I haven’t written about GTFO in a while. We’re still playing it once a week to varying degrees of success. Sometimes it’s fun and sometimes, sometimes we lose, and sometimes we feel like we’ve wasted 2 hours of our night. For the most part it’s fun hence why we’ve played it for 6 months now.

This will be our groups third rundown together and there’s a good chance we’ll make it to the bottom this time. That’s because this run down brings some difficulty scaling with bulkheads. Instead of each level having a flat difficulty, bulkheads let you choose which degree of torture you would like to inflict on your group.

With the difficuly slider compes a new way to unlock tiers of the rundown as well. No longer do you need to complete each level in a tier to unlock the next. Now, you need only need to clear enough levels on the required difficulty. For example, Tier C is unlocked after doing 2 High Bulkheads and 1 Extreme bulkhead. You can only complete one bulkhead a level so if you really hated a level you could skip it and do another one on a higher difficulty. At least this is how I think it works I can’t confirm until we do an Extreme Bulkhead.

I think this is awesome. I know GTFO is a “hardcore” game but it’s nice to have a bit of a choice on how “hardcore” we want to be. It would be great to at least see all of the levels in a rundown without getting carried through by one of our friends who is much better at progressing.

So far we’ve completed A! and A2 on the high difficulty. It was noticeably easier. We got to the end and were expecting the worst when the level just ended. We were all in the lobby saying “That was it?” So far we’re thinking A2: Foster will be the level we go for the Extreme bulkhead.

But just because it’s a bit easier doesn’t mean RNG and sloppy play still won’t end your run. This week we did B1: Malachite. You’re tasked with putting batteries in power supplies. There’s also thick fog accross the whole level. Once someone finds the fog turbine, you’re down one man in fights if you don’t want your whole party infected.

I’ll admit, this week I played badly. I kept alerting whole rooms on accident either stumbling into enemies or forgetting to turn off my flashlight. That lead to us using more ammo than we needed to. But the bad ammo spawns also didn’t help. We made it through to the last alarm door on the level and only found 2 ammo packs.

In the end, we ran out of ammo and couldn’t clear the second to last alarm door. Here’s to hoping next week turns out better.