Released on other platforms in November 2025, Total Chaos is an intriguing first-person survival horror in which you explore the mysterious island of Fort Oasis. Once a bustling community of industry, it’s since fallen into ruin, and it’s your job to explore the environment, piece together fragments of the past, and ultimately survive against the encroaching horror.
Born via a Doom II conversion mod from developer Trigger Happy Interactive, Total Chaos is a slow burn that encourages you to scour the environment for items, weapons, and notes. Emphasis is on survival, and you’ll need to not only keep your health full, but also make sure you’re eating to stave off hunger. Thankfully, you have a pretty hefty inventory, so it’s worthwhile just grabbing whatever you see lying around.
Throughout the environment are crafting benches, and here you can combine certain objects to make weapons or recovery items. They show up quite frequently, as do the manual save stations, so you’ll rarely find yourself lacking essential resources or having to reload to a much earlier save.
Though it’s a slow-paced experience, you’ll quickly come across waves of enemies on the island. Combat is fast and responsive, though there’s a jankiness that could do with ironing out. Swinging melee weapons or using ‘A’ to dodge will quickly deplete your stamina, so you’ll need to be strategic in how you approach each encounter.
What’s nice is an abundance of options when it comes to tackling the main game. You can adjust your inventory space to give yourself a little boost, or begin in ‘Tourist Mode’, which allows you to disable mechanics like weapon durability, hunger, and bleeding. Chapter select is also an option, but you’ll need to make sure you complete each at least once to unlock them.
There’s a lot here that directly speaks to me as a horror fan, and I wish I could say that I loved my time with Total Chaos, but unfortunately the visuals and performance severely dampen the experience. This is a Switch 2 title, but it feels like it was built for Switch 1. Visually, it looks muddy and lacks essential detail, especially in the outdoor environments. Some of the lighting effects are nice, but the overall brightness is way too low. You can crank it up in the settings, but then you completely lose the sense of atmosphere. Sophie’s choice.
Then you have the frame rate. Oh boy… You can choose between quality and performance modes, but neither feels particularly great. At a push, quality mode probably offers a bit more stability, but it still judders. Performance mode, meanwhile, hits that 60fps sweet spot on rare occasions, but you’ll find it struggles to keep up no matter what environment you’re exploring.
With a patch or two, this one could be worth investigating, but for now, maybe stick to other platforms.
