If you, like me, love to get together with your friends and scream, have I got a game for you. Murky Divers follows the vein of Lethal Company to deliver a bit of co-op horror that you'll enjoy very much (while doing some screaming). Murky Divers has been hanging around in early access for about six months now, but with its 1.0 launch this week has taken off to very positive reviews—93% of recent ones on Steam.
In Murky Divers you and your friends are a team sent in to clean up evidence of illegal experiments (and attendant monsters) deep beneath the waves. Piloting a submarine together, you move between the wrecks of undersea facilities cleaning up... well, "proof," but mostly the dead bodies of PharmaCorp's prior employees.
The labs themselves are, of course, filled with hazards caused by stuff breaking and also a host of really gruesome underwater monsters of various origins. That's complicated by the underwater nature of it all: You only have so much oxygen before you have to return. Every second matters when you're outside. In what is now genre tradition, every round you survive lets you pick up new gear to get better and bigger returns on the next go-round. Or, you know, increasingly goofy cosmetics.
What's very cool about Murky Divers is that it also has a whole submarine piloting minigame built in. Your sub has various jobs that the players must share. The pilot is effectively blind, so needs the sonar operator to look out for obstacles and incoming giant sea creatures.
The complexity of submarine piloting only increases as you add more players. One or two people can operate a mini sub, but three and four people move up to a medium sub while five to eight must use the largest size submarine.
The 1.0 release brought with it extensive difficulty settings for custom servers alongside new creatures and an entirely new "lab" biome which includes something called the Copycat that can mimic your proximity voice chat. Big no thanks on that one.
You can find Murky Divers on Steam for $8, or on sale for $6 until January 2.
