Co-founder and game design director Hjalmar Vikström on making horror a service

GTFO is out of Early Access, but there’s still plenty of monstrous evolution in store for the game and its players. Game design director Hjalmar Vikström (right) talks grinding, tabletop influences, and COVID parallels.

How do you retain atmosphere and surprise for players who’ve sunk many hours into GTFO?

We just believe in changing things up. We treat GTFO as almost like an old-school roleplaying game where we’re the dungeon masters, and, well, maybe that’s not a good analogy, but we throw a wrench into the machinery to see how people react. What if we put in this new feature? Or this new enemy? One of the reasons we made the expeditions the way we made them is that we as developers wanted a game that can surprise us. Because if you work on the same level, the same expedition for three years, you learn it by heart, and it’s not really scary any more. It’s not really challenging. But by creating a game where we can change things up, as we do with new expeditions, with the new rundowns and some randomised elements – that’s the most awesome feeling when I jump into an expedition I haven’t played before, and even though I worked for years on this game, I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know where to go. We recognise that each rundown will naturally taper out in interest, so we want to give new experiences to players regularly.