Outlast 2 Review - Losing My Religion

By the time I'd sprinted to the end of Outlast 2's lean campaign of around 6 hours the opening tension had long since died out to be replaced by utter confusion, bewilderment, and jaded cynicism at the amount of violence, only punctuated with the occasional creepy image.

Australia's Funniest Home Videos got dark.

That isn't to say Outlast 2 is a bad game, far from it, but in terms of horror it is decidedly average, too eager to the throw gore and obscenities on top of gore and obscenities, when a quiet lull and sinister shadow would have made you tremble from head to toe. I think the intensity of my negativity above stems from the fact that the game has at its core an interesting premise. Much like the original Outlast your character is in the reporter/journalist school of archetypes, which serves as the reasoning for why he insists on filming everything. That's right, for the uninitiated the Outlast series focuses on first person horror with the option of viewing your surroundings through a hand held camera which has nightvision, and now in the sequel a sound detector. Think the fantastic end of the Spanish horror Rec and you've just thought of Outlast. Your character, along with his wife, are investigating the murder of a pregnant woman in the Arizona desert. Naturally things go wrong fast, and strange violent, hillbilly-esque cults surround you as you stumble through the dark to...outlast the night. Ha.

Gameplay is predominantly about exploring the environment, which is mostly linear, yet the large outdoor environments give the illusion of freedom. You'll move from rickety farmsteads, strewn with blood and bile of animal and human sacrifices, resembling The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to crumbling mines that evoke the claustrophobia and crawling dead of the film The Descent. As you explore you'll catch glimpses of monstrous cultists and other less human enemies before they begin to chase you through the environment. It is at these more linear points that Outlast is at its best. You are forced through a series of assault courses, often with slightly branching paths, where a failure to lock a door behind you or jump an overturned cart will lead to a swift pick axe to the face. Outlast has taken the stellar Innsmouth Hotel escape from Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (highly recommend) and extended it across a whole game.

However, when Outlast moves to a more open ended escape plan the game falters, bad. By open ended I mean this typical scenario: you need to turn on a generator to get a lift to work. You sneak past a few simple patrolling monsters and flick on said generator. As you backtrack to the lift the regular enemies have scarpered in terror from a big nasty who can kill you in one shot. Where the big bad spawns is predetermined but after that they go random but seem to rubber band around you, that is they always supernaturally know roughly where you are and won't wander too far away. Sometimes. That's the problem, they are unpredictable and not in the way the Alien was in Alien: Isolation. There is no logic to where they look or what paths they take. With no way to distract them you just have to luck out that on this retry they have gotten far enough away from the objective. Often when I got through these sections it was tense but looking back I thought "Well I just lucked out there." With Alien: Isolation I learnt when I was far enough away from the Alien that I could run and I could craft distraction items to force out of it a predictable action, e.g. check out that other room whilst I can head the other way. Let me tell you the terror of a perusing nasty dies pretty quick when you've got to retry the scene over and over.

Elsewhere the game also stumbles in its overall atmosphere and story. Much of the story is told through finding documents and biblical extracts. Some of these documents are fairly lengthy and taking 5 minutes out of game time to sit and digest an overly sweary document that doesn't differ a great deal from the last 10 you've read isn't exciting storytelling. Video games are unique in terms of entertainment media: they can get you to directly engage with the story, yet games, not just Outlast, are guilty of simply info dumping plot points in bland, boring, text screens. Outlast's text dumps are not just boring but obtuse and most frustratingly it turns out, one document I missed, located out of the way of the main path of the story, is crucial to the end of the game making a jot of sense. That's as if you were reading The Shining, and didn't notice that one of the pages that describes Jack's descent into madness had fallen out of the book.

Much like the bland The Evil Within, much of the horror of Outlast is generic blood and gore. I feel the religious angle is a really rich mine in terms of video games and it is a shame to see Outlast simply delve into the bloody and well trodden morass of a Hills Have Eyes, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, to make a monster mashup. The horror is only the horror of "I'm scared of being chased and cut up by people" which ironically barely cuts skin deep. There are a few creepy enemies, in particular one of the cult's chief enforcers is a goliath woman who mutters grim Bible passages as she stalks you, but apart from her there is no rhyme or reason to the enemy design. We go from Resident Evil type farmer enemies, to The Descent esque cave dwellers, then somehow to stalker duo who looked like they walked off the set of Mad Max.

With no coherence of horror left in the main plot it falls on the sub-plot to pick up the slack. This is set within a mysterious school that the protagonist seems to visit/hallucinate/flashback to at random points of the plot. These visions seem to refer to a potential long buried trauma in the protagonist's life, in particular his time at a religious school ran by priests...I wonder what on earth it could be? Hmmm (sarcasm). So yes, this side-plot is stretched out thin when you know exactly where it is headed from the first or second vision. But it does create some naturally building dread that does not exist in the main game which is always running at full tilt. These sections include seemingly never ending school corridors, ominous voices, and spectral entities, much more unnerving than the majority of the fodder in the main game. Despite this solid ground work the conclusion and linking to the main story is, without spoiling things, a total let down.

This review sounds may sound highly negative, probably overly so, but I'd like to make it clear that the game is competently made in most of the aspects of the actual gameplay and visuals bar the annoyance of open ended stealth sections mentioned above. It is just in terms of the actual horror that I think it falters. It definitely got a few solid jumps out of me and played with headphones on in a dark room there is a certain amount of tension that is wrung out of its rich premise. But without a coherent plot and tone the spark dies fairly quickly leaving a quickly rotting Frankenstein's monster of a game.