![]() Rather than focusing on the mere unraveling of a mystery, Outlast 2 is a more thematic journey with its overt McGuffin serving as a vehicle to explore the dark reaches of faith, fanaticism, vengeance, and forgiveness. Going with your instincts is one thing, but this is not a dynamic sandbox game and when your instincts prove wrong you just have to do it all again until you get it right.Outlast 2 tells a much more involved story than its predecessor. One of the key questions is when to run and when to hide, but the game gives you almost no information on which to base that decision. And yet there are deep flaws in the way they’re presented. It also allows you to get scared out of your wits, because the weird artificial lighting manages to make even mundane locations look strange and otherworldly – resulting in some of the most panic-filled on-foot chases in all gaming. The only thing which gives you an advantage in Outlast 2 is the infra-red filter on your camera, which allows you to see in the dark when most of your enemies cannot. This is of course far more realistic than most similar games, including the fact that in real life you’d probably get caught and killed almost instantly. Outlast, like its predecessor, takes that to the extreme by giving you no means to defend yourself at all, and no option but to run or hide. Most survival horror games cast you as an everyman character, with little or no combat training. What’s much more interesting though are the hallucinations you begin to suffer, that point towards a traumatic childhood and which cleverly tie into the main story. There’s very little direct narrative in Outlast 2, just a paper trail of suicide notes and diary entries that vaguely fill in the backstory of what is to be honest a fairly cliched horror story. At which point you discover a mysterious cult obsessed with the end of the world… In doing so, you and your wife end-up in a helicopter crash in the desert. You do still play as an investigative journalist though, trying to discover the mystery behind the murder of an unknown pregnant woman in the wastelands of Arizona. If you’re worried about its status as a sequel, Outlast 2 features a completely different set of characters and no obvious connections to the original story. And in terms of cinematography and bone-chilling horror this makes Resident Evil 7 seem like Barbie Horse Adventures. Not that anything about Outlast 2 looks or sounds cheap, mind. ![]() ![]() While most mainstream publishers still struggle with the genre, indie developers have found that, much like movie makers, horror doesn’t require a high budget to be effective. That’s something the original Outlast struggled with, and the question now is whether the sequel does any better.Īlthough we were a little less enamoured of it than some reviewers, 2013’s Outlast became the poster boy for indie survival horrors. But if that’s all you rely on then you’ve got to keep finding new ways to reuse the same tricks.
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