I have to turn the generator back on after that crazy priest guy shut it down. He said he wants me to witness something. I don’t want to witness anything, I want to get the hell out of this freakshow. Using my camcorder’s night vision to see, I creep around a corner. My goal stands in the middle of a utility room, beckoning me forward with its little light glowing in the absolute darkness. I creep forward to the device, intent to turn it back on and get the hell out of here and send in the national guard to take care of this horror house. Things are never that easy, though, and I need to prime two alternates before I can get things working again.
I move to the room on my left, finding the right button to press and head back out to go to the next. Movement catches my eye, and a figure stands in the doorway leading back out of the utility room. I try to move quietly, but I feel the figure getting closer, and I panic and run, turning corners and jumping barricades, blindly heading into the darkness.. I don’t know where I am heading, I just need to get away, but he is right behind me.
I try to open a door, but it’s locked. I’m trapped. The figure chasing me will get me for sure. But where did he go? He was right on my heels. Maybe when I hurdled that barricade he lost me. I slowly retrace my steps. The camera battery is dying, this incessant beeping telling me to change them. I can’t, though. I need to escape. I turn the corner, and he is right there in my face. I scream, and then the battery dies completely.
I press escape and quit the game. My desktop’s blue glow returns me to reality and I once again feel safe but my body remains tense, and I am breathing in short gasps. I feel uncomfortable as I get up from my computer desk and begin to pace around the room attempting to loosen myself up. If someone came into the room and yelled boo right now, I’d probably have a heart attack. This is what Outlast did to me, and it did so on numerous occasions.
Outlast, the debut game from developer Red Barrels, is, without a doubt, the game horror fans have been waiting for. Set in an old mental asylum managed by a slippery corporation, players take on the role of journalist Miles Upshaw as he investigates a report of criminal misdeeds at the facility. The investigation quickly takes a backseat to escaping from the terror that dwells within.
Mental hospitals are by their very nature unsettling places, and Outlast accents this feeling of natural unease by making the asylum a massive labyrinth filled with dark corridors and escaped patients that may or may not be out to hurt you. Enhancing the natural horror elements even further is the incredible sound design, and listening to the game using surround sound headphones is a gloriously scary experience. Is that whispering I hear down the corridor? Was that a footstep behind me? More than once I quickly turned my character around scanning the area for an indication that I was not alone.
Outlast’s setting and sound design are truly top notch, but the game needs to immerse the player into the setting to create the desired effect, and this comes from some truly superb first person game design. Much like in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Outlast players can’t fight back against the enemies, and their only hope of survival is being able to quickly get away from trouble and hide from it when it gets too close. Hiding is simple, and the game directs you fairly early on to what can and cannot be used for cover. Enemies can find your hiding spot, though, especially if they watched you crawl into that locker or under that bed, so speed often becomes an absolute necessity in escaping enemies and getting to a safe out of sight place.
With an environment littered with debris and obstacles, maneuvering around it quickly needs to be effortless, and thankfully, Outlast pulls this off. While the speed of traversal isn’t quite as fast, comparisons to Mirror’s Edge are warranted because there is a sense of weight and being to Miles’s traversal that doesn’t exist in many other first person games. Simple touches, like seeing your hands on a wall as you squeeze between close structures, do a lot to put players into the role of Miles. And because of this, very quickly into the game I didn’t think of the character as Miles; it was me, and as such, the terror on screen was much more easily transferred.
All of these elements combined make for a terrifyingly fantastic playing experience. I would get so tense during sessions that I had shut the game down multiple times just to collect myself. And as a horror game, I don’t think higher praise actually exists. However, during these moments of reflection away from the game, Outlast’s flaws came bubbling to the surface.
Objectives are overwhelmingly similar, often being a combination of go to X location and do two or three things before being able to move on. Despite their creepy appearance, enemies aren’t particularly dangerous, as Miles can take a fair amount of damage before succumbing to death. And they are also extremely predictable in their behavior, following a pretty set AI script that can be easily exploited, provided you don’t panic. The game relies a bit too heavily on jump scares and shock value for its horror, and the narrative is utter nonsense with the worst and least scary moments of the game being whenever a scripted story sequence pops up. Still, when in the experience of playing the game, these faults and issues were inconsequential to me because the game succeeded in scaring me enough that I didn’t care about them.
I did, however, care about the atrocious final section of the game leading up to the extremely cliched and unsatisfying ending. For four hours, the game built to an exciting climax, and you reach it, satisfied with your experience only to be thrust into a new, less appealing environment, against a new, less terrifying enemy where you spend 30 minutes running around doing the same mundane tasks you’ve been doing the entire game, but this time it’s evident. And worse, it just isn’t scary or fun.
Most of Outlast is scary and fun, though. And outside of the ending, it is smart about how it manages the horror. Obviously this game won’t be for everyone, and even some horror fans might not be able to stomach it (the game has an excessive amount of gore), but for those looking for a truly legitimate scarefest, Outlast is a game that needs to be experienced.
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