V.A.U.L.T. PROTOCOL is a six-player co-op extraction horror game about looting irradiated facilities to satisfy a perfect, merciless AI. Every item you grab and every noise you make raises the danger level, and the longer you linger the more the simulation sends after you.
If that sounds familiar, it should — this sits squarely in the Lethal Company and R.E.P.O. lineage. What our reviewers kept coming back to is how polished it feels for a launch-day Early Access title, and how much of it seems to have been designed by people who noticed what was annoying about its predecessors.
It Fixes Things Other Extraction Games Don’t
It’s not the only sanded-down edge. There are multiple save files, so different friend groups each get their own persistent campaign to pick up wherever you left it — which quietly solves the problem of coordinating one shared save across several sets of people.
The hub has a water cooler that restores health between runs, you can always punch things even without a weapon, and there’s a leaderboard — something our reviewer noted has quietly vanished from most modern games, and which gives the whole thing something to climb toward.
Deliberately More Forgiving Than Its Peers
Our reviewer put the philosophy well: it’s fine for a game to be hard, but it grates when a game is designed to kill you and makes the objective punishing at the same time. V.A.U.L.T. PROTOCOL throws plenty at you while keeping the economics generous, and the result is a game that stays fun after a bad night rather than feeling like lost time.
Don’t mistake that for easy, though. He initially thought it was undertuned and revised that view quickly — spawn pressure escalates hard the longer you stay, and there’s at least one siren-heralded creature that kills instantly when it finds you.
The Loop
Grab everything not nailed down across three procedurally generated maps — Hospital, Bunker and Factory.
Noise and time both increase spawns. The map gets deadlier the greedier you get.
Spend at the hub on stamina, health, regen, inventory slots and weapons. Stock rotates and goes on sale.
Get out before the simulation decides you’ve had long enough. Or don’t, and get poured into a new body.
The Anomalies Are the Reason to Play This With People
This is where the game earns its identity. Our solo reviewer — who explicitly prefers playing games alone — said this is one of the rare titles he’d rather play with a group, and the anomalies are why. They generate stories rather than challenges, and a story only really works if someone else was there.
The standout is the mimics. They copy your actual in-game voice, pulled from live audio, and start talking to your teammates in it. Even on push-to-talk, our reviewer heard his own voice used against him. It’s a genuinely unsettling touch in a game that’s otherwise mostly funny.
A Proper Bestiary
Mutant hearts can be harvested from kills for profit, which gives fighting back a payoff — though aggression also escalates the threat level, so it’s a genuine trade rather than free money.
The item interactions are similarly playful. Dice let you gamble an item’s value upward with a chance of exploding, hot potatoes damage whoever’s holding them, gas clouds can be launched at yourself by accident, and vehicles give you extra hauling space.
Where It’s Rough
The map-specific issues are the ones worth watching. Neither is a design failure exactly — the Bunker’s claustrophobia and the Factory’s sprawl are clearly deliberate — but both create friction that the Hospital doesn’t, and both would benefit from spawn tuning.
What’s Coming
Plus 2 unique new creatures and 10+ new anomalies with a codex to track them.
10 new shop items, 20+ new loot items with interactive objects, and pod upgrades with new defensive systems.
Base storage system, a casino with a slot machine, and a large character customisation expansion.
Player statistics menu, vehicle dump bed upgrade, plus a run of QoL and balance work.
That’s a substantial list, and notably it addresses the current content ceiling directly — more maps and more anomalies are exactly what a game like this needs to stay in rotation.
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
| The Good | The Bad | The Ugly |
|---|---|---|
| Anomalies That Make StoriesHalf the crew shrunk while the rest became giants; everyone but one player turned into dogs you could load loot onto. Mimics steal your actual live voice and use it on your friends. These generate the moments you retell later, which is the entire point of a game like this. | The Bunker Is a MazeSmall, samey rooms, loot that’s harder to find, and enemy spawns that turn oppressive in tight corridors. Deliberate claustrophobia, but it needs spawn tuning. | Only Three MapsHospital, Bunker and Factory is a reasonable Early Access foundation, but it’s the clear content ceiling right now. Two more are promised on the roadmap — until then, expect repetition. |
| Forgiving Without Being SoftDaily cumulative quotas you can front-load, power-ups that persist until you actually fail, recoverable traps and survivable turrets. It throws plenty at you while keeping the economics generous, so a bad night doesn’t feel like wasted time. | The Factory SprawlsEverything so far apart that traversal eats the run timer, with some genuinely awkward turret placements on top. The opposite failure mode to the Bunker. | Loot Thieves Are MaddeningShank cats and swarming squirrels do exactly what they’re designed to do, and losing a weapon out of your inventory to one is its own specific fury. Working as intended; still enraging. |
| Genuinely Considerate DesignInfinite flashlight and walkie, multiple save files for different friend groups, a hub water cooler, punching without a weapon, and a leaderboard to climb. It reads like a game made by people who noticed what was annoying about its predecessors. | Steam Deck UnratedValve hasn’t assessed it, so the store page says Unknown. The requirements suggest it should run fine, but there’s no verified badge to rely on. | It’s Early Access6–9 months planned to 1.0, and while the core loop is complete and polished, balance and content are explicitly still moving. Buy for what’s here, not what’s promised. |
The Verdict
V.A.U.L.T. PROTOCOL delivers chaotic co-op fun with its unique premise of looting irradiated wastelands while pleasing an AI overlord. What surprised us is how finished it feels for a game that launched into Early Access this week.
Our reviewer described it as having taken the best bits of everything, and that’s the fairest summary available. The extraction loop is familiar, but the sharp edges have been deliberately filed off — infinite tools, cumulative quotas, persistent upgrades, recoverable traps — while the anomalies supply an identity the genre’s other entries mostly lack.
The limits are Early Access limits. Three maps, two of which have spawn or layout friction, and a bestiary that will thin out once you’ve learned it. The roadmap addresses both directly.
The honest read: if you have a group and you liked Lethal Company or R.E.P.O., buy it now — the price is going up at 1.0 and ten dollars is already generous. Our reviewer, who genuinely prefers playing alone, said this is one he’d rather play with people. That’s the recommendation.
If you’re strictly solo, it’s still playable and the upgrade stacking is satisfying — but you’ll be missing the anomalies at their best, and those are the reason this game is worth talking about.
A polished, generous, genuinely funny take on a crowded genre. We’ll revisit at 1.0.
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