Red Barrels’ third Outlast game is a departure in many ways, but remains memorable for its twisted villains and the grotesque world they inhabit.
Mark Delaney
on March 4, 2024 at 12:17PM PST
One of the hardest reviews I’ve ever had to write was for Outlast 2. The game was so unnerving that it was hard to psych myself up enough to play it sometimes. The Outlast Trials, Red Barrels’ first game since then, doesn’t consistently reach those same heights, but it is memorably scary at times, and when it’s not frightening, it’s plenty rewarding in other ways. Taking a single-player horror series like Outlast and repurposing it as a four-player PvE game sounds like the kind of publisher-mandated live-service experiment too many teams have been tasked with lately. But as an indie team, Red Barrels seems to have steered its own course, and that may be why The Outlast Trials still feels like Outlast rather than a cynical project bearing the name.
The Outlast Trials is set in the Cold War, where you’ll customize your figurative guinea pig for a lengthy series of vicious experiments within the Murkoff Facility. The game’s opening moments, along with the lore, paint a scene so gruesome and wicked that’ll be familiar to series veterans, but disquieting to those new to the Outlast universe. After training to become sleeper agents who are psychologically deconstructed, tormented, and then brainwashed, you’re eventually let back out into the free world awaiting your activation as a secret weapon. The context of your overarching mission is at least as dark as anything this team has done before–and it’s set its bar quite high previously.
These experiments take place on various considerable maps, including a police station, a courthouse, a carnival, and more. You maneuver through these mazes, created by Murkoff, akin to a lab rat. This involves incorporating many signature elements of Outlast, most notably, the harrowing experience of crawling through the dark in search of salvation–or at least batteries for your night vision before it depletes.
Similar to the earlier versions, The Outlast Trials is often set in eerie darkness. However, it incorporates light more, to provide a unique form of torment. You may often hope to find your next battery pack before resorting to blindly feeling walls, and at the same time, you’ll need to traverse well-lit areas which betray your escape strategy to your patrolling enemies. It is a paradox that reminded me of wishing for winter’s chill in brutal summer heat, and dreaming of summer warmth in biting snow. Light and darkness are strategically used to provide diverse challenges, much like noisy traps, failed puzzles, and imposing giants ready to crush you underfoot. And of course, Outlast wouldn’t be complete without menacing characters swinging both their arms and private parts.
You’ll find the mini-games familiar if you’ve played other multiplayer horror games like Dead By Daylight and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Tasks such as quietly starting generators or picking locks quickly are nerve-wracking but fair, as your failures feel like personal errors rather than game-induced drama. These mini-games are challenging enough to create suspense already, and chasing the reward of a flawless run is fun for players committed enough to familiarize themselves with the game’s more terrifying aspects.
You’ll have to battle a variety of grotesque AI adversaries, including a baton-happy prison guard, The Skinner Man, a supernatural entity that terrorizes you whenever your mental state deteriorates, and Mother Gooseberry, a horrifying shattered-mirror version of a nursery teacher. Mother Gooseberry’s mask is reminiscent of Leatherface’s Pretty Woman but is complemented by a disturbing hand puppet duck that conceals a menacing drill in its beak. The Outlast series has always been home to iconic villains, and The Outlast Trials stay true to this tradition.
Furthering the game’s uneasy feeling is the level of nauseating detail found in every corner of every map. Bodies are left crammed into trash cans, or quartered like a butcher shop’s display. The walls are plastered with propaganda furthering your in-universe descent toward submission and brainwashing. Creepiest of all, and something I find to be a true stroke of horror genius, is that every map features Murkoff researchers clad in white lab coats observing you from behind safety glass. So while you may be running for your life, losing your mind, or bleeding out on a bathroom floor, the cold and cruel scientists simply observe and report. The Outlast Trials continues to prove its studio has a knack for being sincerely sinister.
One new wrinkle to this reimagined Outlast is that you can throw bricks and bottles to distract or briefly stun enemies. That’s the simplest means of self-defense in a series that has only ever let you run and hide before. But the more evolved version of fighting back, built for a game that wants to be infinitely replayable like this does, is your rig–a cooldown-enabled special ability of your choosing with many upgrades to unlock slowly over time. There are a few different rigs, such as abilities to heal your team or throw mines that deploy smoke to cover your tracks, and the best use of any one of them is to combine it with those belonging to other players who may be loading into matches with different rigs than yours. Collectively, you are whole as a group.
This design winds up revealing that a more traditional Outlast is tucked away inside this multiplayer-focused prequel. Though many mission objectives scale for your team size, such as needing to turn on multiple generators in a pitch-black basement when you’re on a team rather than needing to activate just one as a solo player, the game is nearly as scary as I found Outlast 2 to be when played alone. That’s a good thing, as it means anyone turned off by the new direction of this series can still find something close enough to the classic Outlast experience if they want it.
Missions can take much longer when played this way too. A mission that might take 90 minutes solo can reliably be completed by a full team in a third of the time, in my experience. I’m fine with either case, depending on how I want to play at a given time, but it’s frustrating that the always-online nature of the game means I can’t truly pause it even when playing alone. I resorted to hiding in lockers, barrels, or under beds if I needed to step away for a moment, but that ran the risk of being kicked for inactivity.
The Outlast Trials becomes less frightening with each added person to your group. This can be seen as a combination of the “strength in numbers” theory and the “misery loves company” adage. In essence, the game’s unimaginable horrors become more bearable with a larger group. Playing with friends can morph the experience into something akin to a haunted hayride, where screams are a mix of fear and laughter. Making yourself vulnerable with friends is fun. The Outlast Trials do not induce as much terror when several people are playing, but it translates into a remarkable experience that previous Outlast games could not provide.
I do find this rather odd that the game, which was designed for four players, loses much of its appeal if played as intended. This review is based on the version 1.0 of the game that will be released on March 5. However, both recently and during previous sessions—some dating back to months ago during the game’s Steam Early Access run—I found some missions particularly easy because the three players I was teamed up with were experts at times. It’s as though they had metaphorically broken away from the confines set by the horrific facility and were exploiting game mechanics to maximize rewards. Instead of a co-op horror game, it had evolved into a relentless pursuit of rewards.
Although it’s not what I was looking for as someone who wanted to be scared by playing an Outlast game, fortunately, such occurrences are not common. It’s possible to end up in such situations. However, more often than not, my team consisted of a few unfortunate souls who barely made it to the exit doors before they shut closed for good. This kind of experience is more appealing to me, and luckily, more frequent.
If you aim to reach the game’s skill ceiling for the sake of rewards, there are many. As each player builds up their character, unlocking new cosmetic decor for their personal “sleep room” and character, as well as new passive skills and rig abilities, it’s immediately clear just how plentiful they are. There isn’t a single skill I felt unnecessary. From learning to slide, breaking open locked doors more quickly, increasing my stamina, or battery life: every skill is vital. For most players, the odds will seem stacked against them, making choosing a new skill a difficult decision because of the paradox of choice. But, it’s also straightforward since every improvement is welcome when you’re otherwise defenseless. I wanted them all, and I’m still after some today.
When you level up, you earn rewards, morphing your victim into an incredibly powerful super lab rat. As you advance, the missions increase in difficulty, making the endgame content and limited-time weekly challenges an enticing, yet distant reward that prompts you, time and time again, to dive back into the game.
The game employs an interesting prestige-like system, reminiscent of Call of Duty. Your character undergoes the endgame trial and is then released into the world–in this narrative, they integrate back into society and anticipate their activation phrase. This aspect, in my opinion, truly adds a dark twist. While you keep your previous unlocks and start afresh with another character, namely a Reagent, the rewards are somewhat sparse and consequences minimal–yet the eerie narrative justification strikes a chord. I wish the story element had a more dominant role. You absorb the plot through collectible text logs in each level, which are quite random, and an opening movie–aside from this, the storytelling is quite minimal.
The Outlast Trials comes off as a rewarding, multiplayer horror game. It’s as menacing as preceding Outlast games. When you’re playing with more players, you may lose some of the scare factor, but it’s replaced by apprehensive laughter as you and your comrades barely escape the monsters lurking in the dark. If you manage to survive and return to the hub facility, you unlock enticing metagame content like demanding missions and useful skills. This is a challenging cycle to crack, especially for most live-service teams, so it’s commendable that a small, typically solo horror studio nailed this approach.
Initially, witnessing the Outlast universe combined with elements like cooldown abilities, cosmetic customizations, and progression trees can be off-putting. But, it won’t take you long to welcome this refreshed look. The Outlast Trials, akin to the villains at its heart, reflects various personas, all equally unforgettable.
