"Don't move when their hearts beat..."
GTFO is a first-person co-op horror shooter developed by 10 Chambers Collective, an indie company with 10 core developers and a few dozen employees in total founded by Ulf Andersson, who previously founded Overkill Software of PAYDAY: The Heist and PAYDAY 2 fame. Players control a group of prisoners sent down into a deep underground facility of unknown origin, by a mysterious entity called The Warden, to fulfill various tasks (such as recovering ID cards or starting a reactor). Complicating matters are the "Sleepers," strange humanoid monsters who are agitated by light and noise.
The game released on Early Access on December 9th, 2019. Prior to that, the game had a closed beta period where you would be able to sign up as an "ambassador" and get a key for the game to test it and iron out the bugs. The game left early access and saw a full 1.0 release on December 10th, 2021.
GTFO has examples of the following:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Warden is implied to be some form of Artificial intelligence, and the intro sequence shows it overriding a security measure so it can send four mentally unstable prisoners into the complex.
- A text log recovered during Rundown 6.0 (XXX-4-WRDN.LOG) strongly implies that the Warden is the result of someone or something hacking into and messing with the BIOCOM Digital Intelligence that Kovac installed to manage security in the Garganta facility, and turning off all of its safeguards. BIOCOM was also responsible for controlling Kovac's security personnell, in a manner identical to the way the Warden uses the Prisoners.
- Alternate Universe: The Alt rundowns are heavily implied to be occurring in a parallel universe from the original rundowns. The Alt version of one of the final rundowns has your characters stumbling upon the corpses of alternate versions of two of your team members from yet another alternate universe.
- Action-Based Mission: Almost every mission you go in will force you to fight a Horde at some point, thanks to how many of the doors have alarms on them. Failing to drive them off or be well prepared can lead to a quick Total Party Kill.
- Action Commands: The "reconnect" missions will require you to restart a reactor, which attracts waves of awoken Sleepers that you need to fend off. Periodically, one of your team will have to run back to the reactor terminal to input a security verification code to keep the process from resetting.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: As the game avoids a grindy progression system like the Payday series has, instead your reward for successfully completing all Expeditions in a Rundown are unique clothing cosmetics that let other players know you've managed to do so.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- The tops and bottoms of all staircases are marked with warning paint, letting you easily distinguish if the upcoming ledge is safe to traverse or will lead to massive falling damage.
- Because bots are not intelligent enough to stealth properly, they don't alert untriggered Sleepers. The flip side of this is that they don't attack Sleepers unless you've already hit them with an attack (to prevent you from exploiting this to clear a room), so you'll sometimes find them standing still allowing triggered Sleepers to wail on them until you intervene.
- Checkpoints in general upon the full release of the game is this as previous Rundowns had no checkpoints whatsoever, meaning that a level that can take hours only for a Total Party Kill had to be done all over again.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: All HEL weapons fire high-energy lasers that pierce targets, letting you kill multiple enemies with one shot.
- Artificial Human: The mysterious "strangers" mentioned in some of the audio logs are indicated to be vat-grown artificial humans (not copies/clones, more like a new species) created by Kovac as a replacement for its current brainwashed Boxed Crook program, due to being able to be manufactured much more quickly.
- Artificial Stupidity: Bots are at least functional but are deliberately undertuned and not intended as a substitute for human players, and many levels are not intended to be completable using only the bots, unlike bots in games like Left 4 Dead or Aliens: Fireteam Elite which are decent enough to allow you to play through the entire game solo on Normal or even Hard. Not only can they not split focus and complete multiple objectives at once (which is at least understandable, as most bots in this genre can't), which many levels require, but they're also subpar in combat, often hesitating for a good second or two before shooting each individual enemy even in intense firefights and often making poor target prioritization choices. The bots also immediately fall to pieces the instant you the human player get downed and are out of the fight. On the whole they're meant to gives solos a taste of the game's gameplay rather than allow them to play through the game entirely, or to fill in 1 or 2 open slots if you're unable to put together a full team of 4 players. This is further compounded by the game's lack of built-in matchmaking; unless you have friends to play it with, the game outright tells you that you're expected to put a party together through social media channels.
- Attack Its Weakpoint: Every variety of sleeper has a weak spot that does additional damage when shot. They also all take bonus damage if struck from behind.
- Titans take bonus damage to the head, but the head can be destroyed without killing the body if the shot wasn't powerful enough!
- Tank enemies are massively resistant to attacks that don't hit the boils on their rear, requiring players to flank it.
- In R6D1: Nemesis, the Kraken can only be hurt by shooting glowing tumors on its enormous surface. The monster is so tall the players have to climb to different elevations to get clear shots.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: In Rundown 6, during the "Nemesis" mission, you visit the alternate dimension, and fight a boss battle against a skyscraper-sized column of flesh and tentacles that exhibits physiological similarities with the Sleepers, appearing almost like the Dead Space Necromorph Hivemind.
- Awesome, but Temporary:
- Fog Repellers are invaluable later in some missions, where the fog can be so dense you won't see anything without it. They don't last forever, though.
- Yellow Syringes causes all melee attacks to deal triple damage for a few seconds.
- C-Foam grenades whenever they're available in a level are very useful for players who did not bring a C-Foam Launcher. They can barricade doors and hit groups of sleepers when thrown at their general direction. They also spawn sporadically in a level.
- Ax-Crazy: Humans that are removed from Hydrostasis without being given an injection of Hydrokinetic Fluid suffer neuronal collapse and become insane and violent.
- Back for the Finale: In Rundown 8.0 the Kraken returns in the Golden Ending final level, "Release" (R 8 E 2), serving as a Final Boss for the game.
- Battle Theme Music: Whenever a horde is triggered. It can actually be a useful indicator of whether or not you're still under attack.
- Body Horror: The Sleepers are grotesquely distorted, naked human bodies.
- Bolivian Army Ending: The Valiant Ending in Rundown 8.0, which concludes with Schaeffer sending your team to the Valiant Chamber excavation and KDS Deep, only for you to discover it's a bombed out hole. Your team is then swarmed by endless waves of sleepers, including multiple Tanks if you somehow manage to hold out long enough. Death is inevitable, which leads to a unique game over screen that remarks on the futility of your efforts and then rolls the credits.
- Boom, Headshot!: Played straight with a shot from the sniper rifle where it can One-Hit Kill everything but the Tank (due to its weak point being the back and it has several amounts of hit marks) and the Nemesis enemy in R6D1 due to it being a gimmick boss where players can only hit certain spots one at a time in the head. Averted with most other guns where shooting off the head isn't enough to kill even the most basic sleeper, catching new players off guard.
- The heads of sleepers add a multiplier to any incoming damage, allowing stronger weapons to kill very efficiently. Weaker weapons still get the multiplier but have a change of destroying the head without killing the sleeper.
- Boring, but Practical:
- The Bio Tracker can only track enemy locations and highlight ones that are active with a red dot and can have a red triangle indication if they're active and the player has scanned to ping the enemies. It won't kill enemies but it will definitely allow players to know if there's a group in the fog or pitch darkness.
- Glow Sticks allow players to see in the dark without turning on the flash light as the light from glow sticks do not wake up sleepers, even when thrown at them.
- Boxed Crook: Players are condemned prisoners who are being used as cannon fodder by the Warden to accomplish objectives inside the infested complex. Subverted. The Hydrostasis pods erase long-term memories, so many of them are civilians that KSO/The Warden abducted and brainwashed.
- Checkpoint Starvation: Played straight during its early access, alpha, and beta phases but averted upon the game's full release. These are indicated by blue circles and if all players die, the host can then just load back up to the checkpoint instead of restarting the entire level again.
- Color-Coded Multiplayer: Each player has a color assigned to them that can be seen on the map or by their silhouette.
- Combat Resuscitation: Standard fare for a co-op shooter. Made even more difficult by how quickly you can die in this game.
- Competitive Balance: All weapons and tools in the game have their advantages and disadvantages and players would need a variety of tools to overcome the game as a team. A few examples include:
- For melee weapons, the sledgehammer is a Jack of All Trades that does deal the most damage compared to the rest of the weapons. The spear meanwhile is slightly weaker than the sledgehammer but can reach far, making it safer to kill scouts; however, its disadvantage is that players sprint slower while charging the weapon. The knife has the fastest charge time which is perfect for horde events; but its range is very short and players have to aim for the head to deliver a One-Hit Kill as it does deal the weakest damage. Finally, the bat can open padlocked chests without charging and easily staggers enemies.
- For ranged weapons, the stronger the weapon, the lower the ammunition reserves. The inverse is also true but it's useful for staggering enemies especially when they come in groups.
- For tools, the auto sentry has the weakest damage but has the highest ammo count. The burst sentry deals better damage but its ammo count is slightly lower. The sniper sentry can one shot even scouts but it has the lowest ammo count and its rate of fire is very slow. The C-foam launcher allows players to foam the doors and floor without having to find a C-foam grenade. The Mine Deployer can destroy multiple amounts of enemies in one go but it has a low count and can One-Hit KO a player if the mine detonates near the player. Finally, the Bio Tracker can only detect enemies but it doesn't need any tool refills.
- Context-Sensitive Button: Holding E can be used to refill ammo, open containers, pick up objects and revive teammates.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Later chapters gradually push the story into this territory, as the extradimensional nature of the NAM-V contamination (Sleeper infection) begins to show itself, and how in every single dimension it's present inside it becomes the dominant force over all life, with no known way to meaningfully fight back.
- The Coup: Santonian Mining Company built Garganta as a combination mine and research lab, hiring Kovac Security Operations to provide physical and digital security for them. Kovac moved in a huge amount of weapons and officers then annexed the facility piece by piece, murdering or capturing anyone who tried to stop them.
- Cut and Paste Environments: Much of the complex looks samey. Likely a deliberate choice to make unaware players get lost easier.note
- Doomed Protagonist: After completing a mission, surviving prisoners are given an evaluation; one of the metrics is "Infection Level."
- Dug Too Deep: As revealed in some of the logs, Garganta started as an enormous Iridium mine until they discovered "The Fossil", an enclosed biome containing alien life forms located over 1.5 kilometers down. This includes the sleepers and the infection that creates them.
- Dynamic Loading: The Uncomfortable Elevator Moment at the start of every mission.
- Early Game Hell: Averted and played straight. Unlike other Overkill Studios games (from which 10 Chambers Collective was created), there is no equipment grind, all weapons and equipment are available to you from the start, so if you don't have high rank friends to carry you, you don't have to fail the first mission a couple dozen times to eek out enough xp for the perks and guns needed to beat it. That being said, the levels are still
Nintendo Hard, though learning to beat them is at least only a matter of getting good at the game rather than mandatory xp grinding for equipment and stats like in PAYDAY: The Heist, PAYDAY 2, or Overkill's The Walking Dead. - Enemy-Detecting Radar: The Bio Tracker can be used to see enemy blips behind walls and doors, and can tag moving enemies (ie, scouts and hordes) to keep track of them.
- Extradimensional Emergency Exit: The final goal in Rundown 8.0 is to achieve this towards a dimension lacking the NAM-V pathogen, all while the Garganta Complex is enduring a core meltdown that threatens to kill the players.
- Fighting Irish: Hacket.
- Fog of Doom: Though all missions have fog, some missions have infected fog that will kill you if you spend too long in it.
- In later levels, there is also The Mother, which will flood the room with fog and start spawning hostile babies when agitated.
- Fun with Acronyms: The title stands for "Get The Fuck Out".
- Giant Mook: There are both melee and ranged Elite Zombie variants of the basic Sleepers; they're twice the size of a human being and serve as "tanks" being able to survive significantly more damage than regular Sleepers, while also dealing out much more damage as well. Then can even survive having their entire upper torso blow off, with the legs continuing to attack.
- A God Am I: During one of his audio logs, Dauda makes a frenzied and guilt-ridden variant of this statement ala J. Robert Oppenheimer, calling himself a "dark god" for his part in unleashing the Sleepers.
- Golden Ending: The Release Ending in Rundown 8.0, which concludes with the prisoners using a portal to get the fuck out of not only the Garganta facility but their dimension entirely, arriving at a world that hasn't been infected by NAM-V, and if it is Earth, it might not have had the facility site dug at all. As the protagonists exit the teleportation chamber they're in, they find themselves outside any interiors, on a cliff inside a lush forest, overlooking many mountains with the sun in view, and then, over a loudspeaker, the voice of Dr. James Durant, one of Garganta's scientists, can be heard telling them that they are in a restricted zone and to not move due to local traps, leading to the credits scene.
- Guide Dang It!: At no point are the game's many unique mechanics explained in any way in the game itself (which is pretty important, since beating a level is virtually impossible without knowing what's expected of you from the game itself). The only way to know how to play the game is to watch multiple videos on youtube explaining how to play. The full release, thankfully, included a tutorial that took you through the various basics like how to use melee weapons, how to avoid being detected, how the doors worked, and how to use tools.
- Hell Is That Noise:
- The rapid, throbbing heartbeat a Sleeper lets out if it detects movement. You have to stay completely still until it calms down or you risk waking up the entire room, so hearing it will definitely spike your blood pressure.
- Also worth noting is the high pitched whoop that Scouts make when something touches their feelers, since it means they will imminently shriek and release pheromones summoning a horde.
- As of Rundown 7, a new group of sleepers spawning will produce a distant scream. Player characters are so unnerved they will comment on it.
- Implacable Man:
- Most enemies will continue attacking even after their heads, limbs and even torsos are destroyed, much to the surprise of new players.
- The final mission of Rundown 7.0, E1: Chaos, features an invincible variant of the Tank enemy that will pursue you throughout the entire level. As you can't kill it, you can only run from it. A coordinated squad can have 1 player run it in circles while the other 3 accomplish objectives. God help you if you try to face it solo with bots.
- Insecurity System: The complex's security systems are very obtuse (requiring several biometric scans in different locations to open a locked door, needing to input a password every few minutes to restart the reactor) but don't seem to have been any help in preventing the Sleepers from nesting in it and presumably killing everyone on site.
- Interface Screw:
- Being infected causes your vision to swim, which can make it hard to read terminals or other text.
- The Warden sends new orders to your character's masks via a holographic HUD. This can sometimes receive random garbage if the Warden suffers an error.
- Suffering the effects of a Pouncer's grab covers your screen in writhing tentacles until it wears off, leaving you deliberately disoriented.
- Jack of All Trades: The Assault Rifle that has existed since the pre-Alpha release has been the most consistently average primary gun a player can have. Fully automatic, decent magazine size, decent magazine reserves, decent damage, decent range, and low recoil.
- Land Mine Goes "Click!": The Mine Deployer allows players to put down mines with infrared lasers that only detonate when a sleeper triggers it. Players can also obtain a C-Foam trip mine that shoots C-foam when tripped and a one-time use explosive trip mine.
- Maximum HP Reduction: The gimmick of the second Rundown, "Infection", involves a downplayed version of this. Certain enemies, environmental hazards and consumables cause an infection meter to rise, which also causes players' health to decrease down to a certain point equal to how infected they are. While players aren't prevented from healing past this point, it's effectively useless since their health will drop regardless. The only way to lower infection levels is through disinfectant packs or if players are lucky, a disinfectant station.
- A Million Is a Statistic: The Warden's Twitter
outright says that he's condemned over 600,000 people to their deaths by sending them in the complex. One has to wonder how the whole place isn't lined to the ceiling with corpses or impenetrable if the implication that the dead can be transformed into the monsters. - More Dakka: A number of weapons allow players to shoot lots of bullets per magazine, though they don't deal that much damage. They're great for staggering groups of enemies however.
- Multiple Endings: Two of them, though both are canon, just occurring with two separate versions of the protagonists.
- The Valiant Ending (E1): The team is led to a dead end by Schaeffer (actually their alternate counterpart), from where there is no way out and Sleepers never stop coming. Eventually their resources will fully deplete and larger enemies come, resulting in their inevitable deaths.
- The Release Ending (E2): The team finishes all preparations for the Matter Wave Projector and use alternate Schaeffer's instructions to find and teleport to a universe free of the NAM-V pathogen, where they shortly after find themselves on a cliff inside a lush forest, overlooking many mountains with the sun in view, where the voice of Dr. James Durant, one of Garganta's scientists, can be heard telling them that they are in a restricted zone and to not move due to local traps.
- No Range Like Point-Blank Range: The Scattergun is very effective at close range and can kill most bosses, but it's useless at long ranges.
- Not Using the "Z" Word: The enemies are reanimated human bodies which attack in a mindless frenzy when disturbed, but they're Sleepers, not zombies.
- Later logs and lore imply some are not made from human bodies, instead growing in cocoons or walking in from another dimension.
- Offscreen Teleportation: Sleepers will always spawn 2 rooms away from the party's current location when an alarm begins. There's no animation for it. Logs imply that many sleepers can do this by travelling between dimensions.
- Ominous Fog: Tons of it in every level, to the point that Fog Repeller is a common utility item. Some levels involve activating ventilators that change the elevation of the fog, which can cover or uncover other parts of the level.
- People Jars:
- Tons of them are around the facility, showing preserved plants and animals that are being studied by scientists in Garganta. A log in Rundown 7 says that Dr. Hammerstein, head of the project and a narcissist, ordered them to be displayed everywhere to "inspire" the workers.
- The HSU tanks are used to store people long-term, suspending them in water and partially turning them into plants to avoid aging, hunger, or disease.
- Permanently Missable Content: Once a particular Rundown event ends, its special weapons and level gimmicks are inaccessible for good. Averted in the 2022 update, with the old rundowns being slowly added back into the game, where they will be permanently available with no expiration date.
- The Plague: Rundown 7.0 has a log describing that the NAM-V virus has wiped out one third of the population of the United States and is still raging, with the host of State of Truth encouraging people to abandon cities and hide in the wilderness. Its relationship to the sleepers is currently unclear. Further logs reveal that NAM-V and a parasite called Parasitidae Garganta have evolved together as a symbiotic pair, and are responsible for creating the sleepers as well as the creatures seen in the other dimension. The parasites incubate NAM-V and NAM-V gives the parasites the ability to mutate their hosts into assorted monsters to further spread the infection. NAM-V by itself can also act as a more conventional virus even without the parasites.
- Resources Management Gameplay: Ammo is scarce and you can't carry very much of it on you, which heavily necessitates the frequent use of stealth and melee attacks. Healing items are likewise quite rare, and you'll likely spend the majority of each mission at least partially injured.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: The Shotgun does not have a lot of ammo but can kill groups of enemies at close range. The Choke Mod Shotgun sacrifices damage for fire rate. Finally, the Automatic Shotgun Sentry is lethal at close range when placed behind a door that sleepers will break through, though the Sentry has been removed as of Rundown 4.
- Sprint Meter: In the form of your character's Pulse, displayed above their health. Sprinting will make your pulse go up and eventually cause you to slow down, while combat will send it sky-high and slow you down considerably as an anti-kiting mechanic.
- Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: In general, whenever players get to a room that has a lot of resource lockers and resources, expect a gimmick where the players have to survive hordes and hordes of enemies while completing a new objective.
- R6D1 gives out a lot of resources at the tail end of the first part where players have to reactivate a reactor just like R1C1 (which is the precursor to this trope for the game in general), and at the last portion of the level where a different dimension provides players with an enormous number of ammo and medipacks, which becomes quite necessary when needing to kill a Kaiju.
- Sniper Rifle: Available as a heavy weapon in all rundowns. It fires too slowly and takes too much ammo to be used during alarms, but it is valuable for killing larger sleeping enemies. If you are far enough away, the gunshot won't even agitate the other sleepers (unless they're adjacent to your target).
- Third-Person Person: Dauda occasionally refers to himself in third-person.
- Took a Level in Badass: The Machine Gun in the first Rundown used to be considered as the worst special weapon in the game due to its low magazine capacity (25 shots per magazine for a gun that's fully automatic), the awkward charge time before firing the weapon, its long reload time, and was generally outclassed by almost every other weapon. While the awkward charge time still persisted, starting from Rundown 2, the weapon got buffed from 25 shots to 50 shots per magazine, allowing players to truly spray and pray plus its drop off damage point was increased.
- Uncomfortable Elevator Moment: Every mission begins with you emerging from your stasis pods, strapped in to a harness, and being literally dropped down into the abyss. It is definitely a jarring experience the first time it happens.
- Unfriendly Fire: While players cannot melee each other, ranged weapons from guns and sentries can damage other players. A mine can also One-Hit KO a player if they're caught in the blast radius of the mine.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: In Rundown 8.0, when following the original Schaeffer to the Drainage Chamber, where the alternate, saner Schaeffer is located, players can activate the chamber before the former kills the latter, taking out both of them together in the process despite having no reason to kill the alternate.
- Violation of Common Sense: In Rundown 1, despite the fact that it makes a really loud sound, one of the best ways to kill a Scout is to use a Mine Deployer and let the Scout walk towards the mine. The resulting explosion will not alert the rest of the sleepers in the area. This has been fixed in succeeding rundowns where the mine will wake up any sleeper in the area, though it's still useful depending on the situation.
- Was Once a Man: Some Sleepers have the atrophied remnants of human faces on the sides of their Vagina Dentata mouths, showing that this is their nature. You can also find human corpses in the complex that appear to be mid-way through the process of becoming a Sleeper. Worst of all, as detailed under Doomed Protagonist it's implied that the player characters are infected to a degree.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: The mission objectives from the final levels of Rundown 6 seem to imply one of the Warden's ultimate goals is attempting to retrieve data for a cure to the Sleeper virus from the depths of the Complex; said virus has possibly exploded into a global pandemic on the surface. Then again, the Warden once had you rescue a baby only to have you suck out its brain to use as a CPU one Rundown later, so you can't really take its motives or goals for granted.
- Wham Episode:
- In Rundown 5 you can find audio logs revealing the past history of the four amnesiac protagonists.
- Rundown 6, which came with the game's full 1.0 release, seems to clarify exactly what's going on to a decent degree: The Corporation has been drilling into the meteor crater in search of ancient alien artifacts, one of which allows teleportation to another dimension. Said dimension is occupied by at least 1 massive skyscraper-sized creature with physiological similarities to the Sleepers, hinting that the other dimension is the source of the parasitic virus.
- In ALT://Rundown 6.0, Schaeffer's journey eventually leads to him discovering a few truths behind the Warden, revealing that it is part of an alien faction known as "The Collectors", which seeks to find a dimension free of the NAM-V pathogen.
- In Rundown 8.0 the existence of alternate timelines enters plain view, resulting in both the teams of the original and alternate rundowns being playable. It also fully shows how far has original Schaeffer's sanity fallen, leading to his prisoner team betraying, and out of self-defence, killing him. It concludes with the original team teleporting to a universe lacking the NAM-V contamination, where it is discovered that they might not be so alone.
- Who Needs Their Whole Body?: It's possible to reduce a common Sleeper to its legs and one arm and still not eliminate it as a threat. The larger variants can still attack after losing everything above the waist.
