I was surprised to see that the reaction to Outlast II was a bit mixed, given that the first game seamlessly blended the atmospheric, run-and-hide horror of Clock Tower with the jump scares of... too many examples to list. Nevertheless, there wasn't quite as much praise for this game as I expected, which is odd to me, because it provides more of what made the first game so gripping, with more than a few new twists thrown in.
Trying to sneak through claustrophobic environments while a lunatic with a machete stalks you through the building, ready to turn you into a bowl of very bloody potpourri, is just as terrifying as it was the first time around. But now there are agoraphobic scares too, as you're abandoned in wide-open areas filled with the odd cultist, making you feel very small and lost, which normally isn't a good thing, but is in a survival horror game. This time, your enemies aren't patients at an asylum, but a crazed religious cult who must think you look like Piers Morgan's dad because they believe you're the father of the Antichrist.
If there's one thing Red Barrels have always done well, it's creating uniqe, memorable villains, and this game is no exception. Sullivan Knoth is a perverted cult-leader and infanticide advocate who you mostly hear over tannoys, preaching self-written gospels to his equally batshit followers. His right-hand woman, Marta, is tall and scrawny, with the voice of someone who started chain-smoking as a baby, but nonetheless can shriek like a banshee as she charges towards you with the intent of introducing her huge pickaxe to your groin. Val is the leader of the heretics, a group of ex-followers of Knoth who abandoned him to fulfil their more primal urges. That's not all of them, but if there's one thing Red Barrels have always done poorly, it's underutilizing their villains. Some of them don't appear often enough, and unused voice clips reveal that there was supposed to be a scene where Marta kills Val but they're all developed well enough through the documents and recordings you can film.
So why the title? Well, this game is in desperate need of a Whistleblower; not in the 'Cambridge Analytica' way, but in the sense that Whistlebower was the DLC for an engaging and unsettling but also very bleak and miserable first game, which ended on the note of 'Nothing you did mattered, except you potentially made things much worse.' Whistleblower took place in the same setting at the same time and ended on a much happier, more victorious note, while also showing that the end of the initial game wasn't quite as hopeless as first thought. But Outlast II doesn't have this, so without further explanation, the game is exactly as depressing as it first appears, which is quite a lot.
But I still had fun. Sure, I'm not trying to beat this one on Insane difficulty, and I looked up 20 minute walkthrough-snippets before taking a single step into uncharted territory, but I had fun.
VideoGame Needs A Whistleblower
I was surprised to see that the reaction to Outlast II was a bit mixed, given that the first game seamlessly blended the atmospheric, run-and-hide horror of Clock Tower with the jump scares of... too many examples to list. Nevertheless, there wasn't quite as much praise for this game as I expected, which is odd to me, because it provides more of what made the first game so gripping, with more than a few new twists thrown in.
Trying to sneak through claustrophobic environments while a lunatic with a machete stalks you through the building, ready to turn you into a bowl of very bloody potpourri, is just as terrifying as it was the first time around. But now there are agoraphobic scares too, as you're abandoned in wide-open areas filled with the odd cultist, making you feel very small and lost, which normally isn't a good thing, but is in a survival horror game. This time, your enemies aren't patients at an asylum, but a crazed religious cult who must think you look like Piers Morgan's dad because they believe you're the father of the Antichrist.
If there's one thing Red Barrels have always done well, it's creating uniqe, memorable villains, and this game is no exception. Sullivan Knoth is a perverted cult-leader and infanticide advocate who you mostly hear over tannoys, preaching self-written gospels to his equally batshit followers. His right-hand woman, Marta, is tall and scrawny, with the voice of someone who started chain-smoking as a baby, but nonetheless can shriek like a banshee as she charges towards you with the intent of introducing her huge pickaxe to your groin. Val is the leader of the heretics, a group of ex-followers of Knoth who abandoned him to fulfil their more primal urges. That's not all of them, but if there's one thing Red Barrels have always done poorly, it's underutilizing their villains. Some of them don't appear often enough, and unused voice clips reveal that there was supposed to be a scene where Marta kills Val but they're all developed well enough through the documents and recordings you can film.
So why the title? Well, this game is in desperate need of a Whistleblower; not in the 'Cambridge Analytica' way, but in the sense that Whistlebower was the DLC for an engaging and unsettling but also very bleak and miserable first game, which ended on the note of 'Nothing you did mattered, except you potentially made things much worse.' Whistleblower took place in the same setting at the same time and ended on a much happier, more victorious note, while also showing that the end of the initial game wasn't quite as hopeless as first thought. But Outlast II doesn't have this, so without further explanation, the game is exactly as depressing as it first appears, which is quite a lot.
But I still had fun. Sure, I'm not trying to beat this one on Insane difficulty, and I looked up 20 minute walkthrough-snippets before taking a single step into uncharted territory, but I had fun.