![]() ![]() Like the first Outlast, much of the game is viewed through the lens of a camera, and in huge swatches, peering through the green filter of nightvision. More than I care to admit, I found myself frantically running, searching for the next place to hide, only to die, and reload, and die again multiple times over. They’re graphic – blades in heads, spikes through chests – and cringe inducing. You’re expected to learn from your deaths, but the sitting through them is painful. Outlast 2 is also a much more open game, which makes breaking line of sight and escaping harder. Enemies are fast and you’re not resilient. Your only options are to run and hide hide in the grass, hide in a closet, hide under the bed, just hide, because being spotted is usually certain doom. Everyone seems to have been expecting you, this stranger from the sky, and everyone wants you dead. Like the original, you experience the world in the first-person and are utterly helpless. With only a nightvision camera, a few replacement batteries and a pair of bandages at your side, you venture forth into the most nightmare inspired farming village this side of a Laird Barron story. You are the cameraman and your wife is the reporter, and when your helicopter goes down, your wife is missing. Journeying into the empty vastness of Arizona, you’re sent with your wife to report on the murder of a young woman who was mysteriously killed. The jump scares are frequent, but its the slow creeping and the frantic fleeing that couch the experience in progressive dread, and it’s all experienced through the lens of a camera. It masterfully builds its claustrophobic atmosphere while also being larger and more expansive than its predecessor. As a horror game, Outlast 2 is an unquestionable success. It plants seeds of the horror and repulsion early on and waters them throughout the experience, mastering the slow reveal to oppressive effect. What makes Outlast 2 so effective is how it combines the seen with the teased. If you had asked me back then if i thought the series could get even darker, I would have scoffed. There is gore aplenty violent, graphic deaths and heaps of viscera, to say nothing of the human horrors around every corner. Like that game, it revels in dark and helpless places. Outlast 2 is the sequel to the creepy asylum stalker I came to love in 2013. I went on to meet my monsters. This is our Outlast 2 review. I wanted to close the game, turn off the PC, and go out into the sunshine. It was only minutes before Outlast 2 made me turn away. ![]()
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January 2023
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