Despite this being a lauded title with a honorable spot in many top 10 horror games, I mostly walked away from it feeling pretty "whatever" about it. There are some things it does really well and perhaps if this were one of my first horror titles instead of, (according to my attempt to shelve by genre on Grouvee) my ~110th, it would've been pretty terrifying. Still, I think alongside 2010's Amnesia: The Dark Descent, this game had a lot of impact on the first-person horror genre in a lot of ways that are still recognizable even now, a decade later.

The gameplay of Outlast is not combat-oriented and you don't really have any tools to fight against the monstrous people around you. Most of your advantage comes from the fact that the camcorder you can use in the dark has night vision, allowing you to be much more sneaky in dark areas and avoid detection from enemies who are very close. This can also be effective to ratchet up the tension when you're slipping right by a big bad dude mere feet from you who doesn't seem to know you're there. Most of the gameplay centers on stealth or running past the enemies and hiding where appropriate. While I tend to only like games like this on the occasion, I think it did a decent job with this and while I found toggling the camcorder a little annoying, the mechanic does add something to the equation. If I'd played this at release, it probably would've felt especially novel.

The horror is in my opinion pretty hit or miss. The game is generally pretty popular and I expect I'm the minority on this but it just didn't land for me. There are definitely parts that are pretty unsettling. Much of the game insists on being over-the-top and pulling no punches, for instance, modeling every nude mutated monster man's limp penis if they're not wearing clothes, and never shying away from extreme gore to fit the brutality of the mutated victims of the asylum. While sometimes this was effective, I found most of it a little too over-the-top for me to take seriously. This is also a bit uncomfortable since while the game makes clear that these monsters are not just "crazy people," but victims of a maligned influence, the game definitely is cashing in on the whole problematic "asylum full of scary mentally ill people" horror vibe. While the story attempts to subvert this trope to an extent, it is very much still present and relied-upon.

All in all, I think the game is pretty well done for what it's aiming at. I simply am A) not that into what it's aiming at; and B) have seen too much since its release like it that it fell flat for me. Still, I think there's an extent in which Outlast goes beyond even the games that have come since and some of it managed to be novel even in my much-later playthrough. I also weirdly kind of appreciated that the game is pretty straight-forward about where to go (just "FOLLOW THE BLOOD") so I wasn't too caught up by difficult or confusing sections that might've slowed down my progression enough to get bored. I think that's an important feature for these "haunted house" type games that are more about the experience than riveting gameplay mastery. So while I had many issues with the game, I still enjoyed it some and can appreciate some of its novelty in a "for its time" sense. For those reason, it's probably better than a lot of 2-star games I've played, but I don't think 3 stars would be justified given my particular experience with Outlast.

Synopsis:

In the remote mountains of Colorado, horrors wait inside Mount Massive Asylum. A long-abandoned home for the mentally ill, recently re-opened by the “research and charity” branch of the transnational Murkoff Corporation, the asylum has been operating in strict secrecy… until now.

Acting on a tip from an anonymous source, independent journalist Miles Upshur breaks into the facility, and what he discovers walks a terrifying line between science and religion, nature and something else entirely. Once inside, his only hope of escape lies with the terrible truth at the heart of Mount Massive.

Outlast is a true survival horror experience which aims to show that the most terrifying monsters of all come from the human mind.

Pros:

• Lots of Jump Scares
• Detailed Graphics
• Soundtrack
• Interesting Main Story

Cons:

• Repetitive

Scores:

• History - 7.5/10
• Music - 8/10
• Graphics - 8.5/10
• Contents - 8/10
• Gameplay - 7.5/10

Final Opinion:

Of all the jump scares I have had in horror games without a doubt that the outlast is the winning by having several jump scares in a short time. It is undoubtedly a tense game that breaks down what power to play when the player tries to dodge the patients with mental problems from every corner of that wonderful world.

Hide and run is what the player can do throughout the game as he discover the horror in the massive mount asylum.

The various scenarios that the player can find throughout the game are beautiful and with enough detail but for some missions the choice of scenarios becomes a little disappointing.

I think that Outlast is one of the best visual and sound level (I played The Dark Ascender, because friends they said it was a scary game, but compare with the Outlast, it’s just a little baby). Dynamic lighting and surround sound make for an optimal combination that brings the game experience to the limit. Each uncharted space or port leads the player to wonder if he even want to explore the darkness. The small details like a trail of bloody footprints after passing through a pool of blood demonstrates how real the place is.

The model of the characters in the game, which seem terrifying in the distance, lose all the terror by approaching us more closely are not so bad. There were times I wondered if that patient was not the same one five minutes ago when i ran away from him to process with the story. This may have happened a few times that I noticed, because I’ve been busy running away from maniacs in other times.

The impotence that Outlast gives the player to survive, relays the primary tools, runs and hide. On many occasions there will be a maniac who wants the “company” of the player, so he will have to run along the corridor chosen one of the unexplored doors without idea what may be there, luckily or by chance may have a closet to hide from the persecutor, causing adrenaline. Not to mention he pursuers open the doors of the closets as well as destroy the doors of the rooms looking for the player.

What can help the player in this situation? The camera of course. With night vision built on the camera is a good tool because many asylum sites are bathed in darkness. Seeing the world through the night lens creates a tension since it requires batteries to function. The batteries can be found in various places.

Being spared on resources in this game is critical because otherwise the player will not see a shit on places bathed in darkness.

What I did not like very much in the game was in certain parts that have to run to that window or breach that is confused with the scenario, the player will ends up dying often because it is not obvious where he have to go. Not forgetting also the repetitive / boring process of progressing (enemy + hide + see which route + wait + object) in the story.

But put it aside, the long periods and tense exploration in asylum reward for a well written and disturbing story. Several documents, research that can be found in the asylum help the player to understand the tragic history of the tormented patients.

To conclude this game is more than approved to be played, whether alone or accompanied, the experience is the same, scary as all hell. But beware the most scary monsters are those that you can not be killed and hide in the dark …. waiting for you when you least expect ….. Ahahahahaha

So I do recommend it.

Note: 7.9/10

After Carrion and KONA, Outlast was the first game I played as part of my all-horror month that was unequivocally horror, which along with the high praise it has received since its release meant I was really excited for my playthrough. And while the game was able to deliver on a couple of fronts, the overly formulaic nature of its gameplay loop left me thinking this was, ultimately, a wasted opportunity in the genre.

I’m certainly not discarding Outlast’s achievements as an experience, the main ones being, to my eyes, its visual and audio atmosphere. The game is a great example of how to use both effectively: there is an uncompromising commitment to repulsive and disturbing imagery, which is actually refreshing to go through in 2021 given today’s artistic expression constraints. For anyone who has seen Grave Encounters, the parallels are obvious, both in the night vision style and in the actual setting. But Outlast takes it further in how graphic and gory it can get, and here, the Whistleblower DLC gets particularly 'aggressive'. Additionally, whether it’s texture quality or lighting, the game just looks amazing, especially considering its indie nature and year of release. In the survival horror genre, these aspects are particularly important due to how directly they affect your level of personal investment, and the devs did a phenomenal job here. The sound effects are equally impressive and very fitting, except for those moments when they opt for an absurdly over-the-top music explosion in order to artificially intensify its many jump scares (I’ll get to those in a moment). Another strong aspect is the fact that you have no means of fighting back (having instead to rely on stealth, hiding and running), as this greatly contributes to a sense of tension - if not necessarily horror - throughout your entire playthrough. Even though this is far from the highlight in the genre - the obvious examples of games that did it better before or since are Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Alien: Isolation -, it is still a decently implemented mechanic that works well enough in Outlast at least for your first run, despite the AI being overall on the weak side.

The game’s drawbacks, however, even if there aren’t that many of them, are significant enough to bring the game down in quality. The biggest issue is how formulaic the gameplay loop feels from start to finish. Structure wise, there’s very little you’ll do or see that you won’t do or see in the first half hour or so, essentially: go there, things go wrong (fair enough, lots of games do this), go somewhere else, avoid a scripted enemy encounter, press/turn/collect two or three of the same thing in order to activate a third, escape a scripted enemy encounter, rinse and repeat, all the while facing a ridiculous amount of jump scares. Which to me is another one of the game’s main issues: even though I find jump scares can be quite effective when used logically and sparsely, Outlast simply relies on them way too much for the technique to achieve the intended effect. After a certain point, you become so desensitised to it that it ends up becoming nothing more than a nuisance. The story, as well as quite a few game segments and enemy encounters, falls short of feeling coherent or fleshed out. There are some aspects in it that don’t seem to make sense even with a fair dose of suspension of disbelief - eg why would you spend such a big portion of the game looking for Father Martin and blindly doing what he says when he’s clearly a lunatic that can easily be tricking you? Why is the Walrider, an otherwise incredibly powerful and lightning-fast creature, so incompetent whenever it tries to kill you? Why do enemies take so long opening doors that you don’t lock, but merely close? To me, aspects such as these hinder the immersion that the game is trying to deliver. Finally, as far as the narrative goes, even though the science part of it may justifiably feel far fetched to some, I actually think it’s the (being overly cautious and adding spoilers to this next part but all of this is pretty obvious from the beginning of the game) cult aspect of it that could do with a bit more development. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere so I may be alone on this opinion, but the conclusion of the game’s ‘religious’ tale felt a bit anti-climatic, and somewhat disconnected from the other half of the story the game is attempting to tell.

All things considered, Outlast is an interesting experience, boasting a couple of tricks up its sleeve that rightly became influential over the years in games that follow a similar formula. That said, its significant shortcomings make a dent on your enjoyment of the game as a whole. A 6.5 out of 10 mirrors my overall impression after playing it. There’s certainly no better time to try this game than October, and if you’re into jump scares you might be in for a treat. For everyone else, even though I still think it might be worth trying Outlast for yourself, you might come out feeling somewhat let down, especially if this isn’t amongst your first survival horror rodeos.

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.

This title is a first-person survival horror game that quickly became a modern benchmark for the genre. The MC is called Miles Upshur, who ventures into the remote and foreboding Mount Massive Asylum after receiving a mysterious tip about unethical experiments. Armed with nothing but a camcorder, Miles must navigate blood-soaked corridors, avoid deranged inmates, and uncover the horrific truth lurking within the facility.

The game’s most distinctive feature is its commitment to vulnerability, there are no weapons, no combat, and no way to fight back. Instead, survival depends on running, hiding, and conserving battery power for the camcorder’s night vision, which adds a chilling green tint to every shadowy encounter. The sound design amplifies the terror, with distant screams, echoing footsteps, and heavy breathing pulling players deeper into the asylum’s suffocating atmosphere.

Visually, this game delivers claustrophobic environments dripping with decay and dread, enhanced by realistic lighting that makes every flickering bulb a source of anxiety. While some of its scares rely heavily on repetition and jump shocks, the sheer intensity of its pacing and the oppressive tone sustain the fear throughout. As a debut title, it excels at delivering pure, adrenaline-fueled horror, a raw and terrifying experience that lingers long after the screen goes dark.