Outlast

Pros

• Smooth and seamless navigation
• Excellent and moody sense of horror
• Clever camera battery management system

Cons

• Slightly padded second act
• Success sometimes relies on trial and error

If you've played Amnesia, you'll feel right at home with the tense and claustrophobic survival horror of Outlast. As survival horror stalwarts like Resident Evil moved more towards action set-pieces, Amnesia's approach to horror is to make you feel constantly vulnerable. And that sense of vulnerability and tension goes more into the extreme horror territory of Silent Hill.

The environment is suitably moody enough to fit within the city limits of Silent Hill. Mount Massive Asylum is a mental hospital that's fallen into complete disarray, but psychotic patients still roam the halls. It may venture into trite and over-explored territory, but the effect here is well executed regardless. And while the notion of a mental hospital as a place of utter madness may tread the line of good taste, it's strangely affecting. Few of the characters here are in speaking condition, so much of the story is told through documents and the environment itself. Mount Massive and the surrounding environments are pretty in their haunting and debased way, but it's one unique feature that makes you completely consider how you interact with the environment.

You play an investigative journalist snooping around the site of Mount Massive, and that means you're more handy with a camcorder than you are with guns. Your camcorder is going to be a necessity too. That's because the majority of Mount Massive is without electricity, and your video camera comes equipped with night vision. What would otherwise be interesting if not astounding graphics are given a dramatically new filter with night vision. It also means that you'll need to balance your resources carefully. The battery on your night vision won't last long, but there are batteries scattered all throughout the asylum. On the negative side, these batteries tend to be in out of the way places. While you're technically free to explore the entire environment all you want, you're ultimately limited by the risk and reward of venturing into the dark.

It achieves this by stripping you of weapons entirely. In fact, there is no way to defend yourself from the deranged creatures you encounter in your journey. It's a version of survival horror stripped down to its chassis - providing players with merely the ability to cower in hiding or try to flee whenever you encounter opposition. It's a bold move that strips out any sense of power fantasy entirely but also often necessitates repetition. Jump scares are an art of diminishing returns, and Outlast hasn't quite reconciled their ability to balance some excellent enemy and stage design with significantly in-depth player actions and a smoother balance curve.

Some sequences seem like merely a case of trial and error, but there are a few tools at your disposal. The ability to vault over objects and hide in containers gives you a means of egress if monsters close in on you. Despite taking place exclusively from a first person perspective, Outlast has a surprisingly fluid sense of character movement. Running down hallways, juking around enemies, and vaulting over objects comes naturally within a few minutes of taking the controls, and it adds some depth that helps fill out the experience.

Or it will give you a means of egress hypothetically. The monsters in Outlast are both smart and relentless. In many ways, they're much like the alien queen in Alien: Isolation. They'll open containers and look under furniture in pursuit of you, but there's less randomness in their behavior here. If you can learn the patterns and blueprints of the environment, you can effectively work your way past every obstacle. Admittedly, a decent amount of time is spent running back and forth through those environments, but smart enemy placement and the natural claustrophobia that the dark environments solicit means that even old areas can feel terrifying when revisited. The mostly pitch black interior of a hospital can become repetitive partway through the story, but it picks up steam and switches up the environments before things become too tiring. All told, a slightly bloated middle escalates into a surprisingly harrowing finale.

If Outlast's existing flaws appeared with frequency, the results would be a mediocre game that showed a lot of promise. Instead, we're left with a phenomenal survival horror game that emphasizes survival above all else. The lunatics of Mount Massive Asylum are both smart and memorable, and the world they live in breathes with menacing life. The lack of action may scare off some core gamers, and some stretches rely on repetitive trial and error to get the job done, but it is for the most part an enthralling and foreboding world that's easy to get immersed in. If you can see lack of agency and empowerment as a design feature rather than a frustration, you'll be treated to one of the best survival horror experiences around.

Pros

• Smooth and seamless navigation
• Excellent and moody sense of horror
• Clever camera battery management system

Cons

• Slightly padded second act
• Success sometimes relies on trial and error