Exploring Barotrauma
Here at Signal Decay the winter solstice is cold and dark, so to match the season we present a double feature on Barotrauma. Prepare yourself for the deeps of Europa.
Under the Ice
Being a submariner seems like a special kind of hell. Sealed in a steel tube and sunk below sunlight, miles of freezing water between you and the ocean floor. If something breaks and can’t be fixed your fate is to sink ever closer to crush depth, the hull creaking as the ocean tightens its fist about you. It does not surprise me that the fear associated with the depths is fertile ground for horror media, see Fear of Big Things Underwater by Geller or “MAG 195 – Adrift” from fiction podcast The Magnus Archives for an overview and a visceral example respectively. Horror videogames use submarines seem as the logical extension of this theme, forcing the player to control their own voyage into the silent waters of the hostile ocean.1 It is from this environment that Barotrauma was formed.
Barotrauma casts the player as a submariner in the subsurface ocean enveloping Europa, a frozen moon locked in orbit around Jupiter. The surface of Europa is inhospitable to human life due to “Jovian radiation” that also makes the shallower reaches of the ocean uninhabitable, forcing the people deeper into the sunless depths. The Europan oceans are filled with life adapted to cold and high pressure, armour plates and long fangs that can peel open the skin of a submarine like paper. In this hostile environment submarines are key to the survival of humanity, holding together fragile human society by gathering resources and transporting supplies between the isolated outposts that litter the ocean.
The goal in Barotauma is to travel between outposts, running cargo or mining ores, to fund your expedition deeper into the oceans of Europa. Focussing on multiplayer, each crew member contributes to the well-being of the boat and its crew. The doctor looks after the physical and mental health of the crew as they are rent and torn by angry mudraptors, the captain is the navigator and the helmsman carefully guiding the sub around angry mudraptors, and the mechanics weld shut holes chewed in the hull by mudraptors. Security officers and engineers are also vital to fending off mudraptors, but it pays not to be fussy about who man's the guns when a group of mudraptors are on the hull. Mudraptors aside, the moment-moment gameplay is maintenance of the submarine’s electrical and mechanical systems (fission reactor, water pumps etc.) then reacting to save the boat when things inevitably go wrong.
To understand Barotrauma as a horror game the visual presentation is vital. The game is on a 2D plane, where the z-axis is the depth of the submarine. The game is colourful in the sense of rust and flickering neon, Europa not allowing for cosy decor. Players can only see what is in their line-of-sight. As the best way to stop a submarine flooding is to keep the doors between compartments shut, for most of a play-session the player can only see what is in the room they are in. Most of the screen will be pitch-black, creating a sense of enclosure and restriction. You can hear through bulkheads, footsteps ringing or alarms blaring, but you’ll never know what’s on the other side of a door until it is open. Contrasted against the claustrophobic sub is the tingling dread of the ocean outside it. When you put on a diving suit and swim away from the lights of your submarine you quickly realise how much space is around you. There is no longer the shield of a deck and hull to stop the monsters getting to you, there are only the cold dark waters surrounding you for miles around. Away from the sub you feel truly alone in the universe… but you know there are hungry teeth waiting outside of your lamplight.
Here is the core of Barotrauma. The submarine is safety and routine, but you never know when something will rip a hole into it and let the darkness flood in. This keeps a constant tension on the player, a subtle horror that blossoms like fungal spores when faced with a Husk or a Hammerhead. When the floor beneath your feet begins to buckle and break, will you reach the door in time? Normally I don’t find Barotrauma too scary as playing with voice chat alleviates the nagging sense of fear (a false sense of security), but the reader will notice that I don’t play Barotrauma alone.
For me the most unsettling part of Barotrauma is the soundtrack. Most tracks have a core of music that is coated in coarse layers of industrial sounds; it feels like walking through a scrapyard in the drizzle, rivulets running down wrecked cars to form rust-red pools with an oil rainbow. Metallic creaks and electronic whines cut in and out sporadically in “Subaquatic Symphony for Hammers and Metal”, the music of Europa now indistinguishable from the faulty and dying submarines in which it is found. If you want an unsettling afternoon, pipe the sonar blips and faint morse code of “Wartrauma” though headphones while you try to write. You won’t be able to pin down why you feel stressed.2
Barotrauma then is a submarine management game which creates fear by setting up a routine and violently taking it away. I think it is best enjoyed with friends, but if social gaming isn’t an option it can still be experienced for its richly atmospheric world or via its soundtrack. The game has flaws such as clunky controls that I won’t get into, and it’s not one I’d play by myself, but given a hardy crew and stout vessel I’m willing to overlook what I don’t enjoy in favour of a great co-op horror experience.
Further Reading
Fear of Big Things Underwater, Jacob Geller, Youtube, 2022.
MAG 195 - Adrift, The Magnus Archives, Jonathan Sims, 2021.
This work is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0
While this essay is about Barotrauma, it would be remiss of me not to mention the existence of Iron Lung and Sunless Sea: Zubmariner, two more creepy games with submarines.
A few times I’ve mistaken real industrial noises outside my window as being part of the soundtrack. I think this is a mark of quality.