If, like me, you love hanging out with friends and shouting, I have a game for you. Murky Divers follows the spirit of Lethal Company, delivering a bit of co-op horror that you’ll thoroughly enjoy (and some screaming along the way). Murky Divers has been available in Early Access for about six months now, but with the release of version 1.0 this week, it has received very positive reviews, with 93% of recent reviews on Steam.
In Murky Divers, you and your friends are a team sent to neat up evidence of illegal experiments (and the monsters that accompany them) deep beneath the waves. Piloting a submarine together, you move between the wrecks of undersea facilities, cleaning up… well, “evidence”, but mostly the corpses of previous PharmaCorp employees.
The labs themselves are, of course, full of dangers caused by breaking things, as well as lots of truly gruesome underwater monsters of various origins. Complicating matters is the underwater nature of it all: you only have enough oxygen to get back. Every second counts when you’re outside. In the current tradition of the genre, each round you survive allows you to acquire fresh equipment for better and greater profits in the next round. Or, you know, increasingly goofy cosmetics.
What’s really nippy about Murky Divers is that it has a built-in submarine piloting mini-game. Your submarine has different tasks that players must share. The pilot is virtually blind, so the sonar operator must pay attention to obstacles and approaching giant sea creatures.
The complexity of piloting a submarine only increases as more players are added. The mini submarine can be operated by one or two people, but three and four people transfer to the medium submarine, while five to eight must exploit the largest size submarine.
Version 1.0 brought with it expanded difficulty settings for custom servers, as well as fresh creatures and a brand fresh “lab” biome that includes something called Copycat that can mimic proximity voice chat. A massive no thank you on this one.
You can find Murky Divers on Steam for $8 or on sale for $6 through January 2.
