Outlast Review for PlayStation 4 and PC

Outlast has been billed as one of the scariest games ever made. Many YouTube videos exist of people either watching or playing the game in the dark and being scared out of their minds at the freakish horrors that await them. While Outlast touches on the most well known clichés of the genre, can it rely on them to cary the game through its 6 to 7 hour play time?

The player fills the shoes of journalist Miles Upshur who is following a lead from a whistle blower about experiments being done on the patients at a local asylum which quietly reopened after many years of being abandoned. After making the questionable, but predictable, decision to sneak into the facility in the dead of night, the player finds themselves in a place where the inmates are running the asylum, and most of them are crazed, murdering psychopaths.

Survival horror games have always played off our fear of death and the limitations the game gives the player to avoid the gruesome end. Games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories took this to the extreme by removing all combat and leaving the ability to run away as the player’s only hopes of survival.

In Outlast, there also is no combat and you will spend a good deal of time hiding in the shadows or lockers. The only tool the player has is a video camera with a night vision mode. With it you can see the giant thing hunting you in the darkness and the small sewer pipe you can crawl into to hide.

The night vision mode drains the battery on the camera and you must find replacements during your journey through the twisted facility. In normal mode, batteries were to be found almost everywhere and I never ran out.

One of the scariest moments is early on in a room where three of the inmates are simply sitting watching a static filled TV, splattered with the requisite amount of blood. They don’t move or acknowledge your presence, and you must cross the room in plain sight. This took me about 30 min to work up the nerve to do as I was absolutely certain one of them would come after me the moment I stepped in front of them, or that something would jump out of the dark doorway that was my objective. In these early scenarios Outlast is a masterpiece of tension, but by the halfway point of the game the inevitable system of the game is revealed and the horror become more of an annoyance.

All games are based on a system and as such a pattern always emerges. Turn a knob or lever to unlock a door and then run and hide. Rinse and repeat. You do this enough that by the final stages of the game, the inmates that kept you scared beyond reason in the first few hours become the annoying pest you put up with. If you fail to run away or hide from the giants stalking the asylum you will die a very painful death. With each death you find yourself a little less scared of the two giant naked brothers who are stalking you and wish to dine on your liver as an appetizer.

I always compare every horror game to my personal touchstone, Silent Hill 2. The tale is a dark descent into mystery, terror and it only gets worse the further you go and still gives me the shivers almost 15 years after I first played it. Outlast gives me the same sense of dread I experienced with Silent Hill 2 but it fades about half way through the experience as the scares start to repeat and the darkness isn’t as scary as it first was. Outlast for the PlayStation 4 and PC is only $19.99 and if you are a PlayStation Plus member the game is free for the month of February. For the price of admission, Outlast is worthy of checking yourself into the asylum. Just be sure to bring batteries.

Outlast
Platform: PlayStation 4 / PC
Developer: Red Barrels Games
Release Date: 9.4.2013 (PC) / 2.4.2013 (PlayStation 4)
ESRB Rating: Mature for Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Sexual Content, Nudity, Strong Language
Official Site