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The Prime Assets
Leland Coyle
"If you ain't guilty, then why you running?"
Leland Coyle, the Police Officer
A former officer of the Sheriff's Department in Blackwell, OK.- Armoured Closet Gay: Overlaps with Internalized Categorism. Many of his lines strongly allude to having deeply repressed homosexuality and equally great internalized homophobia.
- The Bully: He relishes in tormenting anyone who is disadvantaged or can't fight back, and he is never seen punching upwards.
- Bigot with a Badge: A former KKK member, some of his voice lines are openly racist against a variety of groups.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: He treats the Snitch this way.
- Card-Carrying Villain: He combines all three typical goals of this trope: control, corruption and destruction. He shows minimal interest in anything outside of those purposes.
- Control Freak: He'll resort to violence to enforce his control, whether that's through his warped concept of law or in his personal life.
- Depraved Bisexual: Judging from the various mannequins in the police station that are either posed in "odd" positions and bearing signs of electric shock burns in peculiar regions, it is safe to say that Coyle falls into this trope. He also says some very disturbing things when he is looking for the Reagents or actively pursuing them.
- Dirty Cop: Has several lines about things like making charges stick, not having much use for courts, and people being born "wrong" so they deserve police abuse.
- Evil Sounds Raspy: He has a smoker's raspy voice.
- Fauxlosophic Narration: His monologues explaining his philosophy about how law is "insurance for something that's already happened" sound dramatic, but they're meaningless and insane on inspection.
- Good Scars, Evil Scars: One side of his face is disfigured and burned. A note reveals that he intentionally got struck by lightning five times... before Murkoff even met him.
- Hair-Trigger Temper: Can go from calmly muttering to himself to screaming and back to calmly muttering in seconds.
- Hell-Bent for Leather: Wears a black leather jacket.
- Hypocrite: Leland is a corrupt, racist, violently insane bluebeard serial killer who claims that he's a perfectly well-adjusted man serving his community as an Ideal Hero.
- Incoming Ham: His introductory scene has him screaming at the top of his lungs that "We've got fuckin' laws around here! LAAAAWS!"
- Killer Cop: Is a cop and is trying to kill you as well as all of the prisoners he's already killed.
- Jerkass: He's relentlessly cruel, bigoted, bullying and violent with a hair-trigger temper.
- Not Brainwashed: Zigzagged in that Murkoff had experimented on his mind, but he isn't overly bothered by it. In fact, he states that he's never been happier, and even though he's allowed to leave, he refuses to.
- The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: He happily tortures the Snitch but is furious when the player takes the Snitch away and attempts to kill him. It's justified in that Coyle clearly wants to extract some kind of confession or information from the Snitch, and doesn't want to outright kill him... at least, not yet.
- Police Brutality: His defining trait.
- Psycho Electro: Uses a shock baton and is clearly unhinged. He even shocks himself in the groin with it!
- Rabid Cop: Tortures and kills his prisoners, as well as the Regents.
- Repressive, but Efficient: One of his lines is "Say what you want about the Germans, I imagine jaywalking wasn't the problem it had been."
- Reforged into a Minion: He initially intended to turn his Murkoff "recruiter" into another of his victims. He was instead kidnapped, experimented on and reformed into a Prime Asset.
- Shock Stick: It also has a point on the end so he can stab you with it.
- Sinister Shades: He wears sunglasses and is cruelly villainous.
- Smoky Voice: He constantly smokes a cigarette, and he has a gravelly voice to match.
- Smug Snake: He acts overconfident and smug due to his sense of authority.
- Small-Town Tyrant: He was a sheriff in a notorious sundown town who routinely used his position to harass assault and even kill while using his authority to coverup his crimes.
- Sociopathic Soldier: Enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps to avoid investigation following the death of his first wife. Though his evidence file states that he served honorably in WWII's Pacific Theater, it also notes that there were "two suspicious American deaths in his company".
- Terms of Endangerment: Calls the Regents things like "honey" and "sexy bitch".
- Til Murder Do Us Part: His three wives all died under violent and "mysterious" circumstances. ("Fell down the stairs", "natural causes" but body later recovered, and "committed suicide" with multiple rounds in her head, respectively.)
Mother Gooseberry
"When babies are bad, mother gets disappointed."
Phyllis Futterman, the Show Host
A former kids' show host.- Alter Kocker: She talks like this when voicing her puppet, Dr. Futterman, even using the occasional Yiddish term.
- Attack the Mouth: If she kills the player, she uses her drill to tear his or her mouth apart.
- Bald of Evil: She has hair on the sides but is conspicuously bald on top, due to dermatological experiments that burned the skin on her face and the top of her head.
- Consulting Mister Puppet: Mother Gooseberry constantly talks to Dr. Futterman, her puppet and alter-ego representing her abusive father.
- Creepy High-Pitched Voice: She jumps into a high and abrasive voice when she speaks as Dr. Futterman.
- Deadly Doctor: With Dr. Futterman, she makes dental references while pursuing and killing her victims, but even in her Phyllis persona, she shows some amateur surgical knowledge in order to remove people's faces.
- Depraved Dentist: Her father was a dentist, and she uses her puppet to imitate him. She is even seen putting her victims in dentist's chairs before drilling them to death.
- Depraved Kids' Show Host: She hosted a popular kid's show, which she used to create and control a dangerous cult following. She was also apparently hooked on cocaine during the show's production, and she also used drugs to control her young followers.
- Drugs Are Bad: Her cocaine addiction contributed to her twisted life, and possibly to her insanity as well.
- Evil Matriarch: She plays this role in certain missions, in which the murderous ex-pops are obedient to her and speak out loud about their extreme loyalty to her.
- Evil Puppeteer: She constantly uses her hand puppet and is quite psychotic. She is also a figurative puppeteer, manipulating her fans in the past and ex-pops in the present.
- Jewish Smartass: When speaking as Futterman, she is very sarcastic and sardonic, while using Yiddish expressions and inflections.
- Mama Bear: In the "Bad Apples" mission, she is totally enraged when you kill her "babies." Of course, being insane, she's reacting to some mannequins being destroyed.
- Meatgrinder Surgery: In one scene, she sets a victim in a dentist's chair and then neatly removes his face with her drill.
- Messy Hair: Her hair is wild and unkempt, as well as bare on top, adding to her disheveled and insane appearance.
- My Beloved Smother: Taken to a psychotic extreme. She uses a lot of cute and maternal expressions to justify having absolute control over her followers. Some ex-pops even view her as a loving mother, while also fearing and obeying her.
- Monster Clown: With her bald top and frizzy hair on the sides, her thick makeup that includes bright red lips on a white face, and her clownish voice for Dr. Futterman, she has an overt clown-like appearance while being murderously insane.
- Psychopathic Womanchild: A Murkoff document describes her split personalities as being her father and a 14-year-old version of Phyllis. However, this concept isn't apparent in-game, as she acts more like a doting middle-aged mother instead of a young girl.
- Scary Stitches: Her mask is attached with big conspicuous stitches.
- Shout-Out: She's a hefty character who removes the faces of her victims and wears them as a Creepy Souvenir to cover her own disfigured face. The similarity to Leatherface is clear, and her makeup strongly resembles Leatherface's "pretty woman" mask from the 1974 film.
- Split Personality: Her personality is split between her own and a representation of her father, Dr. Futterman. Despite the motherly tone in her own personality, both sides of her are violent and insane.
- Talking to Themself: She often engages in conversations between her two personalities.
- This Is a Drill: She has a drill hidden inside her Futterman puppet, and she uses it to attack her victims.
- White Mask of Doom: She wears a flesh-mask that is eerily white, with some asymmetrical makeup applied to it.
The Ex-Pops
The Grunts
Chosen for their high "vanishability", grunts are the disenfrenchised, the lost and the worthles, attracted to Murkoff's charity outreaches. They are considered expendable.
- Machete Mayhem: Some of them carry machetes, which they wield to brutal effect.
- Mooks: They are your average enemies in the Outlast Trials, and are the most common threats that players will encounter. While they all vary in physical appearance, they posses no defining traits like the other Ex-Pops and are among the easiest enemies to avoid.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: They're this to the Variants from the original Outlast, being deformed psychopaths who will attack you on sight. The only difference is, the Variants were already violently insane individuals who were made worse by Murkoff's experiments, whereas the Ex-Pops are people with no direction in life who were kidnapped and experimented on by the corporation because nobody would miss them.
The Big Grunts
Giant grunts that are either unarmed or carry a large axe.
- Ax-Crazy: Some big grunts carry a large axe and are quite crazy.
- Bald of Evil: One character model appears to be completely hairless.
- Dumb Muscle: They are strong and thuggish, and they are less articulate than most of the other ex-pops.
- Giant Mook: They are basically bigger versions of your normal grunts.
- Hulk Speak: They have different voices with varying dialogue, but one version talks with a limited vocabulary and very simplistic grammar, often barking single words or short phrases.
- Mental Handicap, Moral Deficiency: They talk in a simplistic way and are wall-eyed, suggesting a mental handicap, and they are brutal killers.
- Messy Hair: Out of their two character models, one has unkempt shaggy hair and a scruffy beard.
- Full-Frontal Assault: The bald big grunts do not wear any pants.
- Scary Stitches: The shaggy-haired grunt wears pants that are stitched together from various different materials, adding to his ragged appearance.
- Terms of Endangerment: They're fond of calling the player "honey," "darling," "sweet pea," etc when they're out to kill.
The Pusher
"With the right medicine, you can live forever!"
A specialist ex-pop who carries a fumigator to spray Reagents with hallucinogenic chemicals. He is a former Sinyala staff driven to psychosis through chemical exposure and his proximity to trial populations.- Chemically-Induced Insanity: This is how he attacks and harms the player, and incidentally how he became a so-called pusher.
- Drugs Are Bad: Through his dialogue, it's clear that he enjoys a variety of recreational drugs and hallucinogens, and he now walks around wearing nothing but an apron, gas mask, and stained briefs, apparently oblivious to his dire condition and the numerous lesions on his body. On top of this, he enjoys inflicting a potentially fatal hallucinogenic spray on the player.
- Gas Mask Mooks: The pusher wears a gas mask.
- Laughing Mad: He tends to laugh maniacally a lot.
- Lean and Mean: He has an emaciated appearance.
- Shout-Out: He quotes Aldous Huxley, who also experimented with drugs in an attempt to expand his mind.
- Stoners Are Funny: He is more overtly comedic than most of the other antagonists.
- The Stoner: He is laid-back and comical, and talks about his chemicals as if they are party drugs.
- Word Salad Philosophy: He views drugs as a path to enlightenment, and a lot of his remarks are accordingly nonsensical.
The Screamers
- And I Must Scream: Pun aside, they're the victims of horrific experiments with sleep deprivation, which has essentially turned them into narcoleptic zombies. Their entire existence now is to stand around in a semi-vegetative state, probably no longer aware of who they even are. And if awoken, they will literally scream at you before running off in pain to find a new room to sleep in.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: They scream hysterically if woken up, and as they're fitted with voice amplifiers the resulting sound is loud enough to cause a really bad Interface Screw, as well as briefly prevent you from using your hands while your character covers their ears. Their screams will also attract any other nearby Ex-Pops who hear them.
- Hell Is That Noise: The low, gutteral moaning sounds that they make whilst asleep. When you hear it, it means one of them is nearby.
- Interface Screw: Their screams will really mess with your interface, as well as prevent you from interacting with the environment or your inventory for a few moments while your character covers their ears.
- Non-Malicious Monster: They're mostly harmless, standing around in rooms instead of roaming the environment, and will only physically attack you while they're already in the middle of running away. The main threat they pose comes from their ability to emit high-pitched screams that are loud enough to severely disorient any players nearby, as well as attract hostile Ex-Pops to your location.
The Imposters
Ex-pops who impersonate reagents to get close to other reagents in order to stab them repeatedly.
- Ambiguous Situation: It's not certain how they're able to imitate the reagents so perfectly, but they can look exactly like anyone in the trial at any given time. Considering the nature of the mind experiments being conducted at the facility, there's the possibility they may not even be real at all.
- Interface Screw: Subverted. Imposters have a "scrambled" version of a reagent's name above their heads. If you think it is a bug with the display and allow the imposter to get close, you will get hurt.
- Psycho Knife Nut: They all carry concealed knives, which they will stab you with should you allow them to get close.
- Spot the Imposter: There's a few ways to tell an imposter from a reagent. These include their scrambled usernames and the fact that they don't wear rigs. They also don't use their night vision goggles in the dark, and they often chuckle like a lunatic. Knowing to look for these telltale signs is often pivotal to ensuring they don't get a chance to stab you.
The Berserker
- Don't Look At Me: He shouts this sometimes.
- Lightning Bruiser: He is both huge and fast, making stealth a necessity.
- Spiders Are Scary: In dialogue, he compares himself to a spider awaiting prey.
The Night Hunter
"I'm gonna' watch you bleed, and I'm gonna' watch you die!"
A specialist ex-pop who has flawed night-vision goggles permanently fixed to his head.- Facial Horror: Close inspection of his face shows that his lips have been removed.
- Machete Mayhem: His weapon of choice is a machete, and he'll eviscerate defeated players with it.
- Night-Vision Goggles: He has night-vision goggles fixed to his head, but the goggles are flawed in that the Night Hunter will be pained and briefly blinded should he enter the light.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Probably. He makes allusions to having fought in a war, most likely the Second World War, and he's definitely quite insane (it's unknown if he was like that before he came to the facility however).
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: He might be Slavic. The lack of any cultural references in his dialogue leaves it quite ambiguous. (Notably, he lacks this accent in the French dub, suggesting that his accent was not specified in the script.)
The Pitcher
A specialist ex-pop who has not yet appeared in-game, but whose model and dialogue are found within the game's files. He is a funny drunk who throws molotov cocktails.
- The Alcoholic: Most of his dialogue revolves around being a comical drunk.
- Deadpan Snarker: He is comical, sarcastic, and very deadpan.
- Drinking on Duty: For some reason, Murkoff is totally okay with him being obvious and vocal about drinking on the job.
- Hypocritical Humor: When attacked, he comments "What are ya, drunk?"
- I Need a Freaking Drink: He is weary and sardonic towards his situation, and he consoles this with alcohol.
- Liquid Courage: This seems to be his M.O. as well as his defining personality trait.
- Mad Bomber: He's a hopeless drunk who likes chucking molotovs around. Unlike most versions of this trope, he is rather sardonic and mellow, but he is clearly an extremely dysfunctional person.
- Pyromaniac: Molotovs are his weapon of choice, and when hurt, he shouts "You'll burn for that!"
- Sackhead Slasher: He's out to kill and wears a sack over his head.
The Reagents
The Reagents
- Anti-Hero: All of them qualify for this, as while they're the playable characters, they still do some pretty horrific things in order to survive the trials. These include, but are not limited to, microwaving people's brains until they explode in a mass of gore, sawing a man's legs off while he's still alive, and finally coating someone in hot wax and then roasting them in an industrial furnace. It's hard to blame the Reagents however, as since they were kidnapped and forced to partake in the trials, it's not like they have much of a choice anyway. They either perform these gruesome 'tasks', or they die.
- Badass Normal: Judging from in-game evidence, the Reagents are essentially poor people who fell for Murkoff's Charity Outreach Centers and then shipped to Sinyala in cattle cars. They are able to survive the horrors (which include countless bodily injuries and intake of hallucinogenic chemicals) in the Outlast Trials with their minds and bodies (mostly) intact.
- Body Horror: The night vision goggles they wear are forcibly attached to their heads with a drill.
- Manchurian Agent: They can become one of these after being "reborn," as the goal of the trials is to brainwash them into being assassins who are activated by trigger words. The endings see them waking up in communist countries in order to carry out missions.
- Night-Vision Goggles: They each have a pair of these attached to their heads, allowing them to see in the dark.
The Sleep Room
Cornelius Noakes
- Black and Nerdy: He's a skinny, bespectacled scientific engineer who fits the nerdy archetype.
- Companion Cube: His best friend is a taxidermy dog.
- Disappeared Dad: At one point he asks the player to, if they ever get out, deliver a message to his brother that he didn't just disappear like "our piece of shit old man".
- Gadgeteer Genius: Gives reagents various types of rigs that are immensely helpful to their survival.
- Nerd Glasses: A tech guy who wears thick-framed glasses.
- Trapped in Villainy: He was kidnapped by Murkoff and forced to work for them. He dreams of escaping.
Emily Barlow
- Beneath the Mask: Most of the time that you listen to her optional dialogue, she expounds on what a genius Easterman is and how important the "therapy" is to your healing. Keep coming back to listen to her, and it'll become clear that she knows quite a bit more about Murkoff and what they do than her vapid disposition suggests. She eventually confides that she's just as trapped in the facility as you are, hasn't seen the sun in ages, and has been on a drug regimen from Easterman that she's quietly considering quitting. Finally, she regresses back into her normal sunny self after apparently being put back on her "pills" and "giving up control".
- Romance Novel: Often seen reading a novel called The French Nurse. The tagline is "A tale of forbidden love".
- Stepford Smiler: She constantly acts perky and cheerful despite the obviously dark and twisted work she's involved in.
Dorris
- Friend in the Black Market: Smuggles illicit items into the facility.
- Properly Paranoid: Paranoid about being watched and believes in various conspiracy theories. Though, considering she's a former Murkoff test subject, that's understandable.
Murkoff Corporation
Dr. Hendrick Joliet Easterman
"We're all going to get better, together."
The mastermind behind the Outlast Trials.- All Psychology Is Freudian: In both documents and dialogue, he uses stereotypical Freudian concepts, such as obsessions with one's mother and rebellion against one's father.
- Faux Affably Evil: Played with. While he showers the Reagents with praise if they do well in the trials, he has absolutely no problem putting through such brutal challenges in the first place, and he will become agitated and insult you should you underperform. However, the evidence files reveal that, in his own twisted way, he does genuinely care about the reagents, and wants them to feel the same way about him.
- Fauxlosophic Narration: He uses this in his various speeches to the player. Justified in that he is attempting to brainwash the Reagents into accepting things without question.
- Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: He's a doctor who has orchestrated the entire bizarre and twisted experiment.
- Playing with Syringes: A textbook example of this trope, using extremely elaborate and bizarre experiments to create brainwashed "Reagents" who will serve the CIA.
Others
Skinner Man
- Ambiguous Situation: The Skinner Man only appears when a Reagent is suffering from psychosis, but it isn't certain if he's a real entity or simply a product of the psychosis.
- Eldritch Abomination: Possibly, if you believe it to be a real entity.
- Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: There's no reliable information on what exactly the Skinner Man is, whether it's an actual eldritch entity or a hallucination created by the psychosis. Further muddying the waters is the fact that the doctors at the facility don't seem to be aware of it's existence as an active threat, as the only evidence files found on the Skinner Man are written from a second-hand perspective in which they pass it off as a mere side effect of the mind experiments. Interestingly, Wernicke himself is specifically interested in reports of the Skinner Man, and in the third ending, the characteristic tentacles that creep over the walls during psychosis hallucinations begin to creep over your vision instead as he experiments on your Reagent.
- Implacable Man: Once a Reagent reaches full psychosis, the Skinner Man will appear and begin hunting them, walking towards his target without stopping or slowing down. You can run away from him, but he knows where you are at all times and will catch up eventually. It will only end if you find an antidote, are helped with an upgraded Healing Rig, or if you outrun him until the psychosis wears off on its own.
- Jump Scare: When a Reagent loses one or two bars of their sanity meter, the Skinner Man will begin to do this frequently, appearing randomly to try and give the player a good scare.
- Nightmare Face: When close enough to do damage, his face peels away to reveal a skull with glowing eyes.
- Player and Protagonist Integration: The full effects of psychosis mean that the player is encouraged to just start running, and harsh noises from insanity often drown out the in-game voice chat. From other players' perspectives, their teammate has just started running around randomly, making a lot of noise, possibly running into traps, ignoring offers of help, and attracting the "real" threats, as if they've temporarily gone insane.
- Psychological Horror: In a survival horror co-op game, the Skinner Man offers up a taste of this, being a nightmarish entity that can't be avoided and will chase you until you're dead.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: If you believe it to simply be a hallucination conjured up by the psychosis, then the Skinner Man could be a case of this, as the damage it can do to you is very real. Other players can even see the afflicted Reagent bleeding as they take damage.
