Submarine survival sim Barotrauma enters Early Access next month

Barotrauma, which is a bit like FTL with giant sea monsters, will enter Early Access on June 5, developers FakeFish and Undertow Games have announced.

You control one member of a submarine crew exploring the depths of Europa, a moon of Jupiter. You'll be mining resources, battling off hideous monsters and trying to repair your ship when it inevitably breaks. You can play it singleplayer with bots filling the other crew roles, but the meat of the game will be in multiplayer, where you'll work with friends or online strangers to survive.

Andy's preview from earlier this week is a good place to start if you want to know more: as he says, it could create some amazing stories if the devs get it right, and the creation tools—which let you create ships, missions and monsters—look robust.

The Early Access release date was accompanied by a new trailer, at the top of this pose, which runs through the game's features in detail. Some of the footage looks choppy, which is worrying, but hopefully the devs can sort out the frame rate before release.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.