GTFO

2025-02-25

Review

Believe it or not, the title means what it means. This game is named after the acronym, though the 'fuck' in 'Get the fuck out' is never said out loud. The title honestly does a poor job of describing the game proper, but, you're here, you're reading this review, and that means you'd like to know more.

I'm writing this review slash musing after 220 hours of playtime throughout the latter half of the game's active lifespan.

On the surface, GTFO is a cooperative, Player-vs-environment first person shooter, made by 10 Chambers You play as a part of a team of four prisoners. You have a Warden, an unknown force that gives you objectives that you must fill out.. or die trying. Your objectives lie in the depths of a huge underground complex. The main obstacle between you and your goals is a horde of monsters.

They're called 'sleepers', because they operate on an alert system. The most common kind are simple to grasp. Disturb them, they start pulsating. A visual and sound cue for you to stop. If you ignore it, they wake up, If you're lucky, you can kill them fast enough to not disturb any others. If not, a single sleeper can wake an entire room of sleepers up. Once awake, they immediately rush towards you and attack. A single screw up can send dozens your way at once.

What I described could be a spin on the usual zombie shooter, think l4d, back 4 blood or killing floor even.

Thing is though..

Would you believe me if i told you that getting past the ones littered throughout the levels is the easy part?

Whatever got you into the terrible predicament, seems to have had consequences beyond just you and also it seems to have happened a fair bit of time ago.

You don't immediately notice this, but.. every single piece of kit you bring with you into the complex is.. aged. Well maintained, but worn. You are dirty. The complex is best described as dilapidated, and all of this extends into how you sustain yourself during the levels.

That is to say, resources are scarce.

The easier few levels always give you enough to feel satiated. The later levels, however, actually, really, no joke, require you to make every. single. shot. count.

I am not joking. I say this after two hundred hours of play time. If I take more than two shots to kill a basic enemy with my revolver, I actually get dissapointed at myself.

These are the stakes that GTFO sets out for you.

This is a game that requires absolute cooperation from a team of four.. A single mistake can screw everyone over. A mis-management of resources can leave you unable to fight back a wave of enemies. A screwed up kill of a specific enemy that I've decided to not spoil can end a run, where runs tend to last for at least an hour.

To put it shortly, if you want to succeed at GTFO, you will need four people who are capable of:

Which is what makes this game such a polarizing recommendation. If you want to enjoy GTFO, you are going to want to have a good, reliable group of friends who are willing to go through thick and thin with you and with each other. On top of having to buy the game four times, even if you manage to get it on sale.

I gotta say, getting four people who happen to know each other also be interested in playing this very difficult game is rather unlikely.

On the other hand, nothing, and i really mean this, nothing can compare to the feeling of having a well-oiled group of friends beating a difficult level in-game, seeing the coordination myself and my friends put on display just to get to the next challenge actually puts me in awe.

There is an official discord community set in place to remedy this, and people do actively use it, so, if you really want to find a group of folk to play with, the official channel is your best bet.

Moving onto another aspect i'd like to cover. The enemy design of this game is brilliant. I pointed out earlier that you can put sleepers in an alerted, or pulsating state if you disturb them. It acts as a 'red light' to tell you to stop.. well.. walking or shining lights onto them, otherwise they will wake up.

But here's the kicker: sleepers can pulse independently of each other. An inexperienced team can actually get 'stun-locked' by the sleepers if they get too tunnel-visioned on maintaining stealth.

The entire alert system is built to encourage timed, coordinated strikes on the enemy (I forgot to mention that the optimal way to dispatch sleepers is through the use of a melee weapon, which is both quiet and does not use up ammo).

What's even better is that there are larger sleeper variants. They deal more damage, have a larger hitbox and have more health.

Usually, a single sleeper can be dispached via single melee strike to the head. Not these guys.

They require a full, coordinated strike from four people at the same time to be taken out stealthily. Or so the developers make it seem. When we started out, one of the most memorable experiences I ever had was spending hours upon hours trying to get through a level where it was a sea of these large sleepers, and every single one of them was a game of patience and tension.

That is, until we found a better way. It required far more trust, attention and coordination, but it was both safer and faster. A team of two can effectively take out a single large sleeper by aiming for their weak spots and applying optimal timing in between strikes to maximize the amount of time that the sleeper spends stunned (a state in which it cannot strike back, nor can it call for other enemies, despite what the sounds it makes suggest).

This same method can be made more redundant by having three or four people perform the timed strikes.

Now that i think about it, it kinda reminds me of those videos online of traditional mochi making, where two/three artisans beat the treat into a desired consistency with a lot of force.. and perfect timing.

That just covered the nuance of a single unusual enemy type that can be found within the game. Thing is, both the developers and me are deciding to treat the rest as spoilers, but, just so you know, EVERY enemy type has this amount of depth that can be found within.

Gaining the soft skills needed to beat them all with efficiency and safety is what makes the difference between burning out at the mid-tier levels and actually being able to make it to the end of a level set.

Onto said level sets. They are called rundowns. The game used to have this very neat system where a single rundown was .. an ephemeral thing. You got a set of hand-generated levels and objectives, you ran through it, and a few months later the old levels were gone with the wind, and a new set of levels took their place. That was that.

After a few years, the developers got tired of that scheme and just ended up releasing everything they made (with minor updates) at once. More power to them. The current game offers a solid .. 80-100 hours of raw playtime, to go from 0 to 'seen what the game has to offer entirely'.

I wish i could tell you that every rundown is great, but, honestly that is not the case. Everything up to the 5th rundown is actually really well polished, nearly flawless.

But the quality obviously starts to degrade from the 6th rundown onwards, and this is most apparent on the 8th and final rundown. Any new assets they cooked up for the final content update of the game were.. terrible. Rooms with holes in them. Stairs going nowhere. Inexplicable gaps. Furniture-less interior design. Something I'd tolerate from an indie game, but something that i wouldn't accept from a studio who has shown that they can do better, even in the same game!.

It's almost like you can see the burnout reflected in the game itself. I don't blame them. The studio moved on to cooking another co-op title, and it seems that they are putting their best foot forward on that, while presumably leaving the final update for this game to some intern or somesuch.

The last thing I want to cover here, is the atmosphere. Again, GTFO is unique in what it provides. Just watch the trailer (yt). No game that I know of comes even close in portraying the sheer desperation here. This isn't a metro series game, no such thing as a light at the end of the tunnel. You, the player.. are not surviving. What you find on your way from one task to the next is barely enough for you to take another step.

The levels feel.. stuffed, dusty, dilapidated and dark. There is no such thing as a way out. You are truly stuck in the deep. Every time I fought back against sleepers, I felt like I was doing it because I was backed into a corner. Every single victory is immediately followed up by a challenge that feels more insurmountable.

I wish I could better describe this facet of the game, but I'm not that good at writing yet.

All in all, I don't know if I can recommend GTFO. It has a high upfront investment of both time and money, if you don't have a group of friends who are willing to commit to the game, then you will also have to go socialize with strangers as well.

However, if you are able to get past that hurdle, and if you all have enough determination, GTFO is one of the most rewarding cooperative experiences out there.

Incoming: [changelog]