Outlast

I'm quite picky when it comes to horror games, so take what I say with that in mind. I enjoy Dead Space with the mindset that it is an action game with horror elements and I highly regard Silent Hills 1-3. Now, I grew extremely board of Outlast almost immediately. There was nothing for me to do in spite of the insane people walking around. Sure I could hide and hope that they were gone or be stuck reloading a save. If you're fine with a good amount of trial and error gameplay, you'll probably be fine with Outlast. If you want to soak in the atmosphere more or less at your own pace, you may be disappointed. I did find myself in sprints down hallways, unsure of where I was going, but I wasn't ever scared or horrified by what I saw or what was happening. After three failed attempts to activate a generator in an early section of the game, I quit. For me, this game has far too much guesswork involved to be engaging and its atmosphere is ruined by the crazy people chasing you down the hall.

Outlast is an impressive indie title made by a team of a dozen people. Considering this, the game really is quite remarkable. Outlast shines in the graphics department, the audio fidelity is terrific with atmospheric sound design, voice acting is believable and appropriate, gameplay and design is polished and playable. Where Outlast's faults lie is the scare factor. This game isn't scary. It can be, but when it is, it's not trying to be. The developers just don't seem to get horror. The problems begin to appear about halfway through the (5-6 hour) adventure trekking through a horrifically sinister asylum. Jump scares appear all too often, predictable and heavy handed when they leap at your screen, you'll begin to see them coming a mile away and will no longer be phased by these scripted scares. To top it off, not only will the game desensitize you to jump scares, but each of these scares are accompanied by cheesy sound effects, like a woman screeching, or what sounded like an animal of some sort in another. There are no animals or women encountered in the game, making jump scares all the more silly and immersion breaking. Speaking of desensitization, there are blood and guts laying around EVERYWHERE. This isn't 1968, guys, blood and guts isn't all that spooky to modern day horror fans. The liberal application of gore in this game isn't disturbing or scary at all, it's cheesy and lazy. The atmosphere would have been 10x better if the developers had replaced all of the repetitive (literally, they use the same models and textures for blood and guts throughout the entire game) gore with ACTUALLY creepy things or stuff that was relevant to the story. In the end, Outlast is a fine example of an indie title. Having high production values, great writing, great voice work and sound design in general, but lacking in the most important factor for a horror game: actual horror.

This was my very first Horror game that I completed. It was great in many ways. The graphics and lighting were amazing, especially for a 2013 game and the sound design is phenomenal. There are 2 things that could be better about the game: 1: Some chase scenes weren't that scary because there wasn't a single way to defend yourself, so it doesnt feel that scary when you get chased the second time after you died. 2: It relies to much on jumpscares. The first 2 jumpscares actually made me jump out of my seat, the rest had not much impact or were very predictable. Great game, just not that scary after the first 30 minutes

Many horror games of recent times have tried to follow Resident Evil games' playbook, but not this one. Outlast puts you in total darkness much of the time, having you rely on only a night-vision camera with a shortage of batteries. The game shines in those scenarios. The old saying is true: the scariest things are what you can't see. When you finally see the villain and the typical mad scientist plot line, it is expectedly less compelling. The sequel Outlast 2 is nice too, but doesn't have the claustrophobic feel of the first game.

In general, despite horror games not being my favorites, I've enjoyed this one. It has a lot of unique and interesting elements including having no weapons at all which puts you in very helpless position through entire game. It's pretty well orchestrated indie horror game in asylum which are always creepy places, exploration felt believable and even if story is cliche and exploration unnecessary like BetoBob mentioned, I just rolled with it and generally didn't have issues with it as such. But I had issues with how some things were done and it's a shame they decided to go this way... There are quite few things that annoyed me quite a bit and I think were unnecessary. Mostly approach to the gameplay. Mostly excessive unnecessary darkness everywhere and fact that enemies seem scripted in 3/4 of cases that really ruined the 5/5 score. I get it, they wanted to make tension with darkness, but it's just annoying to use stupid camcorder to a point I used ReShade and used Flashlight shader which made it more enjoyable despite offering very basic illumination. Nothing more stupid than running helplessly from enemies with no means to fight them through pitch black corridors with stupid camcorder that has vision just 2m ahead of you. I get it why, but it was annoying and unnecessary. Lack of 3D audio positioning sucked hard too. Trying to track enemies via sound felt like I'm doing it with mono speakers/headphones and it was horrible as it makes stealth almost impossible. And then I realized stealth means nothing when enemies are scripted to chase you all the time and it didn't feel rewarding to be really stealthy. And throwing jump scares constantly were more annoying than heart attack inducing. I think this game would be far better if it wasn't just so stupendously dark, actually encouraged stealth, have working 3D audio and less scripted encounters. But I still think it deserves 4/5 for first indie attempt. Now, lets see if they fixed any of this in Outlast 2...