape recordings, additional narration, and set dressing you can find in the world itself all slowly unveil themes of mental illness and isolation during the game’s quieter moments. Again, it’s familiar territory for fans of the genre, but it’s effective enough to maintain your interest. The practical horror of just confronting the unknown and overcoming basic survival challenges eventually gives way to a more psychological approach, with the game gradually warping reality itself the deeper you descend into Fort Oasis.
The game’s music and visuals deserve some praise, too. Trigger Happy Interactive already had an eye for detail with their impressive world designs in Turbo Overkill, and it was effectively transferred into a grimmer horror setting here. Fleshy walls and rusted floors accompany muted cliff faces and broken-down shopping districts. Surreal giants and twisted creatures roam the shadowy fog surrounding you. When things get really nuts, I appreciate how the game purposefully twists your only two reliable senses against you, flicking apparitions in and out of your peripherals and throwing thudding noises in every other direction.
The game features at least five composers, with two — Jason Dagenet and William Braddell — returning after their work on the original Total Chaos mod. Their combined talents form a soundscape that’s pretty serviceable, forming a thoroughly haunting atmosphere via layered ambience and the occasional venture into more traditional compositions. Akira Yamaoka of Silent Hill fame even made a surprise appearance by composing the main title theme, which plays during the credits. You can get a taste of it outside of the game via an official preview provided by Apogee Entertainment.
I normally wouldn’t mention this, but I have to give props to the game’s sound design too. Munching on a can of tuna caught me off guard with how guttural it sounded, even ending with the clatter of a can as it hits the floor. Guns and melee weapons are appropriately explosive and crunchy, respectively, and the many monsters you come across all thankfully sound unique enough to differentiate them in a crowd. Even when you’re cloaked in darkness, you can get a decent idea of how far away a potential threat is by just keeping your ears open. It’s great.
It should be mentioned that Total Chaos has two separate endings you can achieve, with one taking substantially more effort to earn than the other. It’s not as if Total Chaos is too secret about this. It’s visibly marked in the game’s achievements, and you can even find a hint towards its existence within the game itself. That said, this is a multi-step process. You’ll have to accomplish a series of very specific tasks within several chapters before you reach the finale to get one of these endings, and missing even a single one effectively locks you out of it. These tasks aren’t necessarily straightforward to figure out, either. It’s something you’ll really have to think out of the box to accomplish, for better or worse.
Surviving the Horrors of Fort Oasis
The actual “video game” part of Total Chaos is where my weird mixed feelings come into play. On the surface, it’s a game that I should absolutely love. Brutal, visceral melee combat reminiscent of Condemned: Criminal Origins? Check. Survival horror resource management amplified to the nth degree? Check. Grimy aesthetics with fleshy monsters and depressing vibes? Check. That’s three whole boxes checked.
And for the most part, I really do like Total Chaos. It’s a first-person horror game with an emphasis on both combat and survival, with the two mechanics going hand-in-hand as you traverse Fort Oasis. As you progress, you’ll have you keep yourself alive by managing three key resources:
- Health: Your health is the be-all and end-all. When it’s all gone, that’s it. Your journey is over.
- Bleed: Enemy attacks can both lower your health and gradually inflict the “bleed” status effect, leaving you constantly leaking your precious red stuff until you can patch yourself up.
- Hunger: You can only go so far on an empty stomach. As your hunger grows, so too does your fatigue, limiting your overall stamina.
In addition to scavenging weapons and ammunition from the environment, you’re tasked with finding food (rotten or otherwise) and medical supplies to manage these three resources effectively. Going over every single item you could find means we’d be here forever. Rather, it’s important for you to know that most consumable items come with a handful of different effects, both positive and negative. Cigarettes might stifle your hunger for a bit at the cost of some health. Stimpacks are a quick fix for your ailing health, but they’ll induce some hunger on top of potentially making you bleed. You’ll be constantly juggling these upsides and downsides with every passing minute, all while your hunger continuously ticks upward. You can only carry so much around too, as you’ll have to adhere to your maximum carry weight. Start hauling too much stuff, and you’ll slow down exponentially.
Weapons and ammo are similarly finite. While you can occasionally get away with not fighting your foes in the first few chapters, you’ll be coerced into brutal combat more often than not later on. Pickaxes, baseball bats, spades, knives, and more will make up your main arsenal here, with coveted firearms only rarely coming into play.
Melee combat is almost always effective, but dangerous. All weapons have a fast light attack, but only the heaviest of blunt instruments come with two phases of a charge attack, with some even being able to put down the toughest of foes in a single blow. You also have access to a parry and a deceptively effective dodge that can either close distant gaps or make incredible space in an instant. Parrying attacks at just the right moment allows you to deal some bonus damage temporarily during your follow-up attack. You also have a dedicated button for throwables, or thrown weapons, which can temporarily stun foes or inflict some safe damage from a reliable distance.
Guns will often put a stop to things in an instant. Though your selection here is small and standard, they’re still a rare enough commodity to be incredibly useful whenever you feel prompted to bust them out. Shotguns, pistols and revolvers, SMGs, and — shockingly — a harpoon gun of all things will gradually become an essential part of your arsenal whenever you’re able to hoard them in your pack.
The harpoon gun especially was one of my most-used weapons. Any sharp or pointed weapon can become embedded into your enemies and retrieved after their death, and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve plugged one, two, three, sometimes even four harpoons into the nastiest of foes before finishing them off. It’s almost as satisfying as a grisly headshot at point-blank range. Almost.
But much like how guns require ammunition, your weapons aren’t meant to last forever. They’ll all break eventually, either via constant combat with your foes, smashing open boxes to find valuable resources, or a mix of the two. This is where craft benches come into play.
By finding blueprints throughout Fort Oasis, you can craft whatever your heart desires. Wanna put some tape and barbed wire around your pickax for better damage and durability? Go right ahead. Wanna cram an axe head onto an axe handle? More power to you. As long as you have the blueprints to do so, you can craft just about anything. Just be sure to keep some wood glue on hand. Maybe some tape too. And nails.
My favorite blueprint in particular allowed you to affix nails to a lone throwable rock, before stuffing that rock into a sack to use a makeshift flail. It’s absurd, but useful. You can also craft additional resources through a mix of red, green, and blue compounds and syringes, through their effects are much more extreme compared to your standard stimpacks and food items.
Speaking of extremes, it’s quickly made apparent that your character is not well. Mentally, that is. Dealing with particularly terrifying sequences may temporarily distort your sense of reality, leading to new passages opening up in the environment, more dangerous foes lying in wait, or constant hallucinations plaguing your senses. You can return to your status quo self by visiting a save point. But, then again, who’s to say that you should?
It’s pretty thrilling when everything all fits together. It’s got that visceral brutality that I missed from games like Condemned, the gloomy atmosphere of Silent Hill, and even a similar sort of key-hunting progression system like the very game it was originally based on, Doom. It’s old-school in some ways, which I’m always a sucker for. But there’s just enough of a glossy, bloody sheen over everything to make it feel fresh.
Where Total Chaos starts to lose me, though, is when it outright abandons this mingling of combat and resource consumption in favor of running and hiding. Several encounters throughout the game outright discourage you from using your weapons in favor of giving you just a lighter to fiddle around with as you flail around in the dark, narrowly avoiding a giant monster or swarms of light-averse ceiling crabs. A variant of this even exists where you enter a “panic” state, meaning you’re locked into your stock movement speed without your dodge to speed things up.
The first time this happens, it’s interesting. It’s scary, even. But I feel like the genuine fear of slowly bleeding to death sans bandages, or slowly whittling down your ammo reserves to keep your last few health items intact is way more effective than playing Simon Says with a monster that can one-shot you. The sections that involve a Weeping Angels gimmick — that is, the monster only ever giving chase when they leave your field of vision — are arguably the most annoying of these for how quickly you can die. It’s just obnoxious, and I feel like these sections really grind everything down to a halt. This was especially true in the Catacombs. I wish I was exaggerating, but it really is just running around a tunnel network and occasionally blowing your light out once you hear footsteps.
There are also a handful of things that really stick out to me as just odd, too. This has since been patched, but a certain boss fight early in the game practically dumped infinite SMG ammo your way, leading me to wonder what exactly what I was meant to do. Am I supposed to attack the boss directly? Am I supposed to find a different way to take care of them? The answer: yes. An enemy in Chapter 4 managed to get himself stuck on seemingly nothing in the environment, cursed to perpetually strut forward in place as I casually slid by him. He didn’t even get an opportunity to swing at me.
The game does admittedly suffer from some power creep as well, at least on the default difficulty. Again, no spoilers. But the final chapter takes a decidedly linear approach to progression with a freshly-vacant inventory, and by the time I hit this point, I had enough food to feed an army, at least three melee weapons with near-to-full durability that were fully upgraded, four guns with semi-available ammo reserves, and more than enough crafting supplies to put me over 20 kilograms above my normal carry weight. It’s not as if the game wasn’t challenging, but resource management didn’t come into play all too much beyond the first few chapters.
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It’s a difficult thing to balance. After all, how do you give the player just enough supplies to keep going without potentially locking them out of future progression? The original mod already developed a semi-notorious reputation for its brutally punishing difficulty, even featuring mechanics like radiation management that are suspiciously absent in this remake.
The survivalist difficulty setting, the only other available setting, does seem like it alleviates this by severely limiting your resources and placing a strict limit on saving your game. It works just like Resident Evil now, where a certain item is spent every time you want to save. Don’t have that item? No saving for you. Combined with dying much more easily compared to the other available difficulty setting, it’s definitely something worth considering if you want more after your first playthrough.
Should You Play Total Chaos?
There’s a fantastic article by Patrick Klepek on Vice about the history of Total Chaos as a mod, with a particular focus on the singular mind behind it, Sam Prebble. It was a fun read. But it was eye-opening in that it pulled the curtain back a bit on how the mod’s multi-year journey ultimately came to a close. I won’t make a condensed version of the whole article, but a through line throughout the whole journey is revision. Overthinking, specifically. Not being satisfied with what’s there, over-scrutinizing everything, and ultimately making a last-ditch effort to ignore those feelings and finally get Total Chaos out the door.
I haven’t played the original mod myself. But while I could snidely joke that some issues I had with this remake were the result of a similar slapdash effort, I can’t deny that the end result here is something that feels confident in itself. It was confident enough to steal a lot of attention when it surprisingly released during the 2025 Xbox Partner Showcase, at least. While I do vehemently dislike some portions of what it’s trying to do, what’s surrounding those portions is so fun that I really don’t mind wading through them — in some cases, literally wading through them.
Would I ultimately recommend Total Chaos though? I’d say yes, but with an asterisk. I think this game would be perfect for those who loved games like Cry of Fear, or similar games driven primarily by a single creative vision. It skews old-school, it can be brutally punishing, it’s incredibly violent, and above all else, it’s not really like anything I’ve played recently. I really enjoyed Total Chaos, warts and all, and I’m eagerly awaiting the desire to revisit it sometime in the near future. For now, though, I’ll stew on my grisly journey, comforted by plenty of leftover monster meat rations and loose pickax heads.
Total Chaos is currently available on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. Additional support for GOG and the Epic Games Store is currently in the works.
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