Barotrauma Dev Tracker

Yeah, if you don't need more reinforcements mid-round and don't mind waiting for the next round, it may be better to wait. You never spawn as a new character unless you specifically opt to create a new character in the tab menu.

The developer (it's actually just one guy!) of Hidden Deep had chosen that artstyle and the game was already pretty far along when he signed the publishing deal with Daedalic. And to my knowledge the similarities between the games are a coincidence - it was already in development before the first versions of Barotrauma (then Subsurface) came out.

But Barotrauma still had some role in this, Daedalic might not have picked it up if we hadn't introduced the game to them and if it wasn't for the similarities to Barotrauma. :)

Looking at the comments here, seems that there's quite a lot of confusion regarding the rules for respawning. I think we need to revisit them and/or communicate them more clearly.

Whenever you die, your skills drop (to be exact, a 75% drop towards the baseline of your character class). If you opt to spawn mid-round in the respawn shuttle, you also get the "Reaper's Tax" affliction which reduces your skills and health until healed at an outpost. The affliction is intended as an additional cost for respawning mid-round - otherwise you would essentially be able to get endless free reinforcements during the round.

So in other words, dying always comes at a cost (a heavy reduction to your skills). Respawning mid-round also adds Reaper's Tax on top of that.