I thought I had Total Chaos figured out. Creepy ruined castle, ironically named Fort Oasis. Shambling undead enemies and scuttling monsters. Resource scavenging and simple crafting mechanics. Reeks of knock-off Resident Evil territory, I thought. Not bad territory to be in, mind, but familiar. And, odd, considering I was locking eyes with hellspawn rather than shuffling corpses.
Then I got into my first fight.
A demonic figure lumbered toward me, lit by flashes of the flickering industrial lights above. I hefted my pickaxe, ready to deploy my finely honed Resident Evil ‘stab and run’ technique. Instead, I wiped the floor with the poor bastard. It wasn’t even fair. His first slash clattered off a well-timed block, and seconds later, after a quick counter, his rotting legs stopped flailing and lay dormant.
Image credit: Trigger Happy Interactive
Why did he go down so easy? Where was the fake-out death, where he starts chomping on my ankles the moment I turn away? I was wrong about Total Chaos’ lineage, it’s not Resident Evil. It started life as a total conversion mod for Doom 2. Suddenly, the hellspawn-turned-sack-of-potatoes made sense. Even if Total Chaos switched out Doom Guy’s plasma rifles and rocket launchers for pickaxes and handmade shivs, I was still a titan that could crush imp skulls beneath my steel boots.
While there are guns dotted throughout Total Chaos’ world, ammo is limited. You’re pushed up close to the monsters, in bone-shattering melee.
Your movement speed is more akin to the Doomslayer’s clomping gallop than Leon Kennedy’s nervous shuffling. You can weave in and out of combat smoothly, smacking hellish goons with your light and heavy attacks. Instead of a sprint button, you’ve a swift dodge, similar to Sekiro’s, which gives surprising momentum for a horror game. But the best of the bunch is a parry, which makes me hoot, holler, and kick my lil’ feet. Hit it just right, and your stamina meter gets a boost that encourages you to move in for the kill, as you hit faster and harder.
You can even parry projectiles to farm extra aura. | Image credit: Trigger Happy Interactive
It’s a quick, hard-hitting combat system that rewards boldness. Landing repeated pipe blows onto squishy zombie skulls is much more effective than slowly picking your shots from a distance, and it creates an unusual (but welcome) power fantasy for a horror game. I like to think there are creepy nightmare folk hiding out in the caves of Fort Oasis, whispering cautionary tales about me as the Russian Mafia do about John Wick.
Though with all this strength, Total Chaos’ opening hours aren’t scary. Hand me a parry and I will master deflection. So no matter how many monstrous spiders scuttled my way, me and my pickaxe would turn them into a pile of twitching eight-legged carcasses. While Doom may revel in empowering, most horror games find their fear in making you feel feeble. Then, when you’re at your most scared and vulnerable, they jump you with a crinkly ghoul that has a big blinking eyeball in its chest.
But I shouldn’t have worried about Total Chaos’s lack of scares. I was being played. In its first chapters, I faced the same few enemies in different configurations. I grew accustomed to parrying demons’ claw attacks, strafing the goopy webs of roaming spiders and stun-locking electric-powered ghosts with a barrage of sledgehammer blows. And I’ll admit. I got cocky.
Yes officer. That’s the invisible ghost that took my duct tape. | Image credit: Trigger Happy Interactive
So when I spotted a graveyard and the mysterious man guiding me over the radio squawked a warning for me not to go in, I thought ‘Screw it. This is the perfect place to find free duct tape to make more shivs.’ Turns out the crypt was home to an ancient hell ghost who loves the taste of roasted parry master. Unlike the demons and spiders I took down so easily, this ghoul is different. I can’t hit him. I can’t deflect him. I can’t even see him. After hours of smugly countering enemy attacks, all I can do is run.
The sudden vulnerability left me reeling. Turns out I hadn’t figured out Total Chaos. Not when I thought it was Resident Evil. Not when I thought it was Doom. It’s a stitched-together Frankenstein of the two. And from that graveyard encounter on, Total Chaos kept me off balance, its momentum shifting from encounter to encounter. The systems of its two influences giving me one-two rabbit punches.
Wow, your inventory sure is generous. The monkey paw curls. Because there’s no weapon wheel, if you see a brute that’s asking for a few shotgun rounds to the face, you have to dive into your backpack while he’s running full pelt at you. If an area’s dark, you need the lighter to guide your way, which takes your weapon out of the equation. Hurled your last shiv to deal stun damage? It’s now lodged in a zombie’s forehead, and you ain’t getting it back unless you can put him down.
And so the overall result is scary, but not in the way I expected. It doesn’t come from its story of a shipwrecked sailor uncovering the secrets of Fort Oasis while (literally) fighting his demons. That’s a relatively by-the-numbers psychological spiral. Instead, the fear comes from its action. It’s a game that toys with you.
Image credit: Trigger Happy Interactive
Resident Evil is my de facto favourite horror series, and there, too, the fear doesn’t come strictly from its mutated abominations. It’s how Capcom use pace and stakes to create discomfort. When you are down to your last six pistol bullets and Nemesis rolls up on you with a bloody bazooka, the fear mounts through sheer pressure alone – and the threat of this low-poly pink Shrek in a trench coat killing you when you haven’t saved in an hour is terrifying.
Total Chaos is not as intricately designed as the original Resident Evils. Few games are. But it captures something of that same discomfort. That feeling of never being safe, no matter how well-armed you become. No mean feat, considering its origins as a Doom 2 mod. The moment you grow confident in your abilities, developer Trigger Happy Interactive throw an encounter at you that reminds you that you’re out of your depth, human, and the stack of lead pipes you’ve been hoarding are no match for the 8ft spider monster that shrieks like an infant and has been doggedly following your scent.
