![]() The soundtrack is great, which is difficult for a horror game like this because you have to balance the creepy, isolated atmospheric stretches up with the pulse-pounding, heart-racing moments when you’re surrounded by angry people who are dedicated to putting their pitchforks in your eye sockets. Outlast 2 definitely isn’t as consistent or coherent, but what made the original game so good is still present, albeit in smaller doses. At various points, it manages to recapture every one of the elements that made Outlast good memorable villains, claustrophobic paranoia, going from nought to life-threatening chase sequence in the blink of an eye, etc. ![]() So as reluctant as I may be to admit it, Outlast 2 is a decent game, and there’s nothing inherently wrong about averaging a six or a seven out of ten. And to give off some false semblance of balance, let’s start with some token positives about the game. Now if we wanted to cover every single negative element of this game, we would be here for a while, so instead I’m going to narrow down this blog to talk solely about the elements of the game that aren’t just bad, but are noticeably worse than the original, and why that is. Outlast 2, on the other hand, does things because they are scary. Outlast worked because it had plenty of moments that were anxiety-inducing, unnerving and outright terrifying, but they also worked because they made sense in the context of the story. I wanted to credit the inspiration for this article but I am also now slightly worried that I’m giving the impression that this will basically just be the transcript to a YouTube video with some minor modifications, but I assure you that these are all my genuine thoughts on the game.Īnd the biggest problem in the game can probably be summed up by the title of that video because it’s scary. One of the biggest flaws about Outlast 2 is that I generally didn’t think it was even interesting enough to write an article about explaining why it wasn’t as interesting as the first game, but there’s a YouTube video by ‘Purposeless Rabbitholes’ named ‘Because It’s Scary: An Outlast 2 Analysis’ that made me think that I actually could fashion an article out of what I had to say about the game. It’s, uh… I’ll be honest, I’m having a really difficult time thinking of positive things to say about the game that don’t start with an ellipsis. It had a plot and characters and I believe some music, and it was responsive, in the sense that I would press a button on my controller and my character would move, and… uh, there were some scary bits, which is good because without scary bits, it wouldn’t be a horror game, it would just be a strangely linear and uneventful platformer, I guess. Outlast 2 was an exceptionally… decent video game. Outlast 2 was… fine? With an emphasis on the audible pause before ‘fine’, and the question mark at the end, as if it’s an incomplete statement, or I’m proposing something rather than stating it. As a result, Outlast is a game that isn’t exactly original, or groundbreaking, or… any of the positive words that you would generally use to describe a genre-busting game that defied all expectations and delivered a strong thematic message in a uniquely artistic way, but it is a really, really, really good horror game, because the environment and characters and soundtrack and sound design are polished to hell and back. Artistically, it’s on the same level as Five Nights at Freddy’s – the first game, not the franchise – only if anything, FNAF might hold an edge because even when it was a single game, it held an impressive amount of background lore, whereas Outlast is very straightforwardly a ‘trapped in a spooky asylum, hunted by the crazy inmates, watch out for the jump scares and look forward to the three minute explanation at the end as to why this is all happening!’ experience.īut if anything, that worked in the developers’ favour, because Outlast is, at its core, what happens when a group of people take a bunch of tired, clichéd horror tropes, and instead of spending all of their energy subverting them for the sake of creating something smarter, spend their time absolutely refining the hell out of what made those horror tropes successful in the first place. Outlast is one of my favourite guilty pleasure games – I even wrote an entire big wordy thinky ‘Look Ma, I’m a real journalist!’ piece about Outlast and Ableism – and the reason I call it a guilty pleasure is that it’s not particularly… smart about anything that it does.
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