Hands on with GTFO Rundown 8.0 “Duality” — The final update, available now!

There are roughly 10,000 games released on Steam every single year in the past few years. That’s nearly 30 games or more every single day. It’s very easy to miss good games, even great ones, and if a game doesn’t click immediately, you might not make it back before your attention is consumed completely. GTFO was one of those games for me. I played it a bit early on, but the completely unforgiving nature brushed me back, and I just didn’t get back to it for the 1.0 launch. Recently I got to play Rundown 8.0 (the team at 10 Chambers calls their major revisions “Rundows”) – the final update for the game, and one thing was immediately clear.

I missed out on something amazing, and I needed to rectify that immediately.

10 Chambers was founded in 2015 by Ulf Anderson and a small group of veteran game makers who wanted to take the industry back to a time when teamwork mattered more than anything else, and where player cooperation delivered success. They also wanted to make a game that would be a challenge every time, and one where players could once more feel the elation of victory over seemingly insurmountable odds. Welcome to GTFO.

If you are unfamiliar with the setting of GTFO (and yes, it does stand for exactly what you think it does), the Chicxulub crater (a real-world crater that was formed 66 million years ago by an asteroid strike that resulted in a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.) now has a prison of sorts built on top of it. The prisoners “volunteer” to go down into the crater to scavenge for strange objects that lie below. Dropped as a team of four, they encounter odd sleeping monsters that lie waiting in the dark. The Warden’s demands continue to grow, and in this latest update, we’ll see the biggest challenges to date – retrieving something called a “Matter Wave Projector”. Could this finally be our chance to escape, or is this just another convoluted plan that’ll thwart us once and for all?

I got to play the newest update with the developers, and wow does GTFO live up to its co-op hardcore roots. As our drop pods hit, we were almost immediately beset by sleeping creatures near every door. Carefully and slowly we approached them. When they begin to notice you, they undulate and make an odd hurking sound. Continue to move and they’ll begin to glow red, immediately setting on your position, alerting everyone in the area. A fully-charged strike to the head will obliterate them, killing them instantly and hopefully quietly. We’d need every advantage as ammo, health packs, turret supplies, and literally everything other than enemies are in very short supply. I could tell you all about it, but how about I simply show you the first mission in this newest Rundown. Enjoy!

I have to say, for my first rundown, I think I did pretty well. Sure, it does help having the team that literally created the game on your six, but I’d like to believe they didn’t have to carry me too much. While this may be the final update as the team shifts full staffing to their newest project, they’ve also re-trenched their previous rundowns. The previous method was a touch of FOMO as they would remove the previous rundown in favor of the new one. As of today, you can play all previous rundowns in their entirety. As the team expressed to me – “No DLC, no Microtransactions, No math fuckery”, which is an approach I can get behind. You buy it once and you get all the content, full stop. At this point you’ll have nearly 80 expeditions at your fingertips, and frankly, that’s a whole lot of scary, tense, and immensely rewarding experiences.

GTFO is now feature complete, allowing the team to also consider bringing the game to consoles. Fingers crossed for you PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S folks as this is one you won’t want to miss. Somehow I did the first time around, but I’m happy to say that it’s something I can rectify.

GTFO Rundown 8.0 “Duality” is available right now – stealth dropped at the TGAs. Enjoy!

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