This is equal parts a reflection on horror games throughout the 2010s as well as a review of Outlast. Playing Outlast for the first time, it stirred me to contemplate on the climate it released in and why I took so long to play it. Skip to the seventh paragraph for the review.
The early to mid 2010s was a dour time for Triple A horror games. Resident Evil's gradual pivot towards action-oriented gameplay brought about the train wreck that was Resident Evil 6, EA's meddling caused the Dead Space trilogy to fall flat on its face, and The Evil Within failed to live up to its spiritual predecessor (in all fairness, developing a horror game as earth-shaking as RE4 is about as likely as Jeff Bezos having a soul). There was at least one hopeful glimmer in 2014, when P.T. trojan horsed its way onto Playstations, unveiling the triumphant return of one of horror's most beloved franchises, Silent Hill, helmed by auteurs Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima. But like a carrot on a stick, Konami dangled that wet dream in front of every horror fan's face only to yank it away. A Silent Hill pachinko machine presented as a consolation, a fitting gravestone for Triple A horror as gamers knew it.
There are a few exceptions, of course. None can doubt the critical and commercial success The Last of Us franchise has maintained, for example (though I admittedly was fatigued by the zombie craze at the time of the original game's release. I'll get around to the series eventually.). Another bright spot during this period was Alien: Isolation, faithfully replicating the 1979 film's analog futurism like no Alien game before or after. The Sevastopol capturing Ridley Scott's vision, from its industrial exterior, to its sterile laboratories, to its chunky-buttoned computer terminals. Most impressive, those at Creative Assembly forged gaming's fiercest AI yet, as their xenomorph dragged gamers into a brilliant, heart-pounding game of cat and mouse. That game, however, was not without its pitfalls. The most glaring to me was the padding that stretched the game's length too thin. What could have been a tight, gripping dance between hunter and hunted soured by bloated monotony. All considered, such games remained high points among their mediocre Triple A peers.
As Triple A studios failed to chart where the horror genre ought go, the indie space thrived. In-fact, the strengths in Alien: Isolation could be attributed to trends set by the smaller projects before it. Those like Frictional Games's Penumbra and Amnesia: The Dark Descent, defined by Frictional as "first-person adventure" games, for they stripped the player's ability to fight. Powerless against the various entities one encountered, the player relied on their wits to navigate the foreboding dark. Hiding, puzzling, and fleeing for survival. While not strictly original to Frictional, the decision to design their games in such a way was a bold rejection of the action elements that superseded the horror in horror games from the late 2000s into the 2010s. By striking players at their pressure points, by emulating that deep-seated terror of being so powerless that one may lose themselves to malevolent unknown forces, Frictional tapped into a fear passed down to us by our primordial ancestors. The industry eventually caught up to what Amnesia, P.T., and other smaller projects were going for. Horror's essence rediscovered, to its roots the genre returned.
I'll admit that, back when I was a teenager and games like Penumbra, Amnesia, Outlast, etc were coming out, I had little interest (hence why I played Outlast about ten years after its release). I grew up with Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and the likes but the newcomers weren't it for me. My reasoning at the time was shallow. I saw a bunch of let's players playing the games on YouTube. Their thumbnails eye-catching, oft depicting the let's player whilst in seizure. These thumbnails clogged my YouTube recommendations. They made me mad. I watched a few videos anyway, stopping once I deduced that the let's player was prone to committing a noise violation at every fart of a rat. I wrote those games off as jump-scare YouTube fodder and returned to my jank-ass immersive sims which, as any connoisseur will tell you, is superior to all other genres. (Food for thought: can a game really be considered art if it does not require multiple fan patches to fix bugs, restore content, and make it compatible with contemporary operating systems? One person's pile of feces and glue is another's collage. And you best believe VTM:B is my Still Life with Chair-Caning.)
I DID play a little over half of Alien: Isolation (I put it down after that one part happened yet the game somehow had another ten hours left, according to HLTB.). I liked most of what I played but the filler was too much. I also loved Soma (I was not aware that Frictional developed Soma until I looked them up for this review. Huh). Though when I played Soma, I was the stereotypical sadboi™ college student who drank too much, read Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir at the school library (sometimes after drinking too much), and gallivanted from emotionally unavailable woman to emotionally unavailable woman. I'm actually convinced Soma was made exclusively for me. It's one of those "THAT guy" games. (To everyone who knew me back then, I sincerely apologize).
Aight, lets talk Outlast. It's good! Underrated, I dare say. It completely changed my mind on the whole "hide-and-seek" horror subgenre. In Outlast, the player assumes the role of Miles Upshur, a journalist who received a tip from one enigmatic Whistleblower, telling of abhorrent experiments conducted within Mount Massive Asylum. Miles infiltrates the asylum to discover a slaughter's aftermath. Blood smeared across the floors and walls. Scientists and security forces dangling from hooks like meat slabs at a butcher shop. The asylum's residents let loose, their bodies and minds twisted by the doctors' cruelty. Miles, armed only with a video camera and a notebook, must traverse the labyrinthian asylum in search of a way out, unraveling a sinister conspiracy in the process
Outlast doesn't do anything particularly groundbreaking. Its premise is standard horror-fare, its plot straightforward, its mechanics sparse. In a word, the game can be summed up as intuitive. It invoked a sense of familiarity that I'm sure was shared among other horror fans who've played the game. One may be reminded of the copious horror works that preceded Outlast, get a swift handle on how to circumvent the enemy AI and ration their nightvision's batteries. Still, the game doesn't pretend to be anything grander than what it is. A lean, competent experience with a few decent scares that had me captivated from start to finish.
Mount Massive Asylum oozes dread. Navigating its dark corridors, creaking open doors as I scavenged for documents, batteries, and items required to progress, rarely certain as to when something would lash out from the shadows. The asylum's residents lurked in abundance, even in the least likely places (which led to one of the funniest scares in the game for me, though I won't spoil it). Worse still is that not all of the residents were hostile. Those who did possess violent impulses were not necessarily blatant about it, striking at random provocations oft when the player was most vulnerable. These factors combine to forge a truly immersive experience, the player sharing in Miles's isolation and paranoia. Alone among the psychotic masses, becoming more like them by the hour.
My one critique of the asylum would be that the female ward...didn't have any women? Apparently there are at least two reasons for this. The in-universe reason being that the female patients experienced "phantom pregnancies" that killed the women, causing the staff to close the ward and focus on the male patients. the IRL reason is that the developers were reluctant to face censors and backlash for portraying sexual violence against women. The latter is totally understandable, it's just a shame the developers couldn't come up with something to include female variants while avoiding problematic subject matter (though that too may have created a dissonance, considering the sexual violence prevalent among the male prisoners). Female patients would've been a refreshing break from all the gangly, hairless, gentlemen-you-see-outside-a-7/11-at-3am-looking-asses who Miles mingled with up until that point. Idk man, the nurses in Silent Hill 2 were badass. Give me more of that.
Outlast features jump scares aplenty but I'd say they're mostly earned. The atmosphere, sound, and level design coalesce well into conflict, erupting in quick bursts of adrenaline. Sometimes in the form of the lizard-faced wall of meat that is Chris Walker bursting through a door like the the Kool-Aid Man, urging the player to cower under a bed. These scares weren't all cheap. I was impressed by how Red Barrels strategically executed jump scares in a well-paced manner organic to the setting. "Holy shit!" I exclaimed as that big bastard yoinked me out from a narrow passage and yeeted me through a window. But what else was to occur from that scenario? Such is life in a place where danger pounces on one so compromised.
As for the story, I'd say the way it was told was more intriguing than its actual content. I'd like to avoid spoiling too much, but the story draws from some real, dark experiments that happened after World War 2. Experiments that have been explored by various fictional works (Miles references one by name in a note), with a little originality in how they connect to the game's paranormal aspects. I was disappointed by the reveal near the end of the game (a certain individual residing behind glass), as it came too obvious. Reading through Miles's notes and the documents found throughout the asylum, I was curious to learn what was really going on, yet there was nothing deeper to investigate than what one could already glean from the game's earliest collectibles. Where the game could've made an interesting turn with its religious and supernatural elements, it veered to the most predictable conclusion. The Murkoff Corporation's shady backstory was neat. The documents on the experiments were effective in humanizing the asylum's patients. Yet the plot would've been enhanced by taking the history it drew from and using it as a springboard to new ideas. I still have the DLC and sequels to go through. Here's hoping that the first Outlast is the springboard.
Outlast is a decent horror game that released during an uncertain time for the genre. While not a trendsetter, Red Barrels took what similar works did before and produced a solid game. The passion the developers had for the game and the horror genre as a whole clearly shine through. I recommend any horror fan give Outlast a chance, even if one is hesitant of this weaponless, jump scare-laden subgenre. While I was initially turned off of games like Outlast, approaching it with an open mind led to a decent time. Obnoxious YouTubers may have turned me off of this subgenre at the jump, but I can now give them credit for exposing these smaller projects to a broad audience. I'm curious to see what the rest of the franchise has to offer.
