I’ve been stabbed, impaled, nailed to things, drowned, electrocuted, strangled, slashed, licked, bludgeoned, buried alive, filled with arrows, and had diseased blood poured in my face. No, I wasn’t taking public transport but playing an average session of Outlast 2.
The sequel to the 2013 breakout survival horror classic, Outlast 2 is just as terrifying and a vastly more polished game, moving the proceedings from a mental asylum to the desert. It manages to evoke the same sense of dread while giving gamers a somewhat different experience.
Scarcity was the driving force behind the tension of early survival horror. Just thinking about walking into another room of Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion with two bullets in the chamber, just to be confronted with another nigh-unkillable zombie, still makes me sweat. Outlast 2 takes that fear to the next level – you have no weapons at all. You are NOT a fighter. All you can do is capture the events on your battery-eating handycam or run like hell.
You play as Blake Langermann, a cameraman working with your reporter wife, Lynn. While investigating the mysterious death of a pregnant woman found deep in the Arizona desert, you are soon both dragged into a nightmare full of mutilated corpses, satanic cults, murderous rednecks, and conveniently scattered AA batteries. Blake is a man haunted by his past, the game seamlessly switches from the present desert horror to a pristine catholic school from Blake’s childhood. I liked the story and felt emotionally engaged. I genuinely cared for the characters, and putting together the fragments of memory was satisfying.
Outlast 2 takes the gut-churning fear and gory set-pieces of the original and elevates everything to another level. While the visuals of Outlast were clean, simple, and functional, Outlast 2 features breathtaking vistas and great lighting. The general graphic detail level, lighting, and texturing have vastly improved.
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Everything feels more developed, from tighter controls to a realistic menu on your Handycam where you can review the horrific scenes previously captured. Like the first game, you need to utilize the Handycam’s night vision function in order to progress, as some areas are completely pitch black. The batteries get drained in mere minutes, so you will be constantly hunting for more. Luckily, what the violent locals lack in a varied gene pool, they make up for with a love of disposable energy sources, oddly leaving enough scattered batteries around to power an army of Duracell bunnies.
The camera mechanic is better than ever, even the somewhat laggy zoom from the first game is improved. Playing on normal difficulty, I only ran out of camera batteries once in what was a terrifying scramble in the dark. That balance felt good, although I have to question if the batteries need to be a little scarcer.
The camera now has a microphone that lets you hear your enemies from greater distances and behind walls– although, in practice, this just causes you to freak out more most of the time. The sound design is predominantly what makes the scares work. From the religious mutterings in the darkness to the creaking floorboards and tense musical stabs of the soundtrack, the sound puts you in a constant state of unease. One enemy, the insidious Marta, has a sound cue that makes me panic just writing about it.
Outlast 2 is a brutal and punishing gaming experience. Get ready to die again and again and in disturbingly vicious ways. One enemy, in particular, seemed to take great pleasure in focusing their attacks on my genitals, hellbent on castrating me at any chance they got. It might sound darkly humorous out of context, but it’s not. In Outlast 2, watching your junk being impaled, smashed, and torn asunder is legitimately horrifying.
Outlast 2 was banned, then unbanned, in Australia (which means here in New Zealand, too: we are constant victims of Australia’s puritanical video game censorship laws) due to the depiction of sexual themes. Game studio Red Barrels claimed that the game submitted to the Australian censor contained scenes from the alpha not intended for the final release.
The game was resubmitted with the offending scenes removed and then cleared for our fragile little minds. The offending scene was reportedly a Lovecraftian psychedelic sex orgy, featuring humanoid creatures bumping uglies and a naked she-demon trying to Cosby the drugged protagonist. Thanks to the Aussie fun police, no one gets to play that version, as Red Barrels swapped it out for a toned-down version worldwide.
Despite this, Outlast 2 is still one of the most hardcore horror games out there, with many shockingly graphic moments.
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Some gamers may smash their keyboards with frustration at the trial-and-error gameplay and the purgatory of unending death animations. But in an era when many games hold players’ hands with levels and even end bosses that are beatable the first time (looking at you, Resident Evil 7), I admire Outlast 2 for its intense and unrelenting challenges.
One annoyance is that some enemies seem to be able to hunt you down in the pitch darkness without the aid of night vision goggles, making your attempts at hiding futile. The stealth mechanic was the element I found to be most lacking. Although various lockers and barrels are available for cowering in, my technique of just bolting past enemies worked 90% of the time.
On the negative side, some of the character animations are clunky, and the game could have been done with some more stimulating puzzles. The enemy AI seems to swing between being psychically aware of your exact location to blindly unable to see you from mere feet away. I found the final act of the game less challenging, and feel like it could have needed to ramp up on the difficulty (a crime many games seem to be guilty of this these days). And the enemy design was good but paled in comparison to the iconic baddies of Silent Hill, Resident Evil, or The Evil Within.
But despite these shortcomings, Outlast 2 is a sadistic survival horror title that features some of the scariest moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game. I particularly loved Outlast 2’s thought-provoking yet divisive and controversial ending, which stayed with me long after the end credits. Sign me up for whatever brutal deaths the series is going to inflict on me next.