sisslethecat
Holy shit. There is so much that I love here I don’t even know where to begin.
I loved the first Outlast. We all did here at Rely, our reviewer even gave it a 10/10. But if this footage is anything to go by, I might end up loving it’s sequel more than anything else I’ve played in a long time. I’m simply floored by how much I love basically everything I’m seeing in these two gameplay videos uploaded by GameSpot earlier today. Just, just watch them.
Okay, so, breather time. Let’s take a second to analyze what we saw. To start off with, I love creepy cults. Chanting, cross-burning, Wicker Man sort of stuff (not the… new one, tho). It’s a genre of horror I feel is more or less untapped in mainstream gaming. Outside of the Order in Silent Hill and Resident Evil 4‘s Los Illuminados. So suffice it to say I’m seriously grooving on the dozens of crosses drawn in blood across walls, the corpses dangling from nooses all over the place and the bible-verse chanting voice that drives his “flock” in pursuit of us. On top of that, these zealots seem way, way more prepared for the hunt than the lunatics of Mount Massive Asylum, these killers can use flashlights to hunt you down, and there seem to be dozens at a time. The original Outlast never had more than two or three potential life-enders in your pursuit at a time, and they couldn’t see in the dark, meaning you could almost hide in plain sight with your night-vision mode engaged. But now, that’s no longer an option.
Stalking you through ears of corn in the first video, our new protagonist must stay out of sight of their probing lights, and now must resort to hiding in all manner of places to escape from their sight. Holding your breath under fetid farm water, and ducking out inside of rusted out barrels, it looks like we’re going to have a plethora of hiding spots as opposed to hiding in lockers and under beds like in the original. To compensate for this new danger, the camera now has a left/right audio level display, presumably to track the direction a searching killer is coming from.
In the second video, we see hints at the sorts of things that will probably play into the full game- our new hero wears glasses, and having them knocked off reduces his vision to a muddy blur. Wearing glasses myself, I’ve always been surprised this mechanic hasn’t popped up in a horror game before. Well, diddle my dongle if it didn’t turn out to be an Outlast game. The original game and it’s DLC Whistleblower, both employed creative and unique ways to screw with the player’s limited vision and movement, with Miles Upshore’s camera screen getting smashed halfway through the game, and Waylon Park badly injures his legs to the point of only being able to hobble around by the end of the last quarter of his story, so it should come as no surprise that Outlast 2 would come up with a new way to fuck with us.
Another huge (and very welcome) change is that our new hero can talk. Both of the original game’s playable characters were mute, and it led to the game feeling as tho some situations could have been avoided if we could just open our mouths. Our new hero pleads, curses, and expresses himself in a way that reminds me of Isaac Clarke in Dead Space 2. An everyman who is scared witless, and is running low on stamina. Exactly the same way I think I’d probably sound in this situation.
Oh, and the second video shows a pile of dead, charred babies. So Outlast isn’t shying away from the seriously messed up nature of its predecessor. Good.
We have a man at PAX this weekend who’ll be able to give you hands-on thoughts with Outlast 2, but for right now, color me very, very, very excited.
