Picking up a game with the name Total Chaos evokes a very special time in a young person’s life, especially if that person is actually in their 40s and can wax nostalgic back to the 1990s. Had I fired up this title and seen the main character with frosted tips, a No Fear t-shirt, and slamming a can of Surge, not only would I have totally understood the assignment, I would have given this game an instant 8/10 with just a couple of points being removed for not having Nonpoint on the soundtrack. Barring that, you imagine the word chaos should imply a level of unpredictability, of things going off the rails and having no control over what happens next. Ironically, the tired, almost dated formula of atmospheric horror and survival crafting makes Total Chaos the total opposite: a contrite, straightforward game.

There…is…no…hey, can someone turn on the porch light? I can’t read the graffiti.

It’s the 1970s. You’re a boat captain, who boats wherever the waters may take him. One day, whilst boating, you get a radio signal that suggests someone is in trouble and also in a really messed up situation. Because you’re apparently only a week into being a boat driver, you promptly crash your boat on flotsam or jetsam or whichever eel happened to be in the way at that time. You chill on the island without incident for an indeterminate amount of time, waiting for help to arrive and getting nothing. You finally get your boat repaired, because I guess you could all along, but didn’t want to so you could make rescue friends. Now you’re free to leave the island, but that weird radio transmission…you should go risk your life in an abandoned mining facility full of mutants, ghosts and apparitions in order to figure out what happened, right?

Here’s my one bit of prop to Total Chaos: no, you don’t. You can absolutely get on that boat, start it up, and get the hell out of here. It’s a silly and deadpan solution, but it exists and I support it for having the game set up a concept and following through. Don’t feel like dealing with first person survival horror with crafting, bleeding, and hunger mechanics, weapons with limited durability and arbitrary rules about what will and won’t happen throughout a game that doesn’t have a clear or easy to follow map? No problem! Get in your boat, basically at any time, and sail off into the wild blue yonder while a vinyl warbles out an unsettling but satisfying ending song and the credits scroll. I can’t imagine why you would buy the game just to not play it, but I appreciate the option exists.

Nowadays I would take the job, blood on the contract or not.

If you decide to forge ahead with Total Chaos and see what lies in store for you, it’s a mixed bag of everything I just mentioned combined with a couple of positive and negative elements. If you don’t like crafting, you’re not going to enjoy Total Chaos. You’ll find some prefabricated things, mostly food, but a majority of what you discover needs to be combined with other things in order to survive or make any headway in the game. And if you do like crafting, you’re still going to be annoyed by the clunky way items are handled moving from your inventory to the crafting table. I’m playing this on the Nintendo Switch 2, and I’m not surprised but disappointed that touch screen controls were not considered for inventory management. It’s an exhaustive task of clicking around to simply make a mattock to get through barriers and enemies.

Which then breaks. Alright, maybe this was something that helped playtesters feel more “spooked” knowing that the weapons and items had a limited shelf life, but that doesn’t make it more fun. Even if you put on the Tourist Mode from the beginning (which is its own misnomer), you still have items deteriorating over time and forcing you to go foraging for handles, blades and other items to keep moving along. There is zero hand-to-hand choice when it comes to dealing with the baddies, so a lack of weapons means a lack of survival options. Even if you carry a brick with you everywhere you go, it’s better as a range attack than a melee, but then, great, no more clobbering tool, time to keep running.

Me and a pair of scissors versus unspeakable eldritch terrors. Classic!

Though players don’t need to worry too much, because the AI of Total Chaos is pretty awkward. Enemies will zero in on you and chase you around Scooby-Doo style, but there’s always a good way to put some interference between you and them. Plus, at least a few of the NPCs have weird attack protocols. You see the player character in a dead end hallway? Better not rush him at first, let’s pick up a rock and throw it at him with shockingly poor accuracy. With a deluge of mobs that look like Nemesis’ slightly more attractive cousin, you’d think there would be positive terror when they appear, but the way that they engage with the player just feels clunky, like they’re extras in a play who didn’t think they’d end up needing to deliver lines.

While the game can be scary, it never hits that fever pitch of anxiety and terror. You end up with either large chunks of dead air where the landscape around you is supposed to do the job of creeping you out (it doesn’t), or a lot of hit and retreat combat to make any form of progress. The first time the electrical spirit ghosts appeared around the corner, I gave an involuntary shiver, but that was it. You rapidly become desensitized to sudden appearances by anything because you understand that, in comparison to something like Clock Tower, their arrival doesn’t mean your demise. It just means that maybe you need to decide if you throw or stab with the glass shiv before continuing on this bizarre field trip. The noises, the lighting, the sudden appearance of enemies didn’t matter to me because the framework was all over the place.

This should scare the piss out of me, but I’m just annoyed because my weapon broke.

Fail states happen in games, whether intentionally or otherwise, but you’d tend to hope the game would set you up for success. Total Chaos has plenty of save spots throughout, which is helpful, but also tons of management tasks, which leaves you feeling frustrated and out of control. You need to think about health, hunger and bleeding, and multiple items can improve one while deteriorating the others. This is something that gets better the further along you get in the game and have more access to materials, but the early stages are full of risk and hazards as you can end up cornered with no food, no stimpaks, no weapon and no great way to go back other than return to a previous save point. Oh, and you’ve only got ten slots to use, so be ready to overwrite previous entries and then be mad you lost those entries.

There is so much potential in the game, too. The plot is oddly set up, but the voice actors do an incredible job through errant radio frequencies to deliver bits and pieces of lore and bad news that gave it a very Bioshock influenced feeling. You eventually start getting outside help that gives you better direction and ideas about what’s going on. There are journals and entries that tell you both how to advance and also snippets of what the mining colony used to be like and why things fell apart. Most of where you are is underground, but the brief jumps into areas like the lonely, barren cliffsides or the incredibly ominous church are spot on and well done. There’s even a point where you start to use firearms which…well, to be honest, shifts it from a survival horror and more into a DOOM 3 sort of vibe.

Guys, one second! I gotta find something in my backpack, please hold the slaughter!

But it just never quite sticks the landing. You’re toggling between things being too dark or washed out to see properly. It’s overrun with baddies or long stretches of nothing. You spend more time breaking open boxes to hunt for food and supplies than you spend doing anything. Tourist Mode takes the edge off, but it doesn’t make the game a storymode experience. It just makes it so the enemies take so much longer to kill you than to just let you be. I went from being sad to frustrated to just disappointed and, eventually, just at peace with whatever was happening on screen. It wasn’t scary or harrowing, or even narratively interesting. It was just banality.

Total Chaos will land well with the crowd who devours the single player survival aspect and want a challenging twist on the formula. It’s got bones for something great, but it lacks the execution to push it into a realm where it appeals to me or gets me to notice it. It runs well on the Switch 2, so fans who’ve been waiting to play this in handheld are finally given the opportunity. But it’s just not a fun game if you’re not already in a very accepting mindset for what the game can and can’t do, and what it needs of you. The mouse controls are poor, the horror is lackluster, and there’s nothing chaotic about it. If you think this game is random madness, then I’ve got great news for you: I’m wearing two different color socks today. CHAOS!

Total Chaos is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch 2.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.

A Copy of Total Chaos was provided by the publisher.