Altogether, Blake's hallucinations prove to be one of the game's strongest elements. It hooked me early, compelled me through the campaign, and eventually delivered an emotional payoff, all while tying together both halves of the game through shared themes of guilt, abandonment, and the exploitation of faith.
They reveal new details at exactly the right pace, providing subtle, devastating hints without spelling everything out. As you progress, Blake starts to experience hallucinations that seem to depict a traumatic childhood event. The ending also falls short of the wild twist that capped the first game.īut there is another side to Outlast 2's story.
The writing is strong throughout, but Outlast 2's primary narrative relies too heavily on trite horror tropes, including sadistic backwoods fanatics, demon babies, and of course, damsels in distress. The only way to understand your situation is to gather information from, for example, suicide notes and deranged gospel excerpts. Instead, you're given a goal-in this case, to save your missing wife-and bad stuff happens as you pursue that goal. As with the original game, there's no traditional story arc with a beginning, middle, and end. I never had a problem finding batteries on Normal, but higher difficulty settings turn this aspect of the experience into a legitimate challenge.Įven if you're stocked up on batteries, though, there's another reason to brave exploration: journal entries. It's almost scarier than being totally blind, so it's important to expend your battery power strategically. You can keep night vision on even when you run out of juice, but your screen starts to flicker and the camera can't focus. However, both of these comforts drain your batteries at an alarming rate, especially on higher difficulty settings. Just as before, your camera's night vision allows you see in the dark, and the new directional mic also lets you (loosely) track enemies through walls. In most games, walking into a room and grabbing an item is about as simple as it gets, but when you're utterly convinced some new horror's just waiting to rip your throat out, exploring for camera batteries suddenly feels like a harrowing trial.
Outlast 2 game summary full#
The subtle squish and crunch that accompanies every footstep as you cross a pit full of dead infants will likely haunt you forever.Īll of these scare tactics get in your head and, in a way, deepen those skin-crawling lulls between the adrenaline-pumping chases. From the jagged, unnerving score to the harsh whispers that seem to come from all directions, Outlast 2's audio is the single biggest contributor to its remarkable sense of foreboding.
And while the visuals pack plenty of unsettling details, the sound design is some of the best in horror game history. Though you'll endure a wide variety of environments, desecration follows you everywhere. In place of the first game's mental asylum, new protagonist Blake Langermann finds himself lost in the Arizona desert surrounded by religious zealots and fetid corpses. Its gameplay may stumble in certain ways, but you're always deeply, inescapably immersed in its atmosphere. Tension, really, is what Outlast 2 does best. Not everyone you encounter tries to kill you. You never quite know when hell will break loose again, but you always know it's coming. The fact that the game excels at delivering sudden bursts of panic keeps your nerves on edge at all times. At least when you do stay on track, it's unbelievably intense and exhilarating. This was occasionally an issue in the first game as well, but you often had more freedom and could play more strategically-if you're trying to avoid one bad guy in a large area while sneaking from room to room to collect valve handles, you can decide, "Okay, he'll see me when I dart across here, but I think I can make it back to this locker and hide before he catches me." In Outlast 2, you generally just need to run from whatever's directly behind you and hope you figure out the one correct path as you go. At that point, the game stops being scary and simply becomes frustrating. It might be a tiny opening you have to crawl through or a bookcase you have to move, but you'll only have a few seconds to figure it out before your pursuers catch up and kill you, forcing you to replay most of the chase in order to return to the apparent dead end where you got stuck. Almost invariably, these chases are scripted, meaning you must get from point A to a specific point B as quickly as possible. To make matters worse, the game's most harrowing moments-those sequences where you're spotted by an enemy and must flee to safety-frequently devolve into trial-and-error tedium.
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