Outlast 2

[vortex]

 

[orcinator]

Thought they'd call it quits after the DLC given how worn out the Spooky Walking Sim genre has gotten.

 

[sexbad?]

It looks like it has a better sense of style, since the first one would typically cram three dicks, eight piles of bodies, and four cutscenes in a span of five minutes. I also think the spooky village can be a better setting, especially since it's still populated and not just everyone is trying to kill you like a typical zombie game.

I still doubt I'd like it, but it at least looks like they're putting more care and less EDGE into it. And that's saying something, since the video ends with a pile of dead children.

 

[vortex]

There are indication of some fantasy or psychological horror elements:

Spoiler

 

[vortex]

I think this was introductory level. I'm sure there will be classic Outlast feel.

In my turn I would like that player would have the option to play more defensive-offensive if he/she prefers that way with some better stealth.
In true horror survival you would feel the sheer fear but your basic insticts will tell you to put down live threatening enemies if you would find the way and the tools. Not just run and hide. Maybe some elements of Alien isolation would suffice.

 

[sexbad?]

The video linked to by anduin is a huge disservice to do their game, since Outlast is one of the rare horror games these days that isn't some retarded jumpscare fodder for oxygen thieves on Youtube. It rarely tries to startle you, and I think it works much better that way: you never panic but something is always off.

Did we play the same game? Outlast is full of tasteless trash horror, with tons of jump scare moments and no subtlety whatsoever.

 

[orcinator]

The video linked to by anduin is a huge disservice to do their game, since Outlast is one of the rare horror games these days that isn't some retarded jumpscare fodder for oxygen thieves on Youtube. It rarely tries to startle you, and I think it works much better that way: you never panic but something is always off.

Back in the day, I bought a bunch of "horror" games during a sale, and I had already lost all will to play them when I finally got around to do so. As a result, I installed them, played them for about an hour or two, then uninstalled them when I realised they were cheap garbage meant to be watched rather than played (in polite terms, I don't buy into that Youtube culture at all). So when I started playing Outlast, I was precisely expecting another Forest, Daylight, DreadOut, Five Nights, or any of the ten-thousand indie cow turds that have flooded the market these last years.

The thing is, that's not what Outlast is at all. If I were to play on semantics, I would say it has the basic decency to be an actual survival-horror game, i.e. it is a horror game in which the objective is to survive. It is not an adventure / clues-gathering game with some monsters here and there like Amnesia, and it is not a jumpscare generator like Slenderman, it is an actual full-fledged stealth-game with high production values. I usually hate games (or even single chapters) in which you must run and hide, but in this game you are given all the tools to do it very effectively, between smooth first-person awareness, quick movement, hiding spots everywhere (that the AI checks regularly, especially if they are alerted) and always a good idea of what you are supposed to do and why. That's exactly how you do proper difficulty, as evidenced by other intense but fair games like ArmA, Dark Souls or Ninja Gaiden: you don't die because you keep fumbling basic tasks, you as the player are always 100% in control, you just need do use your tools properly.

It is quite long and as a result the flaws in its writing eventually add up: there is only so many times you can use the "almost there!" false hope, and the gore feels overdone if you don't get why the game does it, but it is a quality game through and through even for people who like stealth more than horror. In no way, in absolutely zero way, is it some kind of retarded Youtube fodder for reaction videos.

Where's the Red Barrels dev tag.

 

[Cromwell]

I had to google outlast after you said it had no jumpscares, maybe I mixed it up with another game. But I was right it was tht abomination with the shitty filmgrain effect. I did not play it for long because but there was one moment that stuck with me and summed up wh I didnt like it. Somewhere in the beginning you go aong a corridor and two naked psychotic gay dudes come running at you, then theres bars between them and you, so the shock moment ended with the two naked gays growling at you from the other side of the bars and they dont move an inch. I got up and made me a coffe ten minutes later theyre still there looking at you and "scaring you to death".

I forgot about the rest of the game, I think there was some problem with the shadows, but I forgot what enraged me there. Game was really shit but I think people liked it.

 

[vortex]

Open environments, more varied gameplay, and a plot inspired by Jonestown.

https://www.wow247.co.uk/2016/06/01...ippe-morin-open-environments-less-repetitive/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown_conspiracy_theories
I would like to know does more varied gameplay mean player character can defend himself in some way.

 

[Zewp]

I had to google outlast after you said it had no jumpscares, maybe I mixed it up with another game. But I was right it was tht abomination with the shitty filmgrain effect. I did not play it for long because but there was one moment that stuck with me and summed up wh I didnt like it. Somewhere in the beginning you go aong a corridor and two naked psychotic gay dudes come running at you, then theres bars between them and you, so the shock moment ended with the two naked gays growling at you from the other side of the bars and they dont move an inch. I got up and made me a coffe ten minutes later theyre still there looking at you and "scaring you to death".

I forgot about the rest of the game, I think there was some problem with the shadows, but I forgot what enraged me there. Game was really shit but I think people liked it.

To be fair, those naked dudes had nice dicks. Even if they were butt ugly themselves.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

The video linked to by anduin is a huge disservice to do their game, since Outlast is one of the rare horror games these days that isn't some retarded jumpscare fodder for oxygen thieves on Youtube. It rarely tries to startle you, and I think it works much better that way: you never panic but something is always off.

Did we play the same game? Outlast is full of tasteless trash horror, with tons of jump scare moments and no subtlety whatsoever.

This is true, but it does jump scares better than any other horror game I can think of. And the night vision cam gimmick, while a total cliche in the realm of horror films now, worked really well. I enjoyed the game as a sort of low budget, grind house, horror show. At its best it achieved the frantic pacing of the last 10 minutes of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" for brief moments (until you'd hit a sequence where you'd die 20 times in a row and ultimately have to get past via trial and error and all tension would immediately give way to frustration).

I'm a sucker for survival horror, though. I really liked "Amnesia" too. Strangely, not "Alien: Isolation," though, which was overly long and had too many silly gamey elements to distract you.

 

[Ivan]

Frictional do subtlety much better, but I don't think RedBarrel is going for that, so you can't knock them for that if that's your thing. I think of Outlast as being a victim in a Halloween movie. Scripted as fuck but it's manufactured to make you feel tense. Thankfully it's quite short.

Haven't tried the DLC. that any good?

 

[udm]

I liked it more than the OC, but it's not going to change the opinions of someone who didn't like the latter to begin with. There are fewer "obvious" hiding spots, which is a plus for me.

 

[vortex]

Outlast: The Murkoff Account comic ready to be released
http://bloody-disgusting.com/news/3398196/outlast-comic-2/
http://www.redbarrelsgames.com/comic-books/

http://www.redbarrelsgames.com/download/Comics/OUTLAST_ISSUE1.pdf

 

[vortex]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1149400304/underscares-the-diaper-from-the-creators-of-outlas

After the release of Outlast 1, we received numerous reports of soiled undergarments and unprepared anuses.

So we, the team at Red Barrels, decided to come up with a solution that will let every gamer play Outlast 2 without worrying about their skivvies. Fear for your underwear no more with Underscares.
THE SCIENCE BEHIND SH*TTING YOUR PANTS

 

[vortex]

http://gematsu.com/2017/03/outlast-ii-launches-april-25

 

[Boleskine]

Review embargo is lifted.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/04/24/outlast-2-review

REVIEWED ON PC / 24 APR 2017
OUTLAST 2 REVIEW

Spoiler

A panic-inducing experience for hardcore horror fans.BY LUCY O'BRIEN
Not for the faint of heart, Outlast 2’s relentless scares, unforgiving monsters, and provocative meditations on faith are an anxiety-inducing but cathartic horror experience. While it suffers from a couple of pacing problems and some finicky navigation issues, its careful - and sadistic - manipulation of my fight-or-flight reflex had me experiencing an overwhelming sense of dread throughout, which abated only once the credits were rolling. The ending, however, stayed with me for days.

Outlast 2 benefits from ditching the somewhat tired mental asylum setting of the original and travelling the less-trodden road of the Sonoran Desert, where protagonist Blake Langermann is searching for his wife Lynn after crash landing in the cult-ridden Supai region during an investigative journalism assignment. Outlast 2 is deep South horror, but without the trappings of domesticity we saw in Resident Evil 7; Supai is untamed cornfields, dilapidated shacks, and – go figure – gory remnants of unspeakable religious rites.

It’s a lot more open than the original, which adds to an authentic horror experience. With multiple labyrinthian structures and outdoor environments like tall grass and rivers to hide in, it’s easier to simply run from enemies, but it’s also harder to see them coming. I felt constantly disorientated while blindly running to a half-glimpsed place of safety, and while this might look like bad game design on paper, it’s effective in practice when the goal is to create a sense of desperation. Developer Red Barrels has created a world where linearity exists but is deceptive, where each escape feels skin-of-your-teeth frantic thanks to smart world building.

Much of this comes down to Outlast 2’s use of lighting. You’re armed only with your camcorder’s battery-reliant night vision mode to make your way through the omnipresent darkness, and because you spend most of your time being chased at a clip you have to rely on the most basic of visual signals to stay on the right path. Here, fires, dim lamp-posts, and flickering fluorescent bulbs mark the way, but never obviously enough to dim your panic.

Overall, traditional video game elements in Outlast 2 have been kept to a minimum, which kindles the minute-to-minute sense that you’re surviving by your own scared wits with little to help you along the way. Bloody handprints indicate that someone has crawled up a ledge before you, for example, but you have to look hard to spot them. Batteries for your camera – Outlast 2’s most vital resource – are few and far enough between to be believable, but not to a crippling extent, as I was only without a handful of times. Mostly I just feared running out.

Even Outlast 2’s occasional puzzles, the most traditional staple in the survival horror genre, feel vital to your progress rather than busywork to keep you occupied. Turning off electricity and finding rope to access an out-of-reach area are not unfamiliar objectives, but there’s euphoria to be found in small conquests that inch you forward in the face of dozens of angry cultists.

The only real aspect of Outlast 2 that breaks the illusion of authenticity is Blake’s limited maneuverability. While making him move like an all-star athlete would go against the limitations that tend to define the survival horror genre, it’s frustrating how context-sensitive and inconsistent his movements are. Although he can jump across wide gaps if they’re there to be jumped across, he can’t leap over small objects on the ground, and while he can clamber over some waist-high obstacles, he can’t climb over others of similar height. Couple these limitations with your own frantic panic, and you’ve got a recipe for instant death when you run toward an obstacle that appears surmountable but isn’t.

The Evil Within
And you will very likely die in the 13-odd hours of Outlast 2, as I did multiple times. Like the original, you are completely (and let’s face it, inexplicably) unable to defend yourself, so fleeing or hiding from enemies are your only options. The garden-variety enemy - a mix of deranged and deformed religious cultists and “heathens” – are dangerous, but you can take a few knocks from them before you die and not all will attack if you keep a respectable distance. Among these, however, are a handful of creatures who pursue you relentlessly and kill you much faster – think the Xenomorph in 2015’s Alien: Isolation. These monsters – and one utterly terrifying human(?) woman – are faster and smarter than the aforementioned rabble, so while you can evade them for a while by hiding, they have a curious tendency of digging you out of your hole.

These enemies make for Outlast 2’s most frustrating moments, as your encounters with them tend to have instant-win and fail states, and therefore encourage dogged trial and error rather than on-your-feet thinking. Take the time I was being chased through an empty school by a creature with a lacerating tongue, for example: there was only one way to escape, but as it wasn’t immediately obvious to me, I died over and over again (complete with one tongue-through-the-crotch impalement) until the horror of the moment had entirely dissipated, and I was too annoyed by the creature to be afraid of it.

On the other hand, they also make for Outlast 2’s most frightening moments, as Red Barrels has built wonderfully creative scenarios around them to maximise their impact. Being pursued by the tongue creature in the dark in a labyrinthian library comes to mind, or slowly inching a cart forward that will allow you to climb over a wall to escape the Tall Woman while she gurgles her malicious prayers at your heels. These are some of the most terrifying moments I’ve experienced in a horror video game, ever.

Mind Games
Throughout all of it, Red Barrels has explored giddy themes of struggling with one’s faith and the extremities of belief to varying degrees of impact. Outlast 2 jumps semi-regularly from the present to the past, where we revisit the heavily Catholic school of Blake’s childhood. These more quiet sections start off as welcome reprieves from the mayhem of the present day, but gradually take on a far more sinister turn as the events of the past begin to unravel themselves.

Some of Outlast 2’s most effective – and at times, touching – moments occur in the fluorescent-flickered corridors of Blake’s school. However, there are simply too many of them with too much repetition, and during the middle of the story, they drag down the pace significantly. More, to understand the deepest nuance of these sequences, you must record certain vistas and objects around the world and then play them back complete with Blake’s commentary to gain an insight into his head. Considering how horrific the world is, the impetus to voluntarily explore more of it is low.

Still, the messaging in Outlast 2 is broadly effective, and I applaud Red Barrels for tackling such ambitious subject matter. Its bold ending, in particular, will inevitably divide players’ opinions; as for me, I thought it was a tour-de-force that made me laugh in disbelief.

The Verdict
Outlast 2 is a terrifying sequel that builds upon the scares of the 2013 original. Even if its ambitious themes don’t always land and navigating through its world can be frustratingly inconsistent, there’s more wicked creativity at play here than I’ve seen in a horror game in a long time. Play it loud, in the dark.


8.3

http://www.pcgamer.com/outlast-2-review/

Outlast 2 review
By James Davenport an hour ago

Spoiler

Need to know
What is it? A stealthy first-person horror adventure
Price: $30 / £23
Publisher: Red Barrels
Developer: Red Barrels
Reviewed on: Windows 10, i7-6700K, 16GB RAM, GeForce GTX 980 Ti
Multiplayer: None
Link: Steam

What if the most deranged, doom-saying cultists are right? Outlast 2 prods this question with a pointy stick until it bleeds, festers, and wails in agony. While it plays very similarly to the original, Outlast 2 takes its Christian themes into extremely uncomfortable and surprising territory, avoiding what could have been a familiar trek through cultish cliches.

Structurally, it’s a conventional first-person horror game, a string of tense stealth scenarios where you hide from monsters before they chase you through dense forests and flooded mines. The story is too opaque and a maddening amount of trial-and-error is needed to figure out most of the stealth sequences, but through it all, Outlast 2 is a train of depravity steered by a good old-fashioned fear of God.

Picture this
As a freelance journalist, you’re investigating the disappearance of a Jane Doe. Your wife is quickly kidnapped by a cult, the genesis of which is fascinating, mostly told through discarded letters and environmental cues. But the details are hard to process when an entire village is actively hunting for you. Outlast 2 maintains such a relentless pace that there’s almost no time to figure out what’s really going on.

Besides the vague story and some directed flashback sequences that feel like a detour, the slow progression through rural Arizona is layered with enough apocalyptic Christian imagery to be a complete journey. Expect to witness the best of the worst of the bible through some of the most shocking first-person scenes in games, period. Your vision flashes red with hard clank of a hammer coming down on metal, the sky is a dark shade of purple, and a man piggybacking on another man blathers on about how happy he is to see you.

On that journey, you’ll need to sneak past roving packs of rural folks gone mad. Your camcorder is your only tool, used to see in the dark with its night vision mode and a microphone that detects sound wherever it’s pointed. Both functions drain your batteries and like healing bandages, they’re limited, but never so much that you’re left without enough supplies to outwit any pursuers. Even without wit, persistence does the trick, as frustrating as it can be.

Immoral compass

Early on, I wandered the same cornfield for 30 minutes, crawling the perimeter and making several suicide runs to scope out the buildings for an exit. The way out was a short sprint not far from where the sequence begins, a quick hop over a pile of wood pallets piled next to the fence. The area was a wild goose chase killbox, built only to confuse. It’s not an isolated issue either. While the original Outlast could depend on the hospital’s architectural pathways to direct the player, pulling off subtle signposting in an outdoor setting can’t be as obvious without compromising the feeling of being lost and helpless. Red Barrels’ commitment to building such a disorienting horror simulation is as admirable as it is annoying.

Such dedication can be worth it. Subtle lighting casts trees and figures like paper silhouettes against muted backdrops, and convincing effects like the camera’s depth of field and visual noise make the world look real at a glance. It’s stunning artistic and graphical work. And when you’re dashing through it, nearly out of battery while a ‘man’ screams biblical verse and shoots fiery crossbow bolts past your head it’s both thrilling and nauseating, all propped up by an incredible soundtrack.

But it’s a tower that topples often, leading to repeated attempts at trying to find a tiny hole in a huge fence, to figure out if the enemy can see me or not, or if I can grab a particular ledge to scramble away in time. There are even a few instances where enemies are set up to ambush and instantly kill you, totally deflating a close getaway. Without clear rules the illusion fades quickly, exposing the simple AI and restricted level design. The few times I happened to stumble the right way through a level, Outlast 2 felt like an audiovisual horror masterpiece. The motion capture, textures, and animation are never quite up to par with Resident Evil 7, but when everything meshes together, it hardly matters. Just don’t expect a smooth experience the whole way through. When it clicks though—those moments stick.

Long after the final minutes of Outlast 2, I felt queasy, uncertain that what I saw had actually happened. It’s one of the most bizarre ending sequences I’ve witnessed, tapping into a fear I’ve known since my first week at Sunday school. It's not a fear about being hunted, artistic viscera spills, or neatly arranged corpses on spikes (though there’s plenty of that stuff). It’s fear of the drastic measures people will take to ensure their salvation, the burden of guilt, and whether or not the big guy up top exists and gives a damn.

What I like most about Outlast 2 is that it doesn't just use its themes as set-dressing. The first Outlast had the same intense stealth sequences and chase scenes, but in the spooky asylum every Early Access game goes for. Outlast 2 takes you through dilapidating farms and flooded mines and old townships that all say something about the history of the people who lived there. It rains blood and spews locusts and sends twisted cultists after you through it all, just regular people wearing overalls and carrying bloody steak knives, moaning in apocalyptic overtones. There are monsters, sure, but Outlast 2's scariest moments come from its most familiar faces.


The Verdict
85
Read our review policy
Outlast 2
Stealth and pursuit haven’t changed much in Outlast 2, but it excels as a beautiful, brutal journey through extreme spiritual anxieties.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/24/outlast-2-review/

Wot I Think: Outlast 2

Spoiler

By Adam Smith on April 24th, 2017 at 8:00 pm.

If you’ve ever wanted to experience crucifixion from a first-person perspective, Outlast 2 [official site] will let you scratch that one off your bucket list. Moving away from the first game’s psychiatric hospital, developers Red Barrels unearth another necropolis’ worth of horror tropes in a splatterfest about apocalypse, antichrists and clashing cults.

The most frustrating thing about Outlast 2 is that it’s few redeeming features deserve a far better game around them.

Technically, it’s a marvel. The kindest words I have for it are all reserved for the sound design, which is excellent, even when delivering some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever encountered. Composer Samuel Laflamme has created a masterwork of references, from unnerving vocal tracks that echo the opening of The Shining to the kind of scissor-like strings that cut right through nerves. Though I disagree with the target of his criticism, I’m reminded of Stephen King’s thoughts on Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining: “Like A Big, Beautiful Cadillac With No Engine Inside It.”

Whether it’s doing gory details, of which there are many, or unnerving scenery, Outlast 2 is exquisitely crafted. Like the original, it often throws you into the darkness of caves or closets, and even in the outdoors where you’ll spend most of your time, the only light is the eerie glow of the moon, which paints everything with a cold blue. To battle the dark, you have a camera with a battery-sapping night vision mode.

You have a camera because you are Blake Langermann, one member of the Langermann husband and wife investigative journalism team. At the beginning of the game, you’re in a helicopter with your wife, Lynn, looking for clues about the apparent murder of a pregnant woman in the middle of nowhere. When the helicopter crashes, you quickly find that there are a lot of people in the middle of nowhere, and some of them have nabbed your wife. As the game unfolds, the night becomes increasingly unpleasant, and Blake tries his best to document everything while saving his skin from the culty bastards who are trying to put an end to him.

There are many things I disliked about Outlast 2, but the story would probably top the list if I hadn’t started ignoring it in the first couple of hours. Not content with having one cult of creeps out in the sticks, the game presents a place in the middle of nowhere that has not only developed its own offshoot religion, based on Christianity, but has endured a schism, so there is a heretic cult running around the place as well. Every single person in the game, whichever cult they belong to, is awful, existing mainly to torture and murder while writing gospels that are mostly about genitals and infanticide.

Perhaps I’d be willing to cut through all of the nonsense to see the value in the documents found lying around if I weren’t worrying about my camera’s battery levels and the people trying to murder me, but I doubt it. There are lots of letters from members of the flock, but they’re mostly saying either “Hey, I murdered my kids and I feel kind of bad about it actually” or “I murdered my kids and it made me kinda horny. Is that weird and can I fuck god now?”

The first cult you encounter are following the teachings of Sullivan Knoth, an idiot who wrote a new gospel that seems to be the result of a fundamentalist mind trying to work some porn into the Good Book. There are a lot of “cunts” (one of the game’s favourite words, sprinkled across loading screen texts taken from the gospel) and “cocks” in Knoth’s lessons, as well as some more interesting imagery of wheels within wheels and abstract angelic forms. He usually gets back to the “cunts” and “cocks” before long though, at one point describing a creature that has a face like the genitalia of angels. My mind immediately went to Alan Rickman in Dogma.

As far as I can figure it out, Knoth’s lot like to breed, often using Knoth’s seed, but have got a bit worried that one of their kids might be the antichrist so now they’re butchering them, and pregnancy is a bad thing now. The heretics also think the antichrist might be en route so they’re keen to impregnate everyone. You can probably imagine how this leads to a lot of sexual violence. Nobody is unscathed and there are more guts and gore per square inch than in almost any other game I’ve ever played, but the women get the worst of it. At the end of one scene in which Blake hides in the dark while watching a married couple meet a particularly grisly end, he comments on how sick it is that women are punished to hurt men. The game makes sure you can get all of the suffering on film.

That’s what it is, really: a first-person sufferer. Blake gets put through the wringer in so many ways that it’s amazing he keeps on trucking, and barely ever drops his camera. He’s as tough as the nails that are driven through his palms, but he can’t fight back, even when the people attacking him are so sickly that their main method of attack is to shudder and vomit all over him. Sure, he’ll kick people in the face in QTE sequences if they’re grabbing at his ankles, but there are dozens of moments when a dangerous enemy is exposed and vulnerable, when you’ve absolutely got the drop on them, and the best you can do is make a recording of them.

I get that no-fighting-back is a signature of the series, and of this particular flavour of survival horror, but I found Blake’s unwillingness to get his hands dirty incredibly frustrating. He’s choosing to go deeper into the living hell of the cult’s compound and they’re mid-massacre, apparently fighting their enemies within and without as well as culling their own, but he remains essentially passive. It makes him even more of a ridiculous figure than his dialogue, which consists mostly of repeated breathless statements about the simplest of objectives, and lines like “this is where the magic happens” when he finds the brutalised corpse of a woman, curled on a bed.

At this point I should apologise to Resident Evil 7, which I thought might have the blandest playable character in any horror game ever. Blake manages to be even more tedious and obnoxious.

Not being able to fight back means you’re going to spend most of your time sneaking and the stealth swings wildly between fairly enjoyable and frustratingly chaotic. Some sections, including two visually superb cornfield pursuits, are best blundered through rather than approached calmly and carefully, while others rely on trial and error as you tease out the exact point at which enemy patrols will be triggered. There are plenty of hiding places, and I particularly enjoy being able to duck underwater, in lakes, rivers or barrels, seeing torch beams cutting through the muck as you hold your breath and wait for a safe moment to take a gulp of air. Mostly, I ended up running though. Running until my stamina dropped, and then realising that I’d either moved to the next area, effectively eliminating any pursuers from the chase, or stumbled into a corner from which there was no escape.

The camera can be used to detect audio as well as to provide nightvision. Using built-in directional microphones you can track enemies through walls, which suggests that areas should be navigated with care, but I almost always gave up on the slow, silent approach and just sprinted from point A to point B once I’d figured out the path. I was playing on normal difficulty and I suspect I’d have had struggled on one of the harder settings, but that would have also meant spending longer playing Outlast 2 and I did not want to do that.

Put simply, I was bored most of the time I was playing. Things escalate so quickly that there’s barely any space for the horror to grow, except to greater and grosser excesses of violence. When Blake tumbled down a hill and ended up marionetted on some barbed wire, I wasn’t alarmed or shocked or squeamish, I was just mildly curious about the cleverness of depicting all of this suffering from a first-person perspective. Some of the torture sequences are impressively rendered but I shouldn’t be admiring the technical craft as these things are happening to me, I should be feeling at least some anxiety or fear.

Eventually, I entertained myself by seeing Blake as a Wile E Coyote type figure, stumbling from one calamity to the next and always bouncing back.

There’s so much to admire beneath all the slog, and the guts and the grime. Blake remembers, hallucinates or visits his own childhood in the game’s most frightening interludes. I found the story there trite, but the delivery is superb, taking place in a school that is clean and quiet and very much the opposite of the main game’s grubby environments. It’s a thoroughly alarming place and the creature design there shows more invention than the hundreds of variants of “disembowelled person who may or may not be on fire” that make up the scenery in the bulk of the game.

I enjoyed the final third more than the preceding hours as well, beginning with a setpiece on a tranquil lake that I found more nightmarish than all of the brutality that had gone before. There’s just too much too soon, and too little let-up, so that for every moment of inventive camera trickery there’s a hundred more of repetitive chases and splatter-porn.

And I like gore. Even at its most excessive, I wasn’t disgusted by Outlast 2 though, or repulsed or amused. I was so swiftly desensitised to its flayed and charred corpses that I greeted even its most creative kills with a shrug. Its elaborate corpse-structures barely drew a second glance. Then I’d find an underground temple that really did catch my eye and wish that there were more of that weirdness in the rest of the game rather than endless buckets of slop. And then there’s the strange Actual Apocalyptic happenings and more of that awesome sound design as the sky explodes with light and a siren sounds and I start to think that maybe Outlast 2 is actually quite good.

Beyond the nonsense of the story, I found it bloated though, too often losing its grip on the core mechanic of the camera and found footage theme. And it really, definitely would work better if Blake could snap a few necks when sneaking up on cult members, or gut them with their own knives. It’d give players more options during the stealth sections and allow for some much-needed catharsis. Visually, it’s an occasionally beautiful game about very ugly things, and a few hours in I felt like I’d reached the limits of my ability to endure its constant streams of offal. Later, things did pick up, but that might be the Stockholm Syndrome talking, or the fact that I accepted the best way to get through it all was to Mystery Science Theatre the whole experience as I played.

It’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as remade by Eli Roth, starting with the worst possible thing that can happen and then daring itself to go further. Shock tactics so persistently silly that they become the equivalent of a flaming bag of poo on a doorstep. I will always defend the right of horror fiction to be horrible, but never excuse it for being so dull in its depravity. One of the game’s six chapters is named after the Biblical Job and by the end of the game that’s who I felt like. I’d suffered through great and terrible hardships but was no closer to understanding why.

 

[waterdeep]

spoilers obviously

"fuck you and fuck your god" owwww the edge

 

[Ivan]

I don't understand why the codexian detractors are treating Outlast as if it were aspiring to be like Silent Hill, i.e. establish a mood, a tone, dread. To me, it's like a fun night of watching Halloween. Pure, dumb, suspense. That and incredible sound design.

Got around to playing Whistleblower.

-same cheap scares, excellent sound, body horror. game still looks gorgeous

 

[Ivan]

Played and finished so you don't have to. I enjoyed Outlast for being a fun slasher film in game form. I expect cheap scares, body horror, gotcha sound cues and all that jazz. Outlast 2 does the same shit, just a lot longer this time around. Most disappointing of all is that it plays exactly the same way as the first did. You can't use items to distract enemies, you can't use materials to fortify doors or even defend yourself with your fists. There is very little downtime this time around, the game consists entirely of chase sequences and pretty awful "puzzles" where you have to activate an item or move an object before the Boss AI sees/rapes you.

Story is all shock value, as is all the religious imagery, GOD MADE ME DU DIS bullcrap. I still enjoyed this for the outstanding sound, and the presentation is very well done (fooled me, I didn't know it was Unreal Engine 3).

TLDR: more of the same, doesn't aspire to make any gameplay improvements upon the original. the setting doesn't lend itself to uncovering a mystery since the game loves throwing shit at you all the time. what a shame.


on to SOMA!

 

[SumDrunkGuy]

I've developed feelings for Marta. Like I get that the developers intended for her to be super creepy and inspire feelings of dread/horror but to me that's just sooo unlike her.

Shes actually quite charming and beautiful. Every time she emerges from some dark corner and charges at me screaming I get butterflies and grow excited.

The other night I just let her awkwardly chase me in circles around this trailer full of hay and I would frequently duck underneath it and glance up in a pathetic attempt to catch a glimpse of her lady parts. That went on for about an hour.

At one point she yelled out "spilling your blood will soothe my aching virginity" (or somethin like that) - in that moment I was harder than I'd ever been in my entire life. I think I love her.

 

[Gerrard]

 

[Zombra]

So ....... 3 years after the fact, I'm considering Outlast 2.

I played the first game and liked it except for the idiot ending where it takes place in an Umbrella secret underground base and the protagonist gets killed by a sweep of commandos.*
*Whoops, I forgot my spoiler tags! I'll just make this apologetic footnote instead.

If Outlast 2 is more of the same, but without a really dumb hackneyed overplayed ending, I could might give it a shot.

Recommendations?

 

[Wunderbar]

Can't say anything about the ending cuz i've never finished it, but gameplay itself is worse than in the first game because level design (yeah i know, "level design") is so poor you don't know where you're supposed to run so 90% of the time you run into a dead end and enemies kill you.

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

Recommendations?

Yes: AVOID AT ALL COSTS!

It's absolute garbage, one of THE worst things I've ever played. And that's coming from someone who really liked the first one. Not scary in the slightest, just frustrating due to exceedingly poor design. Tries way too hard with the edgy dialogue and gross-out gore. Unlike the first one, which was simply a fun B-movie rollercoaster ride, this one has the sordid veneer of being some sort of criticism of religious fanaticism or whatever. But it's all so preposterously shallow and is really only there to crank up the edginess factor some (For example, the catholic priest side character is only there so you can finally have implied child rape in your survival horror game. Yaay!).

It's absolute dreck. Don't say I didn't warn you