Outlast: So Immersive, It Will Force You to Turn the Lights On

Slasher horror movies are far more terrifying when you’re young. As a child, you’re genuinely frightened by the on-screen action, almost feeling as if you’re there with the unfortunate victims fleeing from the killer. But as you grow older, you become gradually yet steadily desensitized by the plethora of horror films you’ve watched. Somewhere along the path to adulthood, you realize that those ill-fated souls didn’t actually slaugtered during those horrific scenes—they’re alive and well, ready to star in another movie. By the time you hit thirty, little remains of that genuine terror you once experienced while watching “Halloween” on a late summer night as a naive child. You believed that feeling was gone for good.

You were wrong.

In 2013, developer Red Barrels offered you the opportunity to relive all your slasher movie fears once again by putting you in the shoes of a slasher film’s protagonist. But you’re not an ordinary protagonist, and this is no ordinary movie. In their immersive masterpiece “Outlast“, you won’t just rekindle your childhood fears and thrills—you’ll experience them a hundredfold stronger.

Your Goal: Outlast

The game starts like this: You step into the shoes of Miles Upshur, a freelance investigative journalist drawn to the Mount Massive Asylum by an anonymous tip. Armed with nothing but a camcorder and your wits, you infiltrate the seemingly abandoned facility under cover of night. What begins as a routine investigation quickly spirals into a nightmare beyond comprehension. The asylum, you discover, is far from empty. Its halls teem with deranged inmates, twisted orderlies, and something far more sinister lurking in the shadows. As you delve deeper into the bowels of Mount Massive, you uncover a horrifying conspiracy involving unethical experiments, corporate corruption, and forces that defy rational explanation. With no weapons to defend yourself, your only options are to run, hide, and desperately search for a way out of this hell on earth. But escape won’t be easy – the asylum has no intention of letting its secrets, or you, slip away.

If this sounds to you like an “ordinary” horror game, chances are you’ll be quite surprised by the road that lies ahead. “Outlast” wasn’t the first game in this immersive “survival horror” genre (“Resident Evil” or “Silent Hill” aren’t comparable because they had guns). For me, the first game of this kind was “Amnesia: The Dark Descent,” which I wrote about in one of my previous articles, and which left me hungry for a similar experience. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what to expect from “Outlast,” but my expectations turned out to be too mild. In “Outlast,” you’re truly put in the shoes of a horror movie protagonist, and if you play in a darkened room with headphones on, it feels extremely real. Philippe Morin, Red Barrels’ co-founder, said, “The core gameplay experience is about no combat. It’s about having the player suffer,” and I cannot emphasize enough how successfully his studio achieved that goal.

I hope you’ll believe me when I say that more than once, I found myself getting up from my chair and turning on the lights, just to make sure I was truly alone in my room.

Saturday Night Fever

It happens that I’m usually annoyed by jump-scares, as I find them to be the cheapest way to startle someone. But, strangely enough, I don’t mind quite a few of those in “Outlast” because they’re used only as a starter to ignite something much more intense.

The plot and story that the game pulls you through may seem stereotypical, although it resembles real-life experiments allegedly performed by one (or possibly more) major governments. Again, strangely enough, while I typically value a good and original story, I don’t think the existing plot does anything particularly detrimental to the “Outlast” experience. I’m not sure the game would benefit from a much better or more original story; it might even detract from it. What I do know is that the existing narrative perfectly glues the gaming action around the only thing that matters in the game: staying alive.

Turn off the lights

If you haven’t played “Outlast” yet and you’re fond of immersive entertainment that can take you on a rollercoaster of (scary) emotions, look no further. This game will provide you with 10-15 hours of genuine, distilled fear.

• Image credits: Red Barrels.