YMMV / Barotrauma

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Are the Husks unfortunate victims of a deadly parasite? Or are they willing carriers of the parasite to spread it from place to place?
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Generally averted by means of complications. As an example, autopilot can be used to get your sub from one city to the next with minimal problems. However, the autopilot will take the relatively safest route, not the shortest (meaning you'll use more fuel), and the underwater caverns are full of ice spires, which will scramble the autopilot and prevent it from moving properly.
  • In the Legacy version of the game, the Endworm was much slower and could not directly attack divers. Because of this, getting out of the sub and stabbing it with knives was the preferred way of taking one out for many players.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Husks are only a small part of the game, but they are one of the most remembered creatures by players due to their creepy design and ability to start a plague by infecting members of the crew.
  • The Endworm. Look up Barotrauma on YouTube. You will inevitably find one video about the Endworm.
  • Traitor Mode is entirely optional, but some players consider it to be a core part of the game's identity.
• Game-Breaker: The Assistant's Stand and Deliver perk allows you to grant any crewmember 4 points in every skill after a mission. That alone is pretty powerful. However, there is no limit on how many assistants can take this perk, meaning you can theoretically hire 10 assistant bots and gain a whooping 40 skill points every mission. Moreover, if you take this perk, chances are high that you also take the Apprenticeship perk, which gives you a 20% chance to gain the same amount of skill that any other character gains, meaning the effect of Stand and Deliver can grant skills to all 10 assistants at once should they have this perk. What's more, all assistants can in turn take the Clown route, which in this game means getting access to superpowers like damage resistance and complete immunity to water pressure. That's right, you can build a whole crew of superhuman clowns that become exponentially stronger after every mission.
  • The old version of Graduation Ceremony from Assistant was incredibly overpowered. You could prestige your character, carrying over all levels to a new one, with an increase in max HP based on how many levels you had. You could even prestige back into Assistant. As many times as needed. Then, max out the old Clown path once you're finished. You now have water pressure immunity, 50% damage reduction, and potentially thousands of hit points. You could be tossed to the Endworm and used as a chew toy and come out of it in one piece. And all this before armor or gene splicing.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Endworm is a gigantic, alien worm that comes out of fucking nowhere to completely destroy your submarine. You'll most likely either die or be forced to flee.
  • On a similar note, sinking to the abyss for whatever reason is a death sentence in the early game. Not only will the water pressure eventually destroy your sub, but the game will spawn a Super-Persistent Predator (like the afformentioned Endworm) to hunt you down. It's a desperate race against time to get the sub floating again before the endless depth swallows you whole.
  • The Husk's taking over the player is the very definition of And I Must Scream, both to the player characters, and to the players themselves. The slow process of becoming infected eventually culminates in the host collapsing and slowly losing health, being unable to move while this happens, and then the host dies... before suddenly jolting back to life, except now under the control of the parasite, ready to infect the other players so they will undergo the same painful transformation. The absolute worst part of all this? At 75% infection, you get a popup which describes the parasite blocking your throat with the proboscis used for infection, robbing you of the ability to communicate. Examining yourself with the medical interface at this stage of infection describes your character as feeling oddly at peace with what's happening to their body, even as they admit that they should feel terrified.
• Spiritual Successor: Takes heavy inspiration from Space Station 13. Both are multiplayer-centric roleplaying games with a focus on chaotic survival and crisis management, with a Social Deduction Game of countering the work of a saboteur among the crew (who often isn't even the most dire threat on the ship). Barotrauma directly homages SS13 by transplanting the Assistant class and the presence of obnoxious clowns.