I fear we may have swum the Rubicon of diminishing returns where multiplayer horror games inspired by Lethal Company are concerned. The recent Content Warning has sucked up all the remaining oxygen in the room, and oxygen is pretty important in Murky Divers, for reasons that are hopefully self-evident. Still, Murky Divers has some fairly eye-catching USPs. It’s got underwater physics, of course, and it puts you and – unhelpfully – your friends in charge of a submarine.
The submarine doesn’t have a third-person cam or forward viewing ports – you’ll need to pilot it using sonar and a big compass mounted in front of the steering wheel, doubtless while shrieking at tardy team-mates to close the airlock before that big green dot on the sonar screen gets within biting distance. What will you be piloting the submarine towards? “Abandoned” seafloor laboratories, of course. Your job in this latest co-op scarefest from Embers (creators of well-regarded “casual Soulslike” Strayed Lights) is to clear up the results of various experiments gone wrong, lugging any and all dead boffins (piece by piece, if needed) back to your submersible, which contains an all-purpose shredder.
Along the way, you must do your level best not to become a corpse yourself. There are hazards such as sparking sockets and “abyssal terrors” such as octopi with grinning demon faces. The curvy submersible aesthetics put me in mind of our number one survival sim Subnautica, but the wrecks themselves (and the act of swimming around holding a ripped-off foot) also evoke Barotrauma, Subnautica’s grimacing grindhouse cousin.
Expect proximity-based voice chat, immersive 3D audio and procedurally generated wrecks. It’s definitely “Lethal Company plus [concept]” but again, you do get a submarine. Murky Divers was announced this week, and will release in Steam early access on 19th June 2024. If you prefer to go up against demon-faced octopi on your lonesome, and you’re mad keen on UIs full of unlabelled dials and levers, Nauticrawl is a good suspenseful play. Ghoastus likes it and he knows a thing or two about horror, on account of being a ghost.
