I bought the Outlast Trilogy for PS4 new for $12 on clearance and I played through all three back to back. I'm going to focus on the last one, Outlast 2 And because it's on PS4`I get to take my own screenshots. Yay! I love the disclaimers in these games. It’s like “You know why you’re here. Enjoy the game, sicko.”
Outlast 2 is a run and hide survival horror game just like its two predecessors. You have no weapons or flashlight but a trusty camcorder with a night vision mode that allows you to see in the dark with clear atmospheric conditions. This mode uses batteries which you have to collect to keep it functional. Some differences between this and the first two include now taking damage and needing to heal yourself with bandages which you can find. The run button is now L3 instead of L1 which is now the look behind button and let me tell you that was hard getting used to after playing two games with it the other way around. The other two games took place in the same asylum and secret testing facility but this one has the distinct setting of rural Arizona so it’s outside or underground for a majority of the game. Now I haven’t been to ALL of Arizona but I find it hard to believe that there’s a part of Arizona looks like this. Yosemite in California yes or somewhere in the Pacific Northwest maybe but this just seems like too much granite and too many trees for Arizona. Where are the red rock formations, sagebrush and Joshua trees?
The premise is that you’re a cameraman for a reporter, (your wife,) going to investigate the disappearance of a young woman when your helicopter crashes rather abruptly from unseen forces. You arise from the crash with a dead pilot and a missing wife so you set off to find her which takes you straight into the heart of a backwater commune of cultists. Their religion has loose connections to Christianity but kind of runs afoul being centered around rape and human sacrifice.
There appear to be a lot of different horror influences here all melded into one. It’s a lot of Children of the Corn and The Hills Have Eyes. And then there’s some Blair Witch Project and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And then at the end there’s even some The Descent and even one iconic death scene that was straight out of The Omen.
The enemies in this game are all over the place in breed. They’re all humans I think but there’s insane religious zealots which inhabit the ramshackled farm and village areas. They’re like The Ganados from Resident Evil 4. There’s sick people who have been quarantined to a shanty town on the outskirts. There’s weird tribal bush people in the deep wilderness and a couple of guys resembling Master and Blaster, (let’s see how many pop culture references we can do,) who hunt you down with flaming crossbow bolts. There’re mud people in the caves. It’s like a whole freak ecosystem. There’s also no way to tell who’s going to try to kill you on sight, who’s only going to try to kill you if you’re up in their face and who just wants to puke on the ground and be left alone.
There are chase segments where you have to crawl away from pursuers through a tight spot either under a house or through a cave and you move so damn slow I’m constantly thinking there’s no way they’re not going to catch me but they don’t because they’re moving just as slow I guess. it’s almost comical that it’s a dire life or death flight measured in feet per minute.
Ignoring the big recurring baddies, guys with flashlights are the worst enemy. If you have to go within ten yards of them they will eventually spin around and spot you if you aren’t behind something. Considering you can’t hurt your enemies, the convention that you can essentially see in the dark while they’re effectively blind in it makes it a level playing field but guys with flashlights just screws you. However you are granted another tool which wasn’t in the first game, the camera microphone. Switch it on when using the camera view and you get a sound reading on your HUD. You can eavesdrop but that’s not that important. It works kind of like a geiger counter. Depending on where you aim the camera the bar goes up when you center on a noise source which is usually a person. The higher the bar, the closer the person to your proximity. This thing works at a good distance and through walls so it’s almost like you can see through objects in a crude sense.
Like the other games there are backstory or exposition documents scattered around that you can collect and specific events or objects that you can record with your camera. I like how your camera shows a timeline of everything you’ve gathered and shows blanks when you missed something not that you can do a damn thing about it. In the other games you could flick on your camera and the thing in front of you is recorded but in Outlast 2 you have to stand there for 10-15 seconds shooting what is usually a static object and if you move at all you risk interrupting and resetting it. Really? Come on. If it’s an event, you sometimes need to immediately turn the camera on and begin recording before whatever it is ends and you never see it again. But there’s so much crazy shit happening all the time it’s impossible to tell what you’re supposed to document and what’s just another Christmas tree decorated with entrails. Why am I recording this? It’s like the hundredth… one of these I’ve seen tonight.
The segment where you have to go rafting down the river sucks. When I started out and had to paddle across the lake I kept getting hung up on an invisible wall with no way to tell that I wasn’t moving at all. In the river the raft handles like shit but it’s basically made like the door to a wood cabin so kudos on making a door that floats like a door I guess. There are two places on the river where you are scheduled to get wrecked and lose your raft but somehow on my first try I maneuvered past both of them and made it to my destination with significantly less sidetrack and hassle. However when I got there there was no way to dock and get off either by climbing up the ladder or getting on the pier because it’s only supposed to happen as part of a triggered event. I was just stuck floating around on the worst raft ever. I went past the dock and down river to a place you’re not supposed to be able to go, (still unaware things were amiss even though I’d been clipping through objects in the environment,) and I found where the river terminates in a low res pond which I actually think is creepier than the regular textures.
You periodically switch back and forth between the twisted nightmarish present reality and a twisted nightmarish version of your flashbacks from something that happened to you in Catholic school. These sections kind of remind me of FEAR (the haunted office simulator game.) When you’re at the school sometimes the Upsidedown leaks in and the Demogorgon appears and chases you. (Yes, that’s actually the most efficient way to describe it.) But seriously this monster is crazy. It’s a guy with a bunch of arms. I didn’t get a good image because he’s kind of ethereal and teleports and kills you on touch so it’s hard. Initially I was okay with this but I got increasingly annoyed with being continually transported here because I wasn’t seeing the relevance to the actual storyline I was invested in and so it just feels like I have to do busy work until I’m allowed to go back to the forest and get chased by Ganados again. It’s like the game just gets interrupted occasionally with some other game that you have to play. And when I say that I really think these should have been two seperate games. The two have too much diversion to help eachother but enough content to go on solo. Why do they need each other? The school has its own plot and identity as a psychological horror game with one big badguy and some weird phenomena that sometimes makes you question your sanity. The most interesting thing is when the game pulls off a seamless transition between being in the Arizona wilderness and then suddenly you’re in the school or vice versa. It implies that you’re having a mental episode which is reinforced when you check your footage of things from the school and it’s distorted beyond recognition. It’s like the stuff you see there isn’t really happening… but it can still kill you. The problem is this cool mechanic is wasted on transitioning from one dangerous and scary place to another dangerous and scary place. It could be so much more unsettling with a contrast between one location where you are (at least relatively) safe or there are at least rules and constants of normalcy you can cling to and then another location that is chaotic and upsetting. A good example is when you hear the siren in Silent Hill and the world changes into Alternate Silent Hill. Silent Hill as it stands is a creepy abandoned town but that’s it. It also has monsters in it but somewhere in your mind you are familiar with the concept of an abandoned town because that’s something real. When the siren goes off, suddenly the world around you ceases to make sense as you’re thrown head first into a rusty metal hellscape. As bad a place as regular Silent Hill is, when you hear that siren you feel panic because things are going to get worse and similarly when you come back out again you feel relief. In Outlast 2 you’re just going from one Alternate Silent Hill to another. There’s no sense of dread when it happens. Instead of “Oh no, it’s happening” it’s “Great, this shit again.” 
It would be interesting to see this psychological world transition concept fleshed out into its own horror game. It needs to stay subtle, no defined crossover moment. Maybe something like Jacob’s ladder. I imagine a game taking place in a mundane setting of everyday life and then it takes a sinister turn and you start seeing freaky shit. Borrowing the Vietnam War backdrop of the movie, the player would have PTSD episodes triggered by something and then your environment would change to reflect your twisted perceptions. Maybe you go to trim bushes or something in your backyard and then you turn around and find you’re stranded alone deep in the jungle with monsters signifying a distorted version of the Vietcong you remember fighting. Maybe you’re working on your car and you go under it with a flashlight and suddenly you’re back in ‘Nam exploring a VC tunnel system full of traps. The line between reality and your nightmares becomes increasingly blurred and you eventually end up killing your wife thinking she’s a monster or something. I’d buy it… then again I buy anything that’s horror.
Not until the end of the game do you get a clear flashback of what happened between you and the girl you knew in school. In it you are your child self and it plays out as an unaltered truthful memory so it’s odd to see this blood smear through the stairs door window I recognize from an earlier foray into the school, (you can see it in the image of the many armed man). Oops. I think the level designers forgot to clean that up.
There doesn’t seem to be any line that these games won’t cross. Rape, crucifixion, baby murder, baby birth, full frontal nudity, castration and even what appeared to me like a guy masturbating over a corpse… It was a nice little romp.
