Remembering Outlast for spooky month
Date: 2020-10-01
Outlast is an interesting game for me, because I played it almost 4 years ago, when I took a break from Alien:Isolation. I went throught it pretty fast, it's not a long game. However, unlike most people, I have no urge to replay it, simple because it's not a good game.
The game is about a freelance investigative journalist, who got a message by a worker, inside the Massive Mount Asylum. During the game we uncover the place, and its background.
Outlast is an indie game, however this doesn't mean that we have to let the devs off the hook.
I feel that with a little more work at least Outlast would have been a solid game. My main problem with it, that's awefully scripted. Literally there is no replay value, if you already completed the game. Everything goes the same way. The A.I. is not good, easily fooled, but it's not bugged or anything.
The atmosphere is really good however, since the whole story is in asylum, pretty worned out building inside. However there are still repeating places where they used the same assets.
The enemies are repeating in a way that there is always somebody to run away from. Outlast is what I call, a speedrunner game. In a way that even at lower difficulty, you are just running, crawling, running. There is no room for breathing. And the hardest difficulty - with permadeath - literally the speedrunner difficulty, since you can get killed by one hit.
The only worse thing is the jumpscares. It's a horror game staple I know, but you have to design it very well for a 5-7 hour long game, to be effective. I just feel like in a game like this, would be awesome if you could see different scares when you start the game again.
Outlast is a very gross, gory game and there are some sexual images I would like to delete from my memory. It's one of the main reason I won't replay this game. It's just disgusting, but for the sake of being disgusting.
If you want to see a broader critique of Outlast, check out Mauler's video series. He goes into detail of every aspect of the game [plus the DLC, which I started to play, but never finished, it's basically the same with different character(s), just a complementary story].
This was day #66 of #100DaysToOffload, where we write about different things on our personal blogs. Join the project or just read the blogs.