Murky Divers

About Murky Divers

Murky Divers is a co-op horror game by the French studio Embers, based in Strasbourg. It came out in Early Access on Steam in June 2024, reached its full release there on 12 December 2024, and came to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on 30 June 2026. You work for Pharma Corps, and your job is to make its failed experiments disappear: dive to its abandoned labs on the ocean floor, remove every corpse, and destroy the evidence.

Each expedition starts in the submarine. The sub is blind, so the crew splits the work between a steering station, a speed control, a sonar scanner that finds labs and nearby contacts, and a station that identifies what those contacts are. Going full speed helps you escape but makes noise that draws the police. You can go alone or with a friend in the small sub, up to four in the regular sub, or five to eight in the large one.

At a lab, you pull the lever by the hatch and the clock starts: about eight minutes to shred bodies, plants and evidence, punch out computers and fill the compliance bar by the shredder before the police arrest the team. Oxygen refills only back at the sub, and the creatures inside are ready to kill. A diver who dies leaves a body that also has to be shredded, or your notoriety goes up.

Back on board, the credits go into a vending machine for items such as a shopping cart or a scooter, upgrades like see-through vision, body part detectors and a grappling hook, and modules for greater depth and bigger nets. Diving suits unlock as you complete missions, and beyond the labs there are special dive sites, such as a sunken ruin and a lost city.

The tone is darkly funny, with cartoonish divers, garish colours and a grainy, glitchy filter, but the store page promises an uneasy atmosphere and thalassophobia, and ComicBuzz's reviewers found the monster designs and distant screeches frightening enough to scream. It sits beside Lethal Company and Content Warning as a job-based co-op horror game, swapping their moons and caves for the bottom of the sea and a submarine that only works if the crew talks. It suits groups who like their scares mixed with chaos and voice chat.

How to play Murky Divers

1. Choose a submarine to fit your group: small for one or two, regular for up to four, large for five to eight.
2. Steer the blind sub toward a lab marked on the sonar, with crewmates calling out and identifying the contacts around you.
3. Pull the lever by the hatch to start the mission, then dive into the wreck before the timer runs out.
4. Carry corpses, plants and evidence back to the shredder and punch out the lab's computers until the compliance bar reaches its mark.
5. Get back to the sub before time is up, then spend your credits at the vending machine on items, upgrades and modules.

Tips

• Oxygen refills only in the submarine, so plan each trip into the wreck around a return.
• Keep the sub's speed under the noise threshold unless you are fleeing; full speed draws the police.
• If a teammate dies, bring their body back and shred it too, since leaving it behind raises your notoriety.
• There is no real tutorial: read the posters and sticky notes around the sub, which explain stations and keys.
• Stay within voice range of your crew; proximity chat means a diver who wanders off cannot be heard.

Questions