(This problem is particularly evident when you flee the church in the 3 rd act, which is nigh impossible to complete unless you know exactly where to go. Most of the time it isn’t obvious and you rarely have the time to figure it out because you’re running like hell from machete-swinging psychopaths. This would be fine if some mechanism at least gave you some hint as to where to go or what to do. However, it drives you into too many linear trial-and-error chase sequences and other events that seem almost insurmountable unless you know exactly what to do and where to go. Outlast 2 is at its best when it gives you the freedom to stealthily explore its environments. There are some truly exhilarating chase sequences. The game sparingly uses cat-scares but it uses them well. Yet it’s still a largely curious addition, because it seems like it has nothing to do with the main story aside from offering a welcomed break from hillbillies and an excuse to use another popular horror trope: the creepy grade school.Īll that said, Outlast 2 still delivers some solid thrills. It tells you just enough to be intriguing, and at the end of the game it remains open for numerous interpretations. This is the strongest narrative work in the game. Periodically, you are thrust back in time (or into your psyche) to experience something from your past that still haunts you. Side note: Psychotic hillbillies are apparently prolific and even skillful writers at times, despite the fact most of them just yell, gibber, and chase you with machetes.
I stopped reading and began skimming them less than half way into the game. The story is largely told through notes found strewn throughout the game-an almost tired mechanism for video game storytelling-and one made even more annoying given the length and very tiny print of the messages you find. Psychotic hillbillies are apparently prolific and even skillful writers at times, despite the fact most of them just yell, gibber, and chase you with machetes. “Oh look, another bloody, mutilated body,” you’ll sigh (possibly while rolling your eyes). Bloody mutilated corpses are little more than scenery to ignore, and you’re largely immune to it after the first twenty minutes of the game anyway. But often, Outlast 2 simply leans too heavily on gore and largely impotent attempts at ‘shock value’. Horror games work best when an intriguing story is married to a skillfully manipulative and immersive environment that cultivates the horrors of your imagination. I guess this is expected because they don’t appear to mind living in fetid squalor, casually stepping through a disemboweled cow and the curtain of corpses hanging from chains to grab a cold one from a refrigerator. What few living people you encounter are all unhinged, leaving you to wonder about what they do when they aren’t wandering around murdering things. There are more corpses (most of them gruesomely on display) than there are living people.
Unfortunately, in Outlast 2 they also strain the suspension of disbelief.
Violent psychotic hillbillies are easily near the top of that list too.
Outlast 2 tropes movie#
The original Outlast took place in an insane asylum, which is pretty much the mother of all horror movie tropes. I don’t mind tropes if they’re used well and in interesting ways. Also like the original game, batteries found in the game’s nooks and crannies are the currency of your camera’s capabilities - and your survival. In Outlast 2, you can also use a microphone to detect sounds from enemies you can’t see - a pretty cool mechanic that comes into play when you’re hiding inside a barrel or being hunted in corn fields. Like the original game, you have a camera that has night vision to help you navigate in the dark. You’ll also (for unknown reasons) wrestle with old demons from your Christian school upbringing, which adds a strange cross-section of gameplay and a wholly different (and seemingly irrelevant) story to the experience. Your wife is inexplicably dragged off from the crash by these degenerates, and so begins your hellish quest through Hillbilly hell and gore galore to rescue her. Welcome to HellĪ helicopter crash plunks you flush in the middle of a dilapidated shanty town ruled by crazy religious hillbillies at war with one another. Unfortunately, Outlast 2 doesn’t quite hold up to the original, and proves to be more linear, more frustrating, and generally less enjoyable than its predecessor. I loved Red Barrels original Outlast, and it has been a perpetual favorite of mine in the survival horror game genre.