Outlast

Here’s a review that I didn’t think I would ever be able to write. I got Outlast as part of Xbox’s Games with Gold back in December 2016. I starting playing it in January 2017 and completed in April 2018. The story was I started it, played it once, didn’t get into it and then didn’t go back to it again for a year. I returned to it with zeal, hammered through 90% of the game and the DLC in a week or so and that just left the last three achievements. Which I’ll cover later.

Outlast is a true survival horror game. You come to an asylum, off the back of an email sent from an anonymous source, armed with just a video camera. You have to navigate through the asylum trying to avoid being killed by the numerous crazy inmates and the notorious man-monster Chris Walker. You obviously can’t defend yourself so you only have two choices; hide or run.

At first, I thought the game was quite slow and laborious but on reflection, I think this was just me not being used to playing a game without a weapon. Once I got going, it’s quite scary at first and does all the things a survival horror is supposed to do quite well. I was constantly in fear of my life praying that that no one saw me in the dark. When they do see you, its basically a case of run for your life and pray they don’t see you hide. You can close doors behind you to slow them down and one criticism of the AI is that it’s so dumb that if you close a door normally, they need to bash it down, rather than just opening it which gives you a few extra seconds to hide from them. To be fair, this makes the game fair rather than swinging the gameplay in your favour - especially considering you can actually fight anyone.

Essentially that’s all there is to it – you make your way through the asylum, hiding and running until the end of the game. Without a guide, the biggest challenge is working out where to go. Some areas of the game are pitch black and you need to rely on your camera light to get through. This will cause the camera to run out of battery power so you need to try and find batteries to keep the camera going.

The most notable bad guy is Chris Walker who, if he catches you, will just rip your… body off of your head - you have to see this for it to make sense – and its essentially a one hit kill. It’s painful when you have to watch his grotesque face smiling at you as you die.

Musically its great as well. It has the depressing tone when you are alone which suits the game perfectly and when someone sees you and starts chasing you, it ups tempo and gets the heart racing. Every encounter is a life of death situation and the music captures the essence of this too.

Graphically… well… it looks good but there are very few interactions with the environment other than picking up collectibles and batteries and considering how much stuff there is, it almost feels like a waste. In addition to this, I encountered a few game-breaking glitches, one of which caused me to throw up in my mouth a little bit and I’ll go into that a bit later.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 17 Achievements

With only 17 achievements you could be forgiven for thinking this is an easy ride. It’s far from it. The main game has 11 achievements, 5 of which can be obtained by playing the game from start to finish. I got the first two of these before stopping and I’m embarrassed to admit that this probably equated to about half an hour’s worth of game play once the routes are known. It’s probably possible to speed run the game in less than 1 hour but realistically it’s a 1 to 2 hour completion assuming you don’t get any collectibles.

There are also four missable achievements for stuff that you need to do while playing through the game. 2 of these are for collecting all the documents and recordings and another is gained almost at the beginning of the game for pressing a button on an elevator and this is really easy to miss.

One of the bigger ones, which is also fucking stupid, is for playing through the whole game without hiding under a bed or in a locker. There are certain points of the game, even right at the beginning where you are actually told to hide in the locker and having watched the videos of this being done there are really stupid ways of getting around it and most of the time it looks like luck that people survive.

Thankfully for this one, someone figured out that you can actually just do chapter select and do the last part of the game and this counts. There is no need to hide for the last ten minutes or so or the main game which actually makes this achievement really easy.

The last two achievements are two of the hardest I’ve probably earned. Firstly you have to play through the game on insane difficulty. This entails getting through the whole game without being killed otherwise you have to start the whole thing again. Secondly, for the ENERGISER achievement, you have to do this without reloading the camera batteries. In a game that is deliberately dark. Not just dark to the point where it’s hard to see but dark as in you totally, absolutely cannot see anything at all without the camera light.

Essentially to get these two took me a few weeks of trial and error couple with some weeks of getting up the energy to actually try in the first place. With a run not using the camera, you essentially have to know the whole game from start to finish and get through the non-death parts without using the camera at all. It’s basically repetitive trial and error that stops the game from being scary and sees it become annoying. I was sick of the sight of Chris Walker by the end.

Here comes the biggest game breaking glitch. I was ploughing through an insane run and had got further than I had ever been before. I jumped off a platform in a fairly innocuous position and got stuck on the scenery and was unable to continue. This has happened to me twice before when I was crouching but the game managed to right itself. Not this time though and I had to start again through no fault of my own. My rage was so great that I got my head down and made the next run the successful one that netted me the completion.

But seriously, this kind of shit can FUCK RIGHT OFF. I don’t care what level your company is operating at, AAA or ID, sort your shit out. This is fully unacceptable and Red Barrels should be ashamed of themselves. There. I managed to hold that in for 13 days (at the time of drafting this review.)

Downloadable Content

I actually put off the LUNATIC and ENERGISER achievements until after I had played through the Whistleblower DLC as I didn’t fancy manning up to the challenge at the time. Whistleblower sees you take control of the guy who sends the email to the other guy at the beginning of the main game and you essentially have to escape from the asylum. In terms of storyline, continuity and framing, Whistleblower is probably one of the best game additions I’ve ever played. In terms of gameplay, it’s more of the same of the original game with different enemies and a different protagonist who gets crippling injuries you have to cope with. Same video camera though.

There are three achievements for making it through the DLC unscathed and this is also a lot easier than the main game. In addition, you get another two achievements for getting all the collectibles.

That just leaves the Insane run through for the completion and if you’ve done the main game (again, which I did after this) it’s a cakewalk in comparison. It’s still difficult though and I got caught right at the end of the playthrough only to be thrown back to the start. That was hard to take but I got through it in the end.

Outlast is probably one of my proudest completions. Getting through it has given me a second wind to carry on to more challenging things and push through my backlog of games more quickly. I did actually find myself thinking about playing another insane run after I’d finished. Then I remembered I don’t hate myself and uninstalled it forever.