Expect a 'departure' set within the Outlast universe

Where should Outlast go from here? The run-like-hell-and-hide horror series has become a relatively known entity at this point, with more than 15 million sales to date. Outlast 2 felt like the next logical step as a bigger-budget f?ollow-up,?? but should Red Barrels stay on that trajectory?

Last year, the studio said it would probably make an Outlast 3 "at some point." But before that day comes, it's working on "a distinct experience set in the Outlast universe," one that "won't be a sequel to Outlast or Outlast 2." There was som?e unc?ertainty about whether or not the idea would work.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin reiterated that the team's next game is planned to be a "departure" from Outlast as we know it but still set within its universe.

"If you'd told me a year ago that the project we're currently working on was going to be our next thing, I would have said, 'Nah, I don't think so.' It's?? an internal struggle. On the one side you have to stay motivated as a developer, but at the ?same time we have to think about stuff as company owners."

Continuing, Morin said "?That's why it took us several months to find the sweet-spot between doing something that's going?? to please the fans, and something that we're driven by personally."

Without knowing the nitty-gritty, I think a side-step away from the current Outlast formula is the right move. Try?? something new and? different to scare people while you still have their attention.

From zero to 15 million: The story of Outlast [GamesIndustry.biz]

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There will be an Outlast 3 'at some point'

Outlast studio Red Barrels made a few announcements about its horror series today and there's a little something for everyone. First off, "the Outlast franchise" is coming to Ninten??do Switch in Q1 2018.

It's unclear how much the two games will cost or how they'll be distributed on Switch, but earlier this year Red Barrels released a $40 physical package for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with Outlast, the Whistleblower DLC, and Outlast 2 under the name Outlast Trinity. Maybe we'll see something similar.

It's time for a status update! We've got news about the future of Outlast, a new project AND the Nintendo Switch. Read the full update here: //t.co/ZIPQAypmv1 pic.twitter.com/N7a3ZQDG8h

— Red Barrels (@TheRedBarrels) December 7, 2017

The team also explained that despite fan requests for Outlast 2 DLC, the game "was created to make you feel like a rat in a maze, without any knowledge of what's outside the maze," and add-on content wouldn't quite fit. "We've considered many options, but none?? of them felt appropriate for a DLC."

That said, there are plans for an eventual Outlast 3 and "answers will be given."

Finally, Red Barrels teased a separate project that will arrive before a third game (if everything goes as planned). "Currently we're working on something a lot of you have been asking for... It won't be a sequel to Outlast or Outlast 2, but it will be a distinct experience set in the Outlast universe. We can't say more right now, we first need to make sure we can mak?e it work. Like I mentioned, we strive to be risk-takers and this one is a pretty big challenge. If all goes well, we'll soon be able to reveal more."

Red Barrels [Twitter]

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Normal should feel more 'normal'

If there's one thing that can really bog down a horror game, it's the difficulty. Make it too easy, and there's no real chance of maintai?ning tension. Make it too hard, and repeated playthroughs of the same challenging section over again and again will have once-scary moments feeling rote. It's a tricky balance.

After monitoring player feedback, Outlast 2 developer Red Barrels has found that things aren't quite where they ought to be, difficulty-wise. Today's update brings "minor adjustments to th??e game’s difficulty in key areas and moments. On Normal difficulty this will offer players a more appropriately balanced experience while still maintaining higher levels of challenge on Hard and Nightmare difficulties."

Larger subtitles, bug fixes, and a tweak to the microphone (it not longer uses extra batteries) are also included in the patch, which is out now on PC and "coming soon" to the console versions. Find the full notes here.

New patch just released! [Steam]

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Suffer the children

If Chekhov’s gun is the narrative principle that if a gun is shown on a mantle in the first chapter, it must be fired by the third, then Outlast 2 runs on the principle of Chekhov’s piss. If you see a mutant hillbilly pi??ssing into a ditch of decapitated heads and severed body parts, you can be sure that you’ll have to belly crawl your way through that filth in the next 15 minutes or so.

This is a trick Outlast 2 comes back to again and again. It shows you something horrifying, something repulsive, then it grabs you by the scruff and rubs your nose in it. Outlast 2 is not game about pulling punches or subtle implications. It’s a game about terror and cruelty. About not wanting something to happen and then being forced to endure it, inch by inch, in excruciati?ng detail.

There is something admirable about such a direct approach to terror. The eagerness Outlast 2 has for making the player wriggle uncomfortably, for forcing them to come face-to-face with some of the most gruesome and disturbing imagery I’ve ever seen in a horror game is impressive. What is less admirable, however, is the lack of follow-through in the narrative. Outlast 2 knows?? it wants to shock you, but it doesn’t kno?w exactly what it wants to say.

Outlast 2 [PC (reviewed), PS4, Xbox One]
Developer: Red Barrels 
Publisher: Red Barrels 
Released: April 25, 2017
MSRP: $29.99 

Before we go any further, you need to know that Outlast 2 deals with some extremely heavy and uncomfortable topics (and not always with the most tact or delicacy). Religion, body horror, misogyny, and sexual abuse are the overarching themes that stitch together all the moment-to-moment violence and terror. The game is exceedingly gruesome and explicit. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, then ba?il out now.

Outlast 2 uses a similar setup to the original, casting you as a milquetoast videographer named Blake. You and your reporter wife, Lynn, are investigating the mysterious death of a pregnant 15 year old Jane Doe found wandering a desolate highway miles from civilization. While her s?tory is unknown, the most promising explanation is that she was a runaway from Temple’s Gate, a reclusive religious community hidden in the mountains. While filming some establishing shots of the countryside and rural compound, the chopper you’re in goes down. Needless to say, things take a quick turn for the worst.

Waking up in the wreckage, you’re separated f?rom Lynn and are forced to explore the shanty huts and creepy chapels of the cult alone, relying on your camera’s night vision optics and directional microphone to navigate the dilapidated compound. It’s a bad s?ituation even before you encounter knife-wielding hicks, knee-high piles of child corpses, and scrawled notes rambling about the apocalypse and a monstrous sun creature “fucking the earth.” Yeah. You’ll want to give the locals a wide berth.

The camera conceit is effective. More than simply a way to ride on the found-footage horror movie craze of the past few years, or provide a convenient excuse to play with night vision and spooky whispers caught on the directional mic -- it forces the player to linger on the depravity. As you wander through the cult’s compound, you’ll encounter gruesome scenes that demand to be recorded, scribbled notes and cryptic passages from the cult’s bizarre gospel that you feel compelled to document. You’re making something between a case a?gainst the cult in the slim chance that you might make it out alive, and a dead man’s letter to whoever might find your body.

Your role isn’t to intervene or to put an end to the madness. You have no combat skills, no folding knife or pocket full of shotgun shel?ls. You are not the cavalry. Your role is to witness the horror. To capture it, catalog it, and ultimately wallow in it.

This is a fantastic example of game mechanics used to reinforce the themes of its narrative. The camera is both?? your lifeline and your burden. It is your eyes and ears in an almost literal sense, since you can’t navigate the darkness surrounding you without it. The few brief moments you spend separated from it are some of the most tense sequences in the game. But it's also a millstone around your neck, a duty you have to uphold, despite the circumstances. There is a wonderful union of action and idea at play with the camera. Unfortunately, the rest of the narrative never gels quite as smoothly.

The original Outlast and its DLC expansion The Whistleblower were similarly enthusiastic about forcing the player to confront some distinctly uncomfortable ideas. But, its criticisms and themes were more apparent and coherent. By tying the fictional charnel house of the Mount Massive Asylum to the real life debauchery and horror of the MKUltra program, Outlast 1 was a clear commentary on the overreaching cr??uelty of the military industrial complex. ?About the casual disregard for life held by large corporations willing to accept a staggering body count in the name of efficiency and progress. The othering of mental illness and the tragic repeating history of the most vulnerable being subjugated to the worst predations.

Outlast 2’s themes are more muddled. Wrapped in the trappings of the Southern Gothic and centering around an ??isolationist community held together by a cult of personality, the game is mostly focused on the destruction wrought by unquestioned authority and blind (or cowed) obedience. The cult and its leader, Father Knoth, could easily be seen as a stand-in for David Koresh and his Branch Davidians, or any other doomsday cult. Even the name “Temple’s Gate” is intentionally reminiscent of the “Heaven’s Gate” cult that ended in a mass suicide.

It draws parallels between the obvious and shocking evil of the cult to the insidiousness of abuse in more familiar surrounding. Allusions to domestic violence in the home, as well as within trusted institutions such as the Catholic church and its complicated and sad history of sexual abuse and cover-ups are carefully and deliberately made. These acts are all cast as different manifestations of the same kind of evil – only with one being the kind we recognize as clearly vile, and the other we'd rather turn a blind eye to or prefer to not mention. It’s a strong setup, but Outlast 2 never goes much further with it. For a game eager to push (and br?eak) the boundaries of good taste when it comes to gore, it flinches at the last moment when delivering its message.

This is particularly disheartening given how much the game wallows in misogyny and violence against women. The abuse and victimization of young girls and women is a constant, looming shadow cast over the entire story. To Outlast 2’s credit, none of this abuse is ever played for titillation or as naughty taboo-breaking (like some popular premium cable series). The abuse is always depicted in as revolting a light as possible. Nevertheless, it is a pervasive theme throughout, and one that never quite gets the payoff I was looking for. Women are ?hurt, murd??ered, abused, and discarded, and the game just kind of moves on.

There is a scene where the cul?t has captured a wayward member and is torturing him for information. After he endures being blinded and broken on the wheel, the cult plays their trump card. They drag in his wife, strap her to a rack, and crack her bones to make him talk. Of course he spills his guts. Even so, the cultists go on torturing the poor woman in a display of sheer, pointless sadism. Blake witnesses the entire event, and when reviewing the film of t??he encounter comments that, “they always hurt women to punish the men… It’s cowardly. It’s sick.”

And in this moment, it seems like Outlast 2 is on the verge of a breakthrough; of a real commentary on its own plot and structure. But it never happens. Immediately after acknowledging how the suffering of women is too often used as a tool to spur the actions of a man in a meta-contextual moment, the game never reflects any further on it. You go right back to trying to find Lynn (who through all context and implication is likely spending most of the game being tortured and raped), or making your way through surreal flashbacks that focus on the death of a former childhood girlfriend. For a game that is largely taking a fairly nuanced look at the horrors of abuse, it skirts a little too close to?? the “stuffed into the fridge” trope of generating male character pathos by using dead women as props -- dismembered bodies used to flesh out a man’s backstory and motivation.

There is also the matter of some of the more supernatural and apocalyptic imagery used in the later chapters of the game. Without spoiling anything, Outlast 2 goes to some weird places. There are forces at work that go far beyond deranged yokels and crusty cult leaders. Crazy things, impossible things, happen. There is one sequence near the end of the game that I’m sure I’ll be talking about during Game of the Year discussions when trying to nail down speci?fic moments that blew me away this year.

As absolutely fantastic, unsettling, and expertly used as these supernatural elements are, I was let down by the lack of explanation of them. While the game hints in the gentlest of ways that they might have something to do with the Walrider of the previous game (the psychic murder ghost created through concentrated trauma at Mount Massive), it never really gives any clear answers to them. Is the apocalypse building? Is this all some kind of mental break or metaphorical purgatory? Outlast 2 isn’t interested in telling.

Normally I don’t mind this kind of ambiguity (it’s usually best to leave some questions unanswered), but in this case it runs against the grain. By going so heavy on the biblical imagery and supernatural, yet never really explaining any of it, the conclusion almost weirdly validates some of the cult’s insane beliefs. I’m sure this wasn’t the intended effect, but when you wag your finger at a doomsday cult as being delusional and corrupt with one hand, and then present a bitching doomsday with the other??, one can’t help but be confused.

Slight narrative fumbling aside, Outlast 2 stands as a phenomenal horror experience. It’s a tight eight or so hour game, but during that time you go to so many different places, witness so many catastrophes, and evade so many rusty blades and pointed pickaxes, that it feels much longer??. Time crawls when? you're being tortured. 

You night have noticed I’ve spent most of the review talking about the themes and ideas Outlast 2 plays with, and there are two reasons for that. One, criticisms aside, Outlast 2 is a smarter, more nuanced horror game than most other titles out there and deals in ideas that are worth discussing. Two, I don’t want to spoil a single thing. This is a game made of gut punches, and I wouldn’t dreaming of robb?ing you of their full meaty impact.

Outlast 2 is harrowing. It is a horror game that will make you want to take a shower after you’re done with it. It’s a horror game that will make you want to hold your ??loved ones just a little tighter next time you embrace?? them. It’s a horror game that will scare you in the moment with shock and gore, then haunt you in the middle of the night with its ideas. And isn’t that what the best of horror strives for?

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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2 + 2 = 5

Human or not, Australia's Classification Board has decided Outlast 2 is too obscene for sale even with an R18+ rating, thus making the game impossible to sell in its current, unedited form. The scene i??n question suggests, but doesn'??t explicitly show, the main character being sexually violated off-screen by a female monster while he objects.

The Board says the game "depicts, expresses or otherwise deals with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults to?? the extent that they should not be classified."

Remember kids legal adults, you're not capable of deciding what's good or bad for you on your own, but the Australian ?Classification Board is. I don't know why I shelled out the money for a North Korea tour when I could have just revisited Australia to see philosophical oppression.

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Physical bundle of all games available

Outlast was once of 2013's best surprises. New independent developer Red Barrels took a considerable risk dedicating themselves to a horror game focused on evasion rather than direct combat, making for one of the most frightening experiences in recent memory. Two years later, Red Barrels announced Outlast II and that it would release in August, 2016.

However, it was one of many games caught up in the great 2016 delay storm, where game after game was pushed from Q4 2016 to Q1 2017. Despite announcing a Q1 release, today Red Barrels announced the game will launch?? on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on April 25, 2017, nearly a month into Q2.

Red Barrels also announced Outlast Trinity for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, a physical collection of all three titles: Outlast, Outlast Whistleblower, and Outlast II. This bundle will be available for $39.99 on the same day, April 25, 2017. Outlast II by itself is $29.99 digitally; Outlast Trinity is the only way to obtain a physical copy of Outlast II. Considering the original game was just $19.99, I hope this is an indication of a bigger game. In any case, if you're new to the series Outlast Trinity is the way to go.

Missing the mark is not the end of the world and it is understandable that games are not easy to create, but it is wise not to set a date you can't meet. Of all the games that were delayed from 2016, you might say this one is coming out last.

Welcome to Temple Gate. Outlast 2 will be available digitally on PC, XBOX One and Playstation 4 on April 25th. pic.twitter.com/EFzYowzhay

— Red Barrels (@TheRedBarrels) March 6, 2017

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Available on PC and consoles until November 1

Hold onto your junk! Red Barrels has a limited-time demo up for its first-person horror game Outlast 2. You'll be able to download it until November 1 on Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

The game, to quickly recap, puts you in the shoes of an investigative journalist. You're working with your wife to "uncover the stories no one else will dare touch" and have followed a lead to the Arizona desert where there's "a darkness so deep that no one could shed light upon it." Which, oh. Good.

That cornfield up there brings back terrified memories of a real-life haunted maze I went to a couple of years back. Even as someone who likes to be scared, damn, it was intense. I'm still reeling just thinking about it. Indoor haunts are one thing, but being stranded out in a confusing corn maze with a bunch of costumed teens who take their job very seriously? I don't think I can do ?it again.

At least with Outlast 2, I can turn the lights back on.

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2017 it is!

Red Barrels has made the call to push its body-mutilating survival horror title Outlast 2 from a fall 2016 release to Q1 2017.

"Our mission as an indie studio is to deliver to you the best, most terrifying, most fulfilling experiences possible. That's why we're taking just a little bit more time to make sure our vision for Outlast 2 is in no way compromised and is th??e experience you deserve," the studio wrote in an update posted today.

"Thank you for understanding. We promise Outlast 2 will scare the crap out of you."

Ever been so frightened that you lost control of your bowels? I can't say I have, though I am mentally preparing myself for the day hopefully many years?? from now where such a scenario could happen.

Outlast [Facebook]

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Could be great with some improvements

The original Outlast had a nice combination of jump scares and actual horror; someone would pop out and scare you, before giving chase as you ran away and hid from them. You'd hear footsteps, breathing, and see enemies stand inches away from your hiding spot. It was terrifying.

While there are things that lead me to believe the same kind of tense moments will exist in Outlast 2 -- such as lockers to hide in -- I did not experience an??y of these in the demo I played tod??ay at PAX East. Instead, most of my time was spent walking through linear pathways waiting for a cheap jump scare to happen and outstay its welcome before fumbling around trying to figure out which door I would open next to escape.

By the time I found the right door, any tension that was there had dissipated. For example, there was a scene where creepy hands sucked up a child's hanging corpse. By the time I was finally allowed to advance, I felt like I could jump up and high five the hands, because we had grown to be close pals. That's a big contrast? to the original that always had m?e on edge.

Also, there were lots of dead children or babies. At least, I think they were de?ad children and babies (I'm no doctor, just calling it how I see it). I don't have any problem with depicting deceased children, just thought that might turn some of you off.

This story takes place after a helicopter crash (how cliché) in a small country town rife with hints of a Satanic cult (so I'm assuming by the game's promotional material featuring upside-down crucifixes). Spooky.

While there is a limited amount of stamina, it depletes slow enough not to make much difference, and so I didn't find any strategy worked in Outlast 2 other than just running like hell. Towards the end of my preview, a group of creepy farmers gave chase through a corn field. If you follow the path you'll run directly into them, so instead you can just sprint through the cornfield to get to the e??nd of the demo unscathed.

If the pacing could be tightened up a? bit, and players didn't have to play the annoying "guess w??hich door" game, I could see this sequel shaping up to be as good as the original, if not better. Graphically it certainly already has it beat, easily looking better in all three ways you can view the game: normal, through the camera, and in night vision. It certainly has a setting that I find all around spooky, just the current pacing and tension-breaking moments soured the whole experience.

However, there was one memorable moment. At the very end of the short demo that had already had me walking through an empty country town, crawling t??hrough air du?cts, and walking through a school hallway with locker doors opening and slamming shut on their own, I had my dick chopped off with a pickaxe.

A creepy lady came out of nowhere, mumbling things aloud, and knocked me on the ground before raising the pickaxe far above her head to deliver a ball shattering blow directly? to my frank and beans. It looked painful, although somehow not graphic, with no chunking or blood sprays from what I recall. Either way,?? there is no possible way that my genitals stayed attached with such a blow.

Sadly, it doesn't seem like Outlast 2 has any of the expos?ed dongs the original title had, but there is still hope we get to see some big ol' swi?ngers in the final release in Fall 2016.

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We'll presumably see more on April 22

Last we heard, Red Barrels was aiming for a fall 2016 release for Outlast 2. Assuming that's still the case, and based on this unsettling backwards-audio teaser video for the horror game, I bet we'll start to see ?a lot more of it soon -- specifically, later this month at PAX East in Boston.

With the audio reversed, the message is still hard to make out in spots, but the most important part is clear: "On the fourth month and ??twenty-second day of the sixteenth year of the third millennium, our reckoning begins." April? 22, 2016 is the opening day of PAX.

At the very least, a new trailer seems likely. Th?e religious theme has worked well in these teaser materials, ??but I'm more than ready for actual game footage at this point.

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