Outlast 2 was… fine? With an emphasis on the audible pause before ‘fine’, and the question mark at the end, as if it’s an incomplete statement, or I’m proposing something rather than stating it. ![]() As a result, Outlast is a game that isn’t exactly original, or groundbreaking, or… any of the positive words that you would generally use to describe a genre-busting game that defied all expectations and delivered a strong thematic message in a uniquely artistic way, but it is a really, really, really good horror game, because the environment and characters and soundtrack and sound design are polished to hell and back. Artistically, it’s on the same level as Five Nights at Freddy’s – the first game, not the franchise – only if anything, FNAF might hold an edge because even when it was a single game, it held an impressive amount of background lore, whereas Outlast is very straightforwardly a ‘trapped in a spooky asylum, hunted by the crazy inmates, watch out for the jump scares and look forward to the three minute explanation at the end as to why this is all happening!’ experience.īut if anything, that worked in the developers’ favour, because Outlast is, at its core, what happens when a group of people take a bunch of tired, clichéd horror tropes, and instead of spending all of their energy subverting them for the sake of creating something smarter, spend their time absolutely refining the hell out of what made those horror tropes successful in the first place. Outlast is one of my favourite guilty pleasure games – I even wrote an entire big wordy thinky ‘Look Ma, I’m a real journalist!’ piece about Outlast and Ableism – and the reason I call it a guilty pleasure is that it’s not particularly… smart about anything that it does.
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