Outlast 2 looks quite good throughout - save for the slightly goofy character models - but the school sequences in particular are nearly photorealistic in a way that drives home both the banality of the setting and the disquiet creeping at its edges.
As it turns out, Blake has some history with religion, and throughout the game he finds himself hallucinating about his time in a Catholic grade school where some bad shit went down.
OUTLAST 2 GAME REVIEW FULL
The shanties, lakes and mountain paths in the game are full of bloody environmental storytelling, the kind of body-parts-scattered-everywhere stuff that worked to keep my sense of unease growing even as it pushes well past plausibility.īut if the over-the-top horror of its religious cult and their grisly compound drives Outlast 2 forward, the more mundane creepiness of its Catholic school flashbacks push it from good to great. It’s a testament to the game’s atmosphere that it stays terrifying despite the frustration. Outlast 2 stays terrifying despite the frustration These are the moments where Outlast 2 hit a great stride, and I got comfortable enough with the game to allow myself to get freaked out.
OUTLAST 2 GAME REVIEW WINDOWS
Outlast 2 feels at its best at two extremes: first, when it focuses on chase sequences, where you’re supposed to just run through the environment as fast as you can, sliding under debris and jumping into open windows like an amateur parkour enthusiast and second, when it cuts out enemies entirely and just allows you to explore creepy environments and piece together the plot. The encounter design is inconsistent, even if it isn't uniformly terrible. While these hide-and-seek episodes form the core gameplay loop of Outlast 2 and serve as the source of much of its tension, they also do the game the fewest favors.
OUTLAST 2 GAME REVIEW HOW TO
Most areas in Outlast 2 - whether it’s a series of buildings, a small forest or a rundown chapel - operate as their own little puzzles, where you need to figure out how to get from one end to the other without getting murdered in some, er, particularly gory ways. When you run into an enemy who wants you dead - and, as it turns out, there are a lot of them in this village - your only options are to run, hide or, more often, some combination of the two. Outlast 2, like the first game, is a true survival horror title, in that you have no weapons and no means of fighting back. The locals aren’t going to make it that easy, however. Blake soon discovers that this group is obsessed with sex and pregnancy, and Lynn has become the new focus of that obsession, building a powerful personal motivation for finding her and escaping as quickly as possible. This supposedly empty mountainous region is actually home to a massive Jonestown-esque religious cult. When the helicopter crashes, and Blake and Lynn are separated, he quickly discovers that something very wrong is happening. You take on the role of Blake, a cameraman who has joined his journalist wife Lynn on a helicopter ride into the deserts of Arizona, tracking the story of a mysterious murdered woman. Though apparently set in the same fictional universe as the first game, Outlast 2 has no obvious or direct ties to the original, and no knowledge of what happened last game is required. Call it sadistic, but if Outlast 2’s goal was to make me feel like I was going mad, it accomplished it. And yet, here, at the end of my time with it, I can’t help but feel like it is an extremely successful game precisely because it affected me as powerfully as it did. That rest was shortened by nightmares, naturally.įor some readers, all of this preamble probably sounds bad, and while I was in the midst of playing Outlast 2 I often felt bad about it. Several times, I had to stop playing completely, at one point forcing myself to take a nap in order to calm down. I found myself screaming at my computer louder than usual, shaking with a mix of fear and anxiety. Outlast 2 pushed much further than most other entries in the genre, though. I devote a lot of my time to scary books, films and games - including the original Outlast, released in 2013, a game that I found sufficiently frightening if not necessarily groundbreaking.
No game has ever fucked me up quite as badly as Outlast 2.
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