Total Chaos mutates from a Doom mod into one of next summer’s most promising survival horror chillers

We’re not even done with 2024 yet, and already I’ve got a most-wanted horror pick for next year: Total Chaos, now officially unveiled, be-trailered and scheduled for a Summer 2025 release after being teased for the past couple years. As revealed at today’s PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, it’s a grim n’ grimy psychological horror FPS trip through Fort Oasis, a seemingly abandoned industrial island colony unpleasantly overrun with horrible flesh-beasts and writhing tentacles. All the more impressive, it’s a largely solo project; the next big game from micro-indie studio Trigger Happy Interactive, and published by Apogee Entertainment.

If an ambitious survival horror game from a solo dev sounds like a bit of a tall order, you’d be right. But Sam ‘Wadaholic’ Prebble is an astonishingly talented individual. Music and voicework aside, he was almost solely responsible for last year’s fantastic neon splatterfest FPS Turbo Overkill. And if the name sounds familiar, that’s because Total Chaos has already done the rounds—it was previously a free game made with the GZDoom engine, and still to this day one of the most technically impressive GZDoom projects out there. This remake will be built using Unity, allowing for a prettier, more moodily lit game.

Having played the Doom-based original, what you can expect from Total Chaos is a fusion of Silent Hill and STALKER, with possibly more resource starvation than either. The island is an unpredictable, sometimes warping and shifting warren of old concrete tunnels, abandoned streets and haunted woodland punctuated by aggressive monsters. In the original version you could craft yourself resources and repair your gear to a degree, but between cmbat attrition and pockets of deadly radiation, everything in your seemingly spacious grid-based inventory is expendable and less replaceable than you’d hope.

It made for an intense, scary juggling act, balancing health, stamina, hunger and radiation poisoning while trying to solve puzzles, dodge around slower enemies and carefully choosing which ones are threatening enough to spend your extremely limited ammo pool on.

While I’m excited to see all of Total Chaos’ environments and monsters updated to modern spec, I’m most curious to see what gets changed in the remake. Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 2 have spoiled me by being effectively whole new games using familiar locations and story beats, although perhaps a complete rework would be asking too much when the original was technically only finished two and a half years ago. One thing I DO hope returns in the remake is Total Chaos’ excellent New Game Plus mode, which was a harrowing experience, giving the entire game a nightmare makeover and putting a persistent, deadly hunter on your trail.

You can wishlist the Total Chaos remake on Steam here, with the full game planned for summer 2025, and a demo for sometime early in the new year. Those wanting to get some suffering in early can snag the original (and free) GZDoom-based version on ModDB here.