This review contains spoilers
The Outlast Trials is a “Run Away and Hide with friends” simulator and first person horror game developed by former Ubisoft developers Red Barrel. Outlast as a series has been popular with the horror scene for years, even with it’s mixed reputation due to “Youtuber Clickbait” and “edgelord vibes” mixed in with the run and hide “can’t defend yourself” gameplay. While the first one was popular, the second one was a bit of a mixed bag for a lot of people. Regardless, the developers went ahead with the development of Outlast 3 along with a “smaller project in the universe”, with any Outlast 2 DLC being rejected due to “the structure” of it. This is all according to sources on the Wikipedia page so I can’t really verify anything with that. However, I remember the teaser a couple of years back for this game, and being confused about if this was Outlast 3 or not. A while later, they officially announced it as a multiplayer spin-off title and I wishlisted it without giving it a second thought until my buddy Casey (shoutout to you nerd) bought it for me for Christmas. Seeing as though I was mixed about the series formula for running and lack of defense, I was curious to see how the game went and surprisingly I’ve put in A LOT of hours to this.
The plot to the game is as follows: you play as a homeless transient in the 1950s, someone the Murkoff Corporation considers a “nobody”, who signed up for one of their special programs presumably to escape poverty. Instead of being fed and clothed in the traditional sense, you’re kidnapped and whisked away to the Sinyala Facility, where program director Eastermann drills some night vision goggles into your head and sends you to test out their “trials” for a special program they have. After being told to find and destroy your personal records, you meet Mother Gooseberry, a special pursuer with a sock puppet on her hand and a drill in its mouth. You destroy your records and get sent into the main hub, and from here you’re free to poke around, join groups, get into arm wrestling and chess competitions and customize your own room. There isn’t much else in the way of plot here other than what you gather through randomized documents you find around the actual missions themselves but they show Murkoff Corporations ties to the CIA, how their experiments began as a Cold War effort, and can even learn of certain Outlast characters like Rudolf Wernicke from the first and Sullivan Knoth from the second game. Once you beat all of the trials, you go to Program X and when you beat those trials, you go through one last sequence where you go through the first mansion but with several objectives. After you’re able to beat those and you escape one last chase, you leave the facility and gain your freedom…only to wake up either covered in blood in Cuba or delivering a car bomb in Vietnam. Honestly, it’s a bit smaller but I like discovering the little bits and pieces of the lore and think it’s a tremendous improvement on how Outlast 2 did its plot. The game is still in early access for now but I’m sure it has a lot more progress to go but I'm interested in seeing where it all goes.
What I’ll say about the atmosphere and sound design is that they both work in tandem with each other: the game is still as terrifying as always. It still has it’s edgelord sense of horror of course, you’ll frequently see big dudes with their c o c ks hanging out with a makeshift pickaxe trying to kill you, or an overly homophobic and racist cop who has a fetish for zapping people a n a lly. Blood and gore is all over the place and frequently the chase music will make you scream for mommy as I’ve had multiple times in my times playing this game. If you find the atmosphere and sound design scary like before, you still will, especially with the new gameplay.
The gameplay overall is a lot more in line with Outlast 1 than Outlast 2: there aren’t any wide open spaces, no sense of lack of direction and a lot more objective based. You can create your own character with the rewards you earn from playing in the trials and hook up with friends or randoms to tackle the trials together. There are improvements to the formula, with being able to throw bottles and bricks for offensive strategies or distraction along with health drinks, lockpicks to open up stashes, batteries to power up your night vision and antidotes to combat sanity. After a couple of levels you unlock special rigs (which can do anything from powering up your nightvision or healing your team) that recharges along with special perks you can buy and unlock with rewards earned in-game. A little side note, I'm surprised they haven't added a microtransaction store and I'm grateful for this as that sort of thing can be frustrating and annoying as hell. Every session you’ll go in with a specific objective, working with your team by sharing loot, kicking enemies off of each other, alerting each other to the locations of objectives. Communication is essential here, and can legit mean life or death. There will always be multiple pursuers, some overlapping into each other's areas which can get even more terrifying. The main pursuers are Mother Gooseberry and Leland Coyle (the racist cop) but you’ll also encounter regular chasers (in lore patients from Mount Massive) with all sorts of weapons as well as “The Gas Man”. If you get caught by him, he won’t hurt you; however, the hallucination chasing you will. This phantom is called “The Skinner Man”, and other than being a Slender Man clone apparently represents Eastermann. Regardless, the only way you can escape him is either through outrunning him or using an antidote or else your health will be whittled down. Luckily, it’s easy enough to do and the other chasers ignore you when your sanity is gone so that’s nice. You can also go insane if you run over gas mines, and there’s all sorts of traps to look out for from door traps which also make you go insane, floor traps which zap you if you walk over them and empty cans/glass which make noise and alert you to the other enemies.
Overall, my thoughts on this game are this: this is the scariest that the series has been. Cooperating with your team, the random patterns and rearranged layouts of the objectives, the minimalist storytelling, it’s all there and honestly it’s a lot better. I’m not gonna say it’s perfect, when you’re cornered without any stamina in a dark room it gets annoying when a chaser is trying to kill you and the game’s insistence on surrounding the objectives with chasers without moving them around can be both tense and really frustrating at times, if you die and fail you could lose anywhere from half an hour to an hour’s worth of time with nothing but potential documents to show. But there’s a lot to be had here, there’s more in the way of defense and it’s the most fun I’ve had with a multiplayer game in a very long time. I would definitely recommend if you’re looking for a good team based scare with friends, and while it’s in Early Access and I don’t review these kind of games, I’m looking forward to seeing what new content the game will hopefully deliver and will be more excited in that then the third mainline sequel in development.
Links:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/12/07/outlast-coming-to-switch-outlast-3-confirmed
https://redbarrelsgames.com/games/the-outlast-trials/
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheOutlastTrials
https://outlast.fandom.com/wiki/The_Outlast_Trials
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/
The plot to the game is as follows: you play as a homeless transient in the 1950s, someone the Murkoff Corporation considers a “nobody”, who signed up for one of their special programs presumably to escape poverty. Instead of being fed and clothed in the traditional sense, you’re kidnapped and whisked away to the Sinyala Facility, where program director Eastermann drills some night vision goggles into your head and sends you to test out their “trials” for a special program they have. After being told to find and destroy your personal records, you meet Mother Gooseberry, a special pursuer with a sock puppet on her hand and a drill in its mouth. You destroy your records and get sent into the main hub, and from here you’re free to poke around, join groups, get into arm wrestling and chess competitions and customize your own room. There isn’t much else in the way of plot here other than what you gather through randomized documents you find around the actual missions themselves but they show Murkoff Corporations ties to the CIA, how their experiments began as a Cold War effort, and can even learn of certain Outlast characters like Rudolf Wernicke from the first and Sullivan Knoth from the second game. Once you beat all of the trials, you go to Program X and when you beat those trials, you go through one last sequence where you go through the first mansion but with several objectives. After you’re able to beat those and you escape one last chase, you leave the facility and gain your freedom…only to wake up either covered in blood in Cuba or delivering a car bomb in Vietnam. Honestly, it’s a bit smaller but I like discovering the little bits and pieces of the lore and think it’s a tremendous improvement on how Outlast 2 did its plot. The game is still in early access for now but I’m sure it has a lot more progress to go but I'm interested in seeing where it all goes.
What I’ll say about the atmosphere and sound design is that they both work in tandem with each other: the game is still as terrifying as always. It still has it’s edgelord sense of horror of course, you’ll frequently see big dudes with their c o c ks hanging out with a makeshift pickaxe trying to kill you, or an overly homophobic and racist cop who has a fetish for zapping people a n a lly. Blood and gore is all over the place and frequently the chase music will make you scream for mommy as I’ve had multiple times in my times playing this game. If you find the atmosphere and sound design scary like before, you still will, especially with the new gameplay.
The gameplay overall is a lot more in line with Outlast 1 than Outlast 2: there aren’t any wide open spaces, no sense of lack of direction and a lot more objective based. You can create your own character with the rewards you earn from playing in the trials and hook up with friends or randoms to tackle the trials together. There are improvements to the formula, with being able to throw bottles and bricks for offensive strategies or distraction along with health drinks, lockpicks to open up stashes, batteries to power up your night vision and antidotes to combat sanity. After a couple of levels you unlock special rigs (which can do anything from powering up your nightvision or healing your team) that recharges along with special perks you can buy and unlock with rewards earned in-game. A little side note, I'm surprised they haven't added a microtransaction store and I'm grateful for this as that sort of thing can be frustrating and annoying as hell. Every session you’ll go in with a specific objective, working with your team by sharing loot, kicking enemies off of each other, alerting each other to the locations of objectives. Communication is essential here, and can legit mean life or death. There will always be multiple pursuers, some overlapping into each other's areas which can get even more terrifying. The main pursuers are Mother Gooseberry and Leland Coyle (the racist cop) but you’ll also encounter regular chasers (in lore patients from Mount Massive) with all sorts of weapons as well as “The Gas Man”. If you get caught by him, he won’t hurt you; however, the hallucination chasing you will. This phantom is called “The Skinner Man”, and other than being a Slender Man clone apparently represents Eastermann. Regardless, the only way you can escape him is either through outrunning him or using an antidote or else your health will be whittled down. Luckily, it’s easy enough to do and the other chasers ignore you when your sanity is gone so that’s nice. You can also go insane if you run over gas mines, and there’s all sorts of traps to look out for from door traps which also make you go insane, floor traps which zap you if you walk over them and empty cans/glass which make noise and alert you to the other enemies.
Overall, my thoughts on this game are this: this is the scariest that the series has been. Cooperating with your team, the random patterns and rearranged layouts of the objectives, the minimalist storytelling, it’s all there and honestly it’s a lot better. I’m not gonna say it’s perfect, when you’re cornered without any stamina in a dark room it gets annoying when a chaser is trying to kill you and the game’s insistence on surrounding the objectives with chasers without moving them around can be both tense and really frustrating at times, if you die and fail you could lose anywhere from half an hour to an hour’s worth of time with nothing but potential documents to show. But there’s a lot to be had here, there’s more in the way of defense and it’s the most fun I’ve had with a multiplayer game in a very long time. I would definitely recommend if you’re looking for a good team based scare with friends, and while it’s in Early Access and I don’t review these kind of games, I’m looking forward to seeing what new content the game will hopefully deliver and will be more excited in that then the third mainline sequel in development.
Links:
https://www.ign.com/articles/2017/12/07/outlast-coming-to-switch-outlast-3-confirmed
https://redbarrelsgames.com/games/the-outlast-trials/
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheOutlastTrials
https://outlast.fandom.com/wiki/The_Outlast_Trials
From Steam Reviews: https://steamcommunity.com/id/gamemast15r/recommended/