Co-op submarine survival simulator Barotrauma has a free weekend on Steam, so dive in with friends and experience the most comically horrifying deaths you can imagine

Quick story about the most nightmarish death I’ve ever experienced in a videogame: I was playing Barotrauma, the submarine survival simulator where you explore oceans on alien worlds. I’d left the sub and was swimming around in the inky black waters to investigate some sunken ruins, when I noticed I was out of air. Frantically, I swapped my empty oxygen tank with a full one.

At least I meant to do that. What I actually slotted into my oxygen supply was a fuel tank for my welding torch.

Just imagine being submerged in the dark, freezing cold waters of a pitch-black ocean on an alien planet, and taking a big panicky lungful of what you expect will be air but is actually welding fuel. Horrible. Horrible. But pretty funny, too, and a teaching moment. I never mixed up my tanks again.

That’s my sales pitch for trying Barotrauma, the always spooky but frequently hilarious 2D survival game that’s currently hosting a free weekend on Steam. Dive in and play from now until Monday, completely for free.

There’s a bonus, too: if you like it (I suspect you will) it’s on sale for 50% off until April 26.

It’s great timing because Barotrauma recently introduced a bunch of new stuff in its Calm Before the Storm update, like a new mission spanning three undersea ruins and an outpost that’s perfect for PvP deathmatch, making the grim chaos of the game “even darker, more disturbed, and violent,” according to developer FakeFish.

It’s already pretty darn disturbed, if you ask me. Along with inhaling welding fuel, I was also beaten up and imprisoned in the sub’s airlock by a co-op teammate, though to be fair, I had put on a clown mask and tried injecting him with a bunch of random syringes from the med bay. (Barotrauma isn’t strictly co-op, there’s a “traitor” mode where you can sabotage your team, something I wasn’t very good at.)

I was also eaten by an enormous sea monster while swimming, mistook a plasma cutter for a welding torch while trying to repair holes in the hull (naturally, the cutter just made the holes bigger), got beaten to death by an alien hermit crab, and got cut in half by a rapidly closing submarine door. All horrible ways to go, but all pretty funny, too.

In related news, FakeFish announced its next co-op survival game just last week, though this one swaps out the submarine for a train and 2D sidescrolling for FPS action. It’s called Frostrail—but it won’t be along until sometime next year, so checking out Barotrauma for the free weekend is your best bet for some chilling but silly co-op fun.