Once a cult horror project born from the modding scene, Total Chaos now emerges on PS5 as a standalone descent into rust, ruin, and psychological pressure. Trigger Happy Interactive and Apogee have rebuilt its nightmare for a wider audience, yet kept its uncompromising, abrasive spirit intact. From the moment you wash ashore on the forsaken island of Fort Oasis, Total Chaos pulls you under – not with cheap jump-scares or cinematic polish, but with a raw, oppressive dread that lingers. The world feels battered and decayed, as though time and rot have seeped into every wall, corridor, and corridor-bend, turning Fort Oasis into a breathing tomb. The sparse storytelling – with scraps of notes, echoes over the radio and unsettling environmental clues – rarely spells everything out. Instead, it trusts you to fill in the gaps, and that ambiguity often works in the game’s favour, making you question what’s real and what you’re imagining.
The atmosphere is the game’s beating heart. Dark, dank, and claustrophobic environments are filled with creaking metal, distant dripping water, and ambient noises that suggest, but don’t always show – a beast behind a door, a whisper in the ventilation. The sound design deserves special mention: footsteps echo in dead corridors; the breathing and moans of distant creatures sound disturbingly organic; silence becomes its own threat. This is horror that creeps under your skin rather than smacking you over the head with jump scares.
Mechanically, Total Chaos leans into survival-horror tropes with brutal dedication: scarce resources, fragile weapons, and heavy inventory management. Players are forced to scavenge, craft makeshift tools, and carefully weigh every decision. The result can be deeply satisfying when you manage to rig a weapon or turn a scrap into something viable. But it also leads to tension – and sometimes frustration; as the game progresses, you’ll often find yourself lugging around useless debris just because “maybe you’ll need it later.” That weight system is more than mechanics: it forces you to confront your own greed and paranoia, which suits the game’s grim tone perfectly.
Combat and navigation, however, are more divisive. Swinging a wrench or axe at monstrous foes carries a satisfying weight, and successful strikes land with visceral impact. But the flow of melee and gunplay can feel clumsy – not necessarily in a bad way, but in a way that reinforces the game’s world: you are not a soldier, you are a desperate survivor. Still, against lesser enemies the action sometimes devolves into grind, and the weapon-durability system can make such fights feel like chores.
That said, the decision to remain rough around the edges – the imperfect textures, the muddy lighting, the ambiguous geometry in some areas – serves the game’s identity more than it hinders it. Rather than strive for blockbuster polish, Total Chaos embraces its roots as a mod: a gritty, DIY-spirit horror game in which grime and decay tell more stories than slick cutscenes ever could. On PS5, presentation-wise, it never tries to hide those imperfections; it leans into them. At moments the environments feel indistinct, and certain areas can blur together – which sometimes makes direction fuzzy, but that disorientation almost becomes part of the psychological burden of Fort Oasis.
But the game is not without flaws. The vague navigation and repetitive architecture can lead to you wandering corridors more than exploring them; sometimes you feel less like a detective and more like a frustrated-eyed wanderer hitting every blank door and dead-end switch. Combat – especially against lesser foes – can feel tedious, and there are moments when the survival systems strain under their own ambition, making resource scarcity feel more punitive than atmospheric.
Yet for all its rough edges, Total Chaos can burrow itself under your skin and stay there. It’s not flashy, it’s not polished, but it’s a horror game that makes you feel and tremble, question, and survive. For fans of survival horror willing to accept jank and ambiguity, and ready to embrace the grime, it delivers a bitter, haunting descent into nightmare. We found ourselves thinking about Fort Oasis even after we shut off the console, unsettled and exhausted.
In the end, Total Chaos isn’t perfect. It doesn’t need to be. Its strength isn’t in smoothness or clarity – it’s in dread, in discomfort, in surviving a world that seems designed to break you. If you go in on its own terms, with headphones on and tank of resources empty, you might just find one of the more memorable horror journeys of 2025.
Score: 7.8/10
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