The Outlast Trials

This game is not scary. The original Outlast did a great job of building suspense toward the inevitable run-in with an enemy. When you did see an enemy it was truly terrifying, & made you feel helpless as you ran away & hoped to God that you were able to hide in time. Meanwhile, this game is way more in-your-face & yet feels way less threatening. You don't jump back in your seat & feel fear in the pit of your stomach when you see an enemy. When you see an enemy you'll probably just laugh & run/throw something at it until it loses you, or goes to one of your friends. Not that it matters if it does stick to you though, as you can level up your health bar to the point where enemies become more of a nuisance than an actual threat, let alone something to be scared of. The levels play very rinse & repeat, & the story is just nonsensical. I was so excited to play a game like 2013 Outlast with friends, but instead, we got a generic action game set in a horror setting with levels that almost all play the same. "Collect this, run from that".

Lethal Company is unironically many times scarier than this disappointment, despite far superior graphics & set design.

This game feels like such a strange situation. I think Outlast 1 was, pretty ok; neat ideas but kind of all smoke and mirrors and relies too much on shock factor to get people to stop thinking about the plot because it's kind of bad. Enjoyable but not really worth going back to. Outlast 2, though... one of the worst things ever made. Every issue with 1 cranked up to 11, but with one of the absolute WORST plots I've ever had the misfortune of being subjected to. It's kind of worthwhile to witness just because of how deeply terrible it is.

That said, Outlast Trials is... kind of good? At least for what it is. Any pretense of being taken as a serious story is gone. I can't think of a good comparison to make, but jumping the shark was definitely what this franchise needed because they've always had better concepts than execution and trying to make things believable was a lost cause. Chris Walker was, technically feasible as a real person. Eddie Gluskin was clearly more inspired by real life serial killers. Madame Gooseberry is just so over the top that she'd never feasibly exist, but that makes this all the more enjoyable because you really get to play around with the characterization of them.

Gameplay wise it's a direct improvement over the past games. Nightvision was always the strong and weakpoint of the other games, so here it's integral but not the focus at all, which helps a lot. The primary gameplay is mostly centered around the tools you find on the ground and your own personal 'rig', using them to help progress through to the objectives and survive encounters. A lot more emphasis on baiting enemies that the co-op mode encourages, and more interesting level design than anything in the other 2 games.

But that's, kind of all I have to say? It's enjoyable but I can't really put my finger on why beyond the wacky presentation - voice acting and dialogue writing are phenomenal for setting the tone, and every zone is thematically interesting as a horror concept - but the core gameplay is pretty simply and I don't really see why this was made into a live service game.

Co-op is both helpful and a hinderance depending on your own predisposition. I'm long past the point of horror games really scaring me and I am at the point where gamer brain takes full control and just figures out the enemy AI right away and how to most quickly perform all objectives, but this game can definitely benefit from the same effect that gets people playing Dead by Daylight with friends for hours and hours. Thing is, I don't think it has any staying power. DBD has the added level of allowing for skill expression and it's inherently competitive nature. There isn't much skill to express in this, more so map knowledge, and no competitive aspects, so what's going to keep people playing for hundreds of hours? I don't really think there is anything. And yet this game is using a live service 'seasonal' model.... but also has a definitive ending and what seems like a prestige system on paper, doesn't actually revoke any of your equipment, levels, cosmetics... anything. Basically, I think it's the best way you could handle 'live service co-op pve Outlast' but I don't really know if that was a worthwhile venture in of itself. With a premade team you can probably get this whole game done in ~20 hours, and while there isn't anything to keep you there I think that's plenty of content to make it worthwhile, so I dunno. I guess if you wanna just view it as a system where people buy in and check pack every few months for a new set of missions, it's worth it, but I don't expect this game to last all that long in terms of development, and will quickly lose a lot of its playerbase, so we'll see how it fares when that time comes.