GTFO Rundown 8.0 Preview - A Swansong for 10 Chambers debut project

In an age where games that aim to stay relevant and economically solvent through recurring player engagement, it's both puzzling and refreshing in equal measure to hear developers use terms like making the players "suffer", and saying "don't buy this game". That's exactly the kind of rhetoric Swedish studio 10 Chambers have been using to describe their cooperative hardcore shooter GTFO, and by and large it seems to have worked wonders for the developer.

The game's celebrating its fourth anniversary since releasing in Early Access in December 2019, and it's two years since 10 Chambers considered the game to be feature complete and finished. Today marks yet another wild milestone for the game - an actual end. That's what they're promising with Rundown 8.0, which was just unveiled at The Game Awards, and which is available right now. Not only that, it's currently free to play.

The Rundown 8.0, named "Duality", will provide the game with a proper end to its story arc, but it also means that the game in its current state consists of over 80 expeditions, which amounts to hundreds of hours of content. While the initial idea for GTFO was to sunset old rundowns as new ones came in, 10 Chambers has been reintroducing older content for a while in order to jampack the game, and as a result, it's hard not to be impressed with this specific pitch; an unforgiving game demanding proper, real-time collaboration and communication of its players with no microtransactions or recurring user spending and offering up many, many hours of solidly crafted content. It's the quintessential Early Access success story.

Now, the details on Rundown 8.0, beyond the teaser you just saw yourselves during the show, are light, but the narrative about the mysterious Warden dropping prisoners into Chicxulub crater to extract mysterious artifacts from an abandoned research complex is an interesting enough set-up, that knowing that a story payoff is coming certainly will be enough to drive players forward. Additionally, the developers from 10 Chambers on hand at our preview event promised that said ending will be "suitably depressing", which does fit the style and tone of the game.

And indeed the developers chose again to emphasize difficulty, and that the game was not designed for mass appeal, but for a select set of "sadomasochistic" players willing to endure the slow, methodical and often pressure cooker-like conditions of a typical GTFO mission. As stated in the opening above, it continues to be refreshing to see both a clear vision for what the game should, and shouldn't, be, and also that it never can, and will, appeal to a broader range of players.

Speaking of a broader appeal; console editions? Where are they? Sticking to that particular mantra, the developers, or more specifically Creative Director and CEO Ulf Andersson were brutally honest, and suggested that they are "thinking about it", and did confirm that it's "doable". Whether or not the studio itself will work on such versions? See, that's another story entirely.

10 Chambers was originally founded by Ulf to host just... you know, 10 chambers, 10 offices and 10 employees to keep the studio agile and creatively interesting. But the studio has since grown to over 100 employees, and while Ulf admits that "he failed", he did so with a big smile on his face, because while that initial idea wasn't sustainable, that only became the case because GTFO became a success despite it's rigid creative vision, and it's insistence on being difficult and player-unfriendly. This all culminates in Rundown 8.0, and while it isn't the end for GTFO, it does feel like the swansong for a project that's very easy to defend, and very, very hard to criticize.