Outlast 2

 

Since its October I'm just looking around for any immersive good graphics scary game to play. I searched Steam by amount of reviews and went through the top reviewed games, Outlast 2 was the first real candidate so I bought it just because of that mainly, but I also beat the first one and thought it was pretty good.

Outlast 2 has a pretty vastly different premise than the first game
In the first game it takes place in a mental asylum
Outlast 2 starts off in a Helicoptor with your wife (?) and the helicoptor gets shot down(?) or crashes. From there on the entire plot is just wandering around some weird outback redneck villages and forests , kinda like Resident Evil 4, looking for your missing wife. You soon discover you're in a fucked up place cos theres all sorts of random crucified people and decapitated heads and warnings all over the place , and thats where things really take off.

You have a video recorder with Night vision which is essential, and batteries which drain. You can also turn on a microphone for the camera to help track where enemies are, but other than that theres not much more to itemization or mechanics. You can sprint, slide, climb, look behind your shoulder, use a bandage when you get hurt, but thats about it.

Where the game really sells its self is in the graphics and attention to detail.
The enviornmental storytelling is kinda top notch too, frequently I found myself just stopping to zoom in on random things in the enviorment with my camera, just admiring all the details and piecing together things. It's a visually impressive game and theres tons of things in the enviornment to just stop and look at and get more info from. You sometimes get teleported to a dreamlike school enviornment randomly , and theres papers all over the walls like in a typical school and stuff, papers on the desks etc, and you can zoom in super close and read everything in perfect detail, its cool and immersive.


The game even subtly rewards you for doing this because there are moments where you can 'record' key points by looking at them with your camera, then a red circle appears and it captures it. You can then press a button to open your camera and re-watch all the key moments you've recorded, with additional commentary from the main character.

 
There's a ton of gore and its some of the most over the top creepy stuff i've seen in a game, faces peeled off, dismembered, eyes being eaten by insects, its like the whole game is a full motion Cannibal corpse album/album cover. You can zoom in close to see the insects moving on corpses in full detail, the textures in particular are super high quality in this game which really adds to the enviormental storytelling. It's extremely explicit with full nudity, torture scenes, dead babies, penises hanging out on dismembered and crucified people, its intense. Maybe one of the most shocking games I've ever played. I was skimming the Steam forums and one of the top posts was "How is this game not banned?" Yeah, I can see how someone would think that. It's on the same level as depraved horror movies like Salo 120 days of sodom, Human centipede, Cannibal holocaust tier of shock value.

The story is simplistic but immersive the whole way through. You find notes scattered about that have great writing and tone about two cults the Christians and the Heretics who are at war or something, but also the Christians want to prevent the birth of the antichrist(?) so they go around killing every baby and child(?) they can, its crazy and dark edgy stuff. You find pits of dead babies and watch torture scenes and at one point you even get crucified yourself its pretty intense. But the story isn't like a massive exposition of dumping information at you,it always keeps it brief and isn't very involved or anything, I think its well done. The dialogue on the notes is crazy and very well written.

The gameplay has some questionable and frustrating parts, however.
Unlike other horror games, theres virtually no puzzles.
There is no inventory, there are (almost) no items to pickup or collect.
Only a few times will you have to go around and find a specific item to progress, maybe 2-3 times.

Other than that the bulk of the gameplay is sneaking past enemies.

However, they try to make up for the lack of puzzles with frequent chase sequences, where you automatically get caught, and have to escape. This would be fine if it happened rarely, but it happens so frequently that you start to get desensitized, and it becomes a constant trial and error deathfest where you keep dying over and over until you find the exact specific path it wants you to go down, which is extra hard because the game is so fucking dark even with night vision on. Dying multiple times per checkpoint really does make the game less scary because you lose the suspense and "what if" and it just becomes something you expect, so you lose that anticipation. The game does too many of this "Haha, gotcha, you died!". Too much trial and error.

This is made even more frustrating because its actually the most visually disorienting, confusing game I've probably ever played. There are CONSTANT visual effects all over your screen. Especially any section with water or rain, your screen becomes so damn blurry and covered in water effects that its very dizzying and nausating to play. I get physically nauseated and get a headache playing this game. Its SO dark that for most of the game you'll be walking around in complete pitch black running up against walls and trees hopelessly trying to find where to go. On the one hand it makes for a sort of terrifying experience, but on the other hand it just feels bullshit when you have enemies chasing you and you're left feeling like you drank a bottle of whiskey stumbling around like a moron without being able to see anything. The night vision effect also tends to make the graphics super blurry too so it all gets added ontop of eachother to be a really confusing mess to navigate.

There are a few sections in particular that was just very bullshit and frustrating.
One of them is the infamous 'cart scene' where you have to push a cart up against a fence and jump over, but as soon as you touch the cart there is a pitchfork lady enemy that automatically spots you. From there on you have to run around, hiding in barrels and random places, waiting for the music to stop, go back to the cart, and try to push it without being caught. Problem is, every single time you seem to push the cart she INSTANTLY teleports to you or knows where you are. VERY hard section. Probably took me like 20-50 deaths/attempts to get past it, and I only did it by basically figuring out the AI is stupid and doesn't crawl under fences so I exploited the AI pathing to do it. Really unfortunate the game has problems like that and it seems like at certain times the AI just teleports to you no matter what, like I said it makes the game actually lose horror because you get in this stupid loop of dying over and over again to where the suspense is lost.

There are multiple difficulties , I think I picked difficulty 3/5 but I don't know what it does. I think all the difficulty does is lower the amount of batteries and bandages you get, how fast your night vision drains, and how many hits it takes to kill you? Well I was dying in 1-3 hits, and I never once ran out of batteries so I don't know. I almost think the game would be MUCH scarier on the easiest difficulty, because atleast you wont be constantly in these trial & error death loops where it just feels stupid and bullshit - instead you'll be in a state of constant progress and suspense wondering "what if I do get caught, oh shit!" . Its weird that thats how it would probably work out, and in my opinion its kind of a design flaw if you want to make people scared, they're probably not going to assume that picking the easier difficulties is whats gonna scare them.

Theres a lot of enemy variety, you have outback village people type, but as the game progresses you find more and more twisted and fucked up beings, like guys that look like they blew their face off with a shotgun but are still alive in weird animal form chasing after you, weird zombie type things, I dont know how to describe it , if its supernatural or what, but the monsters are very well done.

You dont only crawl through forests and villages , though, frequently like I said  earlier youll be 'bursting' in and out of this dreamlike school sequence, running through brightly lit halls with supernatural things chasing after you, or monsters. Other times towards the end of the game you go across a lake in a longwinded raft sequence , almost like something out of RE4 again. Theres snowy areas in the dreamlike world. There are blood red raining skies, churches, chapels , those sorts of things. Its varied enough where it doesn't feel like youre just doing the same thing the whole time.

Its pretty funny how I played Amnesia: Rebirth before that, while that game was terrible, its a really funny coincidence I just happened to pick two games back to back that have a plot about pregnancy, and even have childbirth scenes! What are the odds! I was blown away when I realized that, like what the fuck are the chances of that. I will say the childbirth scene in this game is WAY more intense and graphic and disgusting, this game makes Amnesia:Rebirth seem like PG13 family friendly and Outlast is like underground deep web snuff film or some shit in comparison.  

Though all in all its a pretty great horror experience with some stupid trial and error and a few other minor visibility issues. The enviornmental storytelling and plot is good enough that I'd even consider playing this game again, its like the perfect game to play if you have guests over, its like watching a horror movie with them but even more intense and immersive. There are enough details and graphical fidelity that playing it through again just to look around, zoom in at all the objects and crazy gore and weird things, that it would still be interesting. The graphics are awesome, I kind of like that it doesn't have a hardcore emphesis on puzzle solving like other horror games, thats really refreshing, though the game could have been better if some of the AI teleporting shit was gone, or the automatic chase scenes were a bit less janky, not knowing where to go, running into dead ends while being chased cause the visuals are so disorienting.

8/10