Review: Outlast

Outlast is a first-person survival horror game for the PC. It was developed by Red Barrels Games.

An escaped patient looking for Miles.

Miles Upshur gets a tip that something is going on at the Mount Massive Asylum. Suspecting a more mundane story, Miles breaks in to find dead military, blood and guts everywhere, a horde of disfigured mental patients, and a psychotic priest who wants him to witness the whole thing. Armed with only a camcorder, Miles has to find a new exit and maybe discover out what messed up the asylum.

Your time in Outlast is spent wandering around the asylum, opening doors and hiding from the patients. Miles has no way to defend himself while the patients could beat him to death in a couple of seconds. What Miles does have is the night vision of his camcorder, which lets him see in the pitch black asylum. While the inmates have to hunt based on sound and limited sight, Miles can see people coming from a distance and can run and hide under beds and in lockers.

The camcorder runs on limited battery power though. You have to find batteries and regularly replace the ones in the camcorder so you are not stumbling around in the dark.

You can use the camcorder without night vision, but its pointless to do so.

The game is really linear. There are a lot of long narrow (but not boring or copy and pasted) corridors you walk down with regular breaks to peer into rooms to look for exits, keys, or papers that detail the backstory. Most of the time you do nothing besides walk and wait for the next horror to jump out and chase you.

Miles puts his hands on the wall when you are next to one; a small detail but impressive.

When some crazy psycho does appear, they either immediately see you or not. With the former you have to run away, jumping over obstacles and closing doors behind you until you find a bed to hide under or a locker to hide in, at which point they guy will follow you into the room, look everywhere except where you are, and leave, or you have to run until something plot related happens. If they do not see you, you can normally move back and out of the way until they turn around

Controls while running are responsive and easy to use. Hiding is a simple button press which is easy to activate while you are running. The only difficulty is closing doors in a hurry, the game is finicky about whether you have clicked on a door, and double doors take too long to close.

The inmates are easy to get by. All you do is run and hide and as long as they are not in the room with you they never look at where you are. They are not that coordinated either, a few times I was just able to squeeze by them when I did not feel like running back and hiding.

But that is all okay, because Outlast is, for the most part, terrifying, for several reasons. The great lighting effects makes most of the asylum look dark and foreboding, so every step feels like walking into danger. Miles helplessness creates a sense of tension and caution on the player’s part. The inmates are just disgusting to look at, with missing limbs and large patches of their skin mutilated, so when they pop out of nowhere and chase you, screaming, it’s more than simply outrunning a normal person. The asylum itself is vile, with blood and lovingly detailed organs everywhere, and more inmates walking around acting crazy, even if they are harmless.

You will often find inmates doing nothing besides freaking out.

Special mention has to be given to the camcorder night vision effect. It does not just paint the screen green, it recreates that look night vision has, where only the area immediately in front of you is illuminated in a somewhat fuzzy effect. It gives you just enough light to see in front of you, but keeps you from seeing the guy silently walk into your field of vision until he is right in your face with the little eye lights that happen when you look at eyes in night vision.

If there is one thing that can make the game less scary are the musical cues. They are useful when I need to know that someone has seen me and I need to run, but it kills the surprise sometimes. Especially with this one guy who chases you everywhere, eventually when I heard his music I was like “Oh, it’s that guy again.” But those minor problems do not take away from the scariness of the game.

The only serious problem with Outlast is the ending. For most of the game you are running around, collecting papers that hint at some sort of supernatural being causing everything and something to do with Nazis. But at the end, I think Red Barrels felt like they had to give an explanation for everything, which they did not, and their explanation brings in a lot of plot points that were not set up beforehand, and just makes the story more confusing and the ending unsatisfying.

Even with its few flaws, Outlast is worth the time of anyone who is looking for a good, thorough scare, which is the most important thing.