PC release “Outlasts” cliches, delivers one of the scariest titles in years.
It’s dark in the basement of the Mount Massive Asylum. It’s pitch black. In fact, the only way to see down here is through the night vision mode on your hand-held video camera.
Even with that, you can barely make out the dim figure rounding the corner, stalking you.
His face is disfigured, rendered a sickening green in the infrared light, and his eyes glow as two balls of piercing white light. In his hand, he’s clutching a bat. He’s murmuring something about finding a “putty cat” and getting dangerously close to where you’re hiding.
And then the camera’s batteries die.
This is “Outlast,” one of the most intensely terrifying games to come along in years. In it, the player takes control of Miles Upshur, an investigative journalist who, on a tip from an inside source, heads up to Mount Massive Asylum in Colorado in the hopes of exposing the unethical treatment of the patients there.
Upon entering the asylum, things go badly very quickly. The halls are slicked with gore, offices strewn with dozens of bodies, and the patients, who barely look human anymore, are freely roaming the
wards.
“Outlast” owes a lot of its existence to Frictional Games’ “Amnesia: The Dark Descent,” a game which popularized removing combat from the survival horror formula entirely.
“Outlast” is much the same. At no point during your stay in the Mount Massive Asylum do you receive anything even resembling a weapon. The only means of survival is to hide within the shadows, under stained hospital beds or inside cramped storage lockers. And when that fails (and it will), the only option left is to run for your life.
What makes it all the more tense is that the pursuers are eerily quiet most of the time. Unlike traditional stealth games, enemies don’t make it a point to talk to themselves, constantly announcing to the player where they are. Rounding a corner and ending up face-to-ghoulish-face with a patient is a common occurrence.
Not every grotesque patient in “Outlast” is hostile; some of the asylum’s denizens are too far gone to prove aggressive. The game plays with that concept throughout its opening hours. There’s a tension that arises between trying to tell a true threat from a pitiful, tortured shell of a person.
For the most part, “Outlast” forgoes logic and originality in its pursuit of the ultimate haunted house experience. The amount of carnage and bodies present in the asylum exceed even ridiculous numbers, and the storytelling is peppered with horror film clichés, from hulking monsters to mad surgeons.
However, despite its rather trite plot conventions, “Outlast” presents its horrific nightmare house with such a level of mastery that it’s impossible to not be strongly affected by it.
The excellent sound design ensures that no single room ever feels safe. The way the camera’s night vision lights the environments is unsettling in an instinctual way (which fans of “The Blair Witch Project” or “REC” no doubt understand).
Make no mistake, this is a game for serious horror fans, and certainly isn’t for the faint of heart.
Though much of the sense of fear in “Outlast” comes from paranoia rather than actual danger, that illusion is all too powerful, a relentlessly oppressive force that bears down on the player for the game’s 5-to-6 hour duration. And despite the short length of “Outlast,” it is likely that players will need several sittings to complete it, as it can prove that exhausting.
The game loses some of its momentum around the two-thirds mark, and it all spirals down into a twisty ending that is decidedly unsatisfying.
Regardless, as an entry in the increasingly resurgent survival horror genre, and as a debut title from indie studio Red Barrels, “Outlast” is superb.
Is it fun? Well, no; it’s self-imposed psychological torture. But if you’re into that kind of thing, “Outlast” is out there, just waiting for you.