Outlast 2 Review

Nine hours in the desert with a camcorder

I want to start by saying I like this series. The original Outlast was fantastic to play. Mount Massive Asylum is tight, it's mean, it's scary, and the opening hour is one of the best I've played in horror gaming. So I came into the sequel wanting more of that, but instead I spent most of it either bored or annoyed while being actively grossed out in a way that had nothing to do with fear.

The setup is decent on paper. You are Blake Langermann, a cameraman out in the Arizona desert with your wife Lynn chasing a story about a murdered pregnant woman. Your helicopter goes down, you wake up separated and you find yourself outside of a creepy village called Temple Gate. The rules are the same as in the first game, you don't have any weapons and can't fight back. You just have your camcorder's night vision and the ability to run and hide. 

Credit where it is due

The production is legitimately excellent. This game looks fantastic which is why I didn't score it lower, especially for its era. Cornfields at night with your night vision washing everything in that sick green. Lantern light strung across a valley. The sound design is also pretty strong and there were absolutely moments where it got me.  Also, the addition of a directional microphone that lets you hear enemies through walls is a solid add.

So when I say I did not like this game understand that I am not saying it is fully incompetent. Red Barrels can build atmosphere and give you the occasional jump scare, but that is where it ends with this game.

Gross is not the same thing as scary

Here is my main problem, Outlast 2 does not appear to understand the difference between disturbing in service of something and disturbing as the point. It opens with a corpse nailed up like a crucifix and chopped up body parts and then just keeps escalating.  The issue is that everything it escalates into is designed to make you go ugh rather than content designed to make you afraid. Bodies staged for maximum grossness and sexual violence used as set dressing over and over.  Also, I simply draw the line at violence against children, it's just super unnecessary to show graphically regardless of the tie to the plot line with the priest and the kids. None of it building toward anything or earning its place, just there, constantly, because the developers decided that awful equals intense.

Shock has a budget and once you have spent it you cannot spend it again. By the second act I was not scared anymore. I was numb and that curdles into annoyed pretty quickly. The term I would use is shock fatigue and I was fatigued early and often.

So some tell me "it was the same in the first game!".  Ok, let's compare it to the first game. Outlast 1 had brutal moments too, but they almost always had a reason to exist. Those images and scenes typically had narrative weight or some perspective that made you sit with it. Here, radical religion is mostly a delivery mechanism for horrendous imagery that does not need to be there. And I am not a squeamish dude, I like horror, but this was just cheap overall.

The story is a mess that thinks it is a mystery

The plot starts okay. Cult, missing wife, creepy town, let's go! Then somewhere in the second act it breaks. The cult stuff moves to the back burner when a lame second faction shows up. All of a sudden hallucinations start creeping in and it's not until the end of the game that we start to sort of get explanations and things make some sense.

I finished this game and had to go read plot breakdowns online to find out what I had supposedly just experienced. There are competing theories about the whole thing that range from a Murkoff mind control experiment to a literal biblical apocalypse, but the game does not commit to either. The actual explanation is buried in a pile of collectible notes and audio logs that you are expected to hunt down while being hunted and I just couldn't do it. 

Somebody online phrased it exactly that way and I have not thought of a better description since. "This is a story ending in confusion and hoping you will mistake it for mystery."

Verdict

A 4. Not a zero, because the graphics are strong, the sound is good, the microphone is a smart mechanic, and it did creep me out a few times. But the craft is wrapped around a game that mistakes revulsion for dread, buries an incoherent story under collectible notes, and turns its chases into trial and error slogs.

I finished it out of stubbornness. If Red Barrels had made an entire game out of the school sections or fleshed out the cult more and cut half of the gore, I would be writing a much different review. Instead this is the rare horror game that made me bored and annoyed without ever really scaring me. I just cannot recommend spending nine hours with it, go replay the first one instead.