Outlast 2 sticks you in dark, unfamiliar areas with hostiles over and over in which you cannot defend against except run or hide. Dishonored, for example, has massive levels but with multiple, explicitly stated paths that take place in an urban environment. Action oriented open world games allow you to have a “player toolkit” that lets you deal with all the hostile folks in the map and let you explore the environment afterwards. Open areas tend to be the setting of open world games, and it is rare to find a stealth game set in one dark field after another. Unfortunately, Outlast 2 just gears towards appalling nonsense and doesn’t stop until the 10 seconds are up.
Outlast always kept a toe dipped in the possible scenarios pool, drawing the scary from the average. Women raped, children murdered, men crucified and burnt alive in such a disconnected, frequent sequence that it never becomes truly horrifying. Scribbles and scriptures endlessly repeat with preachings of murder, sex, or the ever popular murder-sex. The game places such a heavy emphasis on gore and disgusting moments that the actual cult’s beliefs never coherently come together. Swapping out the dry corporate Murkoff notices that brought pain and suffering, Outlast 2 goes for pseudo-religious horror.
IN practice, imagine elongating Outlast 1’s courtyard portions and making them even more witless and frustrating. Theoretically, this could make the game more scary, with possible dangers jumping out of the trees and rushing you from every angle.
Where every one of Outlast 1’s hallways had an atmosphere of claustrophobia or anxiety, the oppressive insane asylum is replaced with the outdoor, scrubby hills of Arizona. Instead of coming out with an actual horror film, you emerge with many highlights of suffering but without the “boring” bits of footage. However, Outlast 2 has you record a certain event or image for about 10 seconds from a certain angle, which turn into saved “clips”, anything else you do with your camera up is completely disregarded. The most apparent form of change between Outlast 1 versus Outlast 2’s mechanics is the way your camera records the first game allowed you to cobble together footage from the entire game whenever your camera was raised. There is no one but Red Barrels themselves to blame for this, since both games use the same conventions yet presents the plot of Outlast 2 in a more obvious way. This makes it a bad horror movie, and an even worse horror game. Outlast 2 is, unfortunately, one of these statistics a highly expected sequel that ditches all the technical and artistic flourishes of the first game that defined the series. Of course, this is the total assurance that a good horror film will fall victim to a worse sequel, such as Halloween or even the good ole’ Blair Witch Project, these having solid horror themes while spawning god-awful Netflix marketing sequels.
The irony is not lost upon me that a game which sticks to movie conventions and mechanics falls into the pit of the most common, yet painful cliche. Throughout the critique, I will make many connections to the “found footage” horror genre. I will also refer to and spoil several movies for comparison reasons. I will not be talking about the various platforms that run this game or display any bias towards any other horror-centered games. This is a critique of Red Barrel’s second Outlast game. If you are easily disturbed by themes of violence, sexual violence, and religious themes, this is not meant for you.
Warning, there are FULL spoilers discussed in this critique.