Experience spine-chilling horror in an abandoned asylum with intense gameplay and realistic graphics
Experience spine-chilling horror in an abandoned asylum with intense gameplay and realistic graphics
Pros
- Smooth and seamless navigation
- Excellent and moody sense of horror
- Clever camera battery management system
Cons
- Slightly padded second act
- Success sometimes relies on trial and error
If you've played Amnesia, you'll feel right at home with the tense and claustrophobic survival horror of Outlast. As survival horror stalwarts like Resident Evil moved more towards action set-pieces, Amnesia's approach to horror is to make you feel constantly vulnerable. And that sense of vulnerability and tension goes more into the extreme horror territory of Silent Hill.
The environment is suitably moody enough to fit within the city limits of Silent Hill. Mount Massive Asylum is a mental hospital that's fallen into complete disarray, but psychotic patients still roam the halls. It may venture into trite and over-explored territory, but the effect here is well executed regardless. And while the notion of a mental hospital as a place of utter madness may tread the line of good taste, it's strangely affecting. Few of the characters here are in speaking condition, so much of the story is told through documents and the environment itself. Mount Massive and the surrounding environments are pretty in their haunting and debased way, but it's one unique feature that makes you completely consider how you interact with the environment.
You play an investigative journalist snooping around the site of Mount Massive, and that means you're more handy with a camcorder than you are with guns. Your camcorder is going to be a necessity too. That's because the majority of Mount Massive is without electricity, and your video camera comes equipped with night vision. What would otherwise be interesting if not astounding graphics are given a dramatically new filter with night vision. It also means that you'll need to balance your resources carefully. The battery on your night vision won't last long, but there are batteries scattered all throughout the asylum. On the negative side, these batteries tend to be in out of the way places. While you're technically free to explore the entire environment all you want, you're ultimately limited by the risk and reward of venturing into the dark.
It achieves this by stripping you of weapons entirely. In fact, there is no way to defend yourself from the deranged creatures you encounter in your journey. It's a version of survival horror stripped down to its chassis - providing players with merely the ability to cower in hiding or try to flee whenever you encounter opposition. It's a bold move that strips out any sense of power fantasy entirely but also often necessitates repetition. Jump scares are an art of diminishing returns, and Outlast hasn't quite reconciled their ability to balance some excellent enemy and stage design with significantly in-depth player actions and a smoother balance curve.
Some sequences seem like merely a case of trial and error, but there are a few tools at your disposal. The ability to vault over objects and hide in containers gives you a means of egress if monsters close in on you. Despite taking place exclusively from a first person perspective, Outlast has a surprisingly fluid sense of character movement. Running down hallways, juking around enemies, and vaulting over objects comes naturally within a few minutes of taking the controls, and it adds some depth that helps fill out the experience.
Or it will give you a means of egress hypothetically. The monsters in Outlast are both smart and relentless. In many ways, they're much like the alien queen in Alien: Isolation. They'll open containers and look under furniture in pursuit of you, but there's less randomness in their behavior here. If you can learn the patterns and blueprints of the environment, you can effectively work your way past every obstacle. Admittedly, a decent amount of time is spent running back and forth through those environments, but smart enemy placement and the natural claustrophobia that the dark environments solicit means that even old areas can feel terrifying when revisited. The mostly pitch black interior of a hospital can become repetitive partway through the story, but it picks up steam and switches up the environments before things become too tiring. All told, a slightly bloated middle escalates into a surprisingly harrowing finale.
If Outlast's existing flaws appeared with frequency, the results would be a mediocre game that showed a lot of promise. Instead, we're left with a phenomenal survival horror game that emphasizes survival above all else. The lunatics of Mount Massive Asylum are both smart and memorable, and the world they live in breathes with menacing life. The lack of action may scare off some core gamers, and some stretches rely on repetitive trial and error to get the job done, but it is for the most part an enthralling and foreboding world that's easy to get immersed in. If you can see lack of agency and empowerment as a design feature rather than a frustration, you'll be treated to one of the best survival horror experiences around.
Pros
- Smooth and seamless navigation
- Excellent and moody sense of horror
- Clever camera battery management system
Cons
- Slightly padded second act
- Success sometimes relies on trial and error
Pros
- Great plot
- Good graphics and sound effects
- Ingenious camera gimmick
Cons
- Quite repetitive and soon loses its scare factor
- Resources run out fast
Outlast is a terrifying first-person survival horror game.
When Miles Upshur, a freelance journalist, receives an anonymous tip about inhumane experiments that are being carried out in Mount Massive Asylum, a long-abandoned psychiatric hospital nestled in the Colorado mountains, he breaks in to investigate and scoop the story of a lifetime.
Taking on the role of Upshur, the aim of the game is for players to navigate their way through the dilapidated asylum, now overrun by homicidal patients and insane doctors, in an effort to find a way out. The plot cleverly develops by way of notes taken by Upshur as the game progresses and manila folders that are found sporadically throughout the asylum. These manila folders contain intriguing patient files, doctors notes and newspaper cuttings that help the story unfold and provide background information into the Murkoff Corporation’s controversial experiments.
As players stumble across mutilated corpses, disembowelled bodies, men impaled on spikes and disfigured lunatics, there are various tasks that need to be completed in order to move forwards through the dark prison cells, abandoned medical wards, corridors and offices. These tasks include finding key cards to unlock doors, restarting pumps and electrical breakers and restoring power to a selection of devices. The game is very linear in this respect as players need to figure out what to do and which way to go before moving on, however, it still offers excitement and frights at every turn.
The most significant feature of this game is that there is no combat. Although it can be quite frustrating at times, it definitely makes the game more frightening as players have to either run, squeeze between obstacles, vault over obstructions and barricade doors behind them or hide and watch from a broken locker or from under a bed as crazed inmates stalk the building. On the occasions that players do get found, watching Upshur be dragged from his hiding place and torn apart is nothing short of brutal. This game is definitely not for the fainthearted. Having no weapons to use means that there is a constant sense of helplessness throughout gameplay. This is a clever tactic when making an intensely scary game.
An ingenious aspect of Outlast is the fact that the majority of the game is viewed through the LCD screen of Upshur’s camcorder. This gives the game a terrifying ’found-footage’ feel that has been so popular in films in recent years. Making the game even more frightening is the fact that many areas are completely unlit. This forces players to use the infra-red function on the camcorder which casts an eerie green glow on the surroundings. The only downside is that the batteries run out very quickly and players must constantly search through the available rooms to find replacements.
Despite the all too familiar premise of an evil corporation carrying out dangerous experiments that go horribly wrong and the fact that although the first hour of gameplay is very scary, the routine-like scenes and tasks do become quite repetitive, the controls are excellent and the graphics are outstanding. Players really are put firmly into the shoes of Upshur, which makes for very realistic gameplay.
The sound effects are another great thing about Outlast. The sounds of Upshur’s panicked breath as he run through the corridors mixed with the shrieking, snarling and screeching noises, footsteps and breaking glass that can be heard echoing throughout the asylum, all help to create a terrifying experience.
Pros
- Great plot
- Good graphics and sound effects
- Ingenious camera gimmick
Cons
- Quite repetitive and soon loses its scare factor
- Resources run out fast
Pros
- Bloody, violent and terrifying all at once
- The controls have a realistic feel
Cons
- You run out of resources fast
- The storyline could be improved a bit
Outlast, a jump out of the chair horror game, has plenty of moments when you feel like you have begun your descent into the bowels of hell. An intense game that does not leave you with much to defend yourself, your best defense will be to run and hide most of the time. You start the game as the investigative journalist Miles Upshur, who decides to check out the abandoned asylum. It sounds like a great idea because it does not seem like much could possibly go wrong. The environments of Outlast are quite impressive, and you have one of the best looking and sounding games that has been seen in a long time.
This game does a good job at building dread when you enter new areas or closed doors. Like a lot of great games, the richness of the game lies in the smaller details that have made it feel like a real world. Besides running for your life throughout the game, you search for notes that build the back story. Some of the enemies in the game, however, look petrifying from afar, but once you see them up close and personal, they look kind of silly and harmless. Considering that you will be running much of the time, it does not matter much because you will rarely get close enough to get a good look.
You are largely left powerless in Outlast. You have no weapons to defend yourself with, and your only guardian angel takes the form of a video camera that has night vision. Unfortunately, you only get so much battery life, and that can heighten the tension as you have to plan your battery use correctly if it will last. The game has some terribly banal objectives like getting three generators to work for an area. Similar to other games, it relies on three-collection objectives which can start to feel tedious and uninspiring. After you die a couple times, and you WILL die a few times, you start to memorize the layout. In this game, the scares do not always come from the ghouls, but it takes place based on the real world spooks.
A lot of the game has you dart from sewers to lockers to under beds. Throughout the game, you have a sustained dread, and the horrifying music adds to the effects. When one of the patients comes closer, you will start to hear your heartbeat, which delivers an intense effect. The graphics in the game make it wonderful to the eyes, and when you step in a pool of blood, you will see a trail of bloody foot prints. A visit to the sewers will have the water splash in a realistic way. You never completely let your guard down in Outlast and that makes it an excellent game for the horror genre.
Pros
- Bloody, violent and terrifying all at once
- The controls have a realistic feel
Cons
- You run out of resources fast
- The storyline could be improved a bit
