My co-op partner (none other than DualShockers' very own Kyle Knight) and I have been stuck in this prison for a long old time, but the end is finally in sight. After just under an hour of hiding, sprinting away from lunatics, sticking our hands into the neck-holes of decapitated bodies to find keys, and pushing some hapless schmoe on a railcart to an electricity chamber, we’ve finally reached the end of the trial.
We return to the level entrance/exit, but something goes terribly wrong…
The prompt tells us to wait for the shuttle, followed by a message which leads us to understand that we need to survive for 180 seconds before it arrives. Bit of a weird pacing decision, we think, but we find some hidey-places and hang in there until we get the ‘30-second’ warning. After another 10 or so seconds, I get the terrible realisation that perhaps that’s the amount of time we haveleftto escape, not the amount of timebeforewe can escape, which is confirmed a moment later when the screen says ‘Subject Termination Imminent.’ We make a dash for the exit elevators, get in them, and thendie as the elevator takes us to safety, our bodies slumping out into the game’s hub area from which you embark on you trials (and, weirdly, get to decorate your cell).
It was a frustrating end to a generally heart-pumping if overly long gauntlet run, and all we had to show for it was 150 measly XP—15% of what’s required to jump up to Level 2. There’s no quicksave in The Outlast Trials, nor checkpoints: you either complete the trial, or you fail.
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So how do these titular trials work? Well, I say the prison is ‘staged,’ but the brutality that its twisted inhabitants mete out on you very much isn’t. There’s a kinky leather-clad cop with an electric baton in one hand and his dick in the other (not severed, mind, but doing that whole ‘tough guy crotch grip’ thing), ultraviolent loons who join the fray when the yellow light around elevator doors starts flashing, and a naked giant with his wangle flailing around intent on giving you a big old bone-breaking hug.
There’s a lot of dick energy around these parts, and it’sintense.
There are three distinct ‘themes’ through The Outlast Trials, each broken up into several smaller trials; while I played on the Prison ‘world,’ there’s also an Orphanage, a Fun Park, and a special ‘X’ world, making for a nice diversity of themes and (I’d hope) enemy types. The Outlast series has never been about particularly ‘intelligent’ horror, so its goofy premise of signing yourself up for a scientific experiment that sees you trying to escape a bunch of thematised trials is absolutely par for the course.
There’s a beauty to its ‘psychos running around chasing you’ simplicity, with dramatic music stabbing in when an enemy spots you from afar and the chase begins. You have more tools at your disposal since the series’ last outing in 2017 though. There’s the classic night-vision goggles of course, which let you go all Buffalo Bill and see your enemies when they can’t see you; throwing bricks or battles at enemies, meanwhile, is a remarkably effective way of momentarily stunning them. Outlast Trials introduces a level-based progression system too, where you unlock special cooldown-based ‘Rigs’ as you level up, which let you pick from one of four pretty powerful abilities such as stunning enemies, group healing and x-ray vision.
While that all sounds flashy and co-op oriented, letting you plan your loadout with your group to play with some semblance of strategy, I’m a little wary of the game’s excellent fear factor when you play it as a Level 1 scrub being drowned out in the later stages with abilities, extra inventory slots to endlessly pelt enemies with bottles, and effective cheesing strategies. I’m the kind of horror fan who feels that Alien: Isolation really lost something once you got your hands on the flamethrower, and I wonder if The Outlast Trials will be able to keep you feeling like prey throughout.
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Because feeling helpless isgoodin horror, and it works well in the part of Outlast Trials that I played. Various obstacles require you and your partner to work together—such as giving a knee-up to high ledges or bashing through well barricaded doors—and working as a team is generally rewarded, but when shit hits the fan and Big Daddy Dangles comes a-runnin’, then all coordination goes out the window and it’s each player for themselves.
At one point, my partner and I got spotted, dropped whatever the hell we were doing, and sprinted for the same hidey-hole. Alas, only I made it in, so was left to watch through the locker slats as the big oaf grabbed my partner and pounded him to mince. Other times, you get split up from sheer panic, and end up on other sides of the level with a ton of enemies between you, so you get on with your investigations before reconvening later. That flow of working together with your partner, splitting up due to coming under attack, then finding your way back to each other is really well done, and testament to how well co-op horror can work when done properly.
The game has other horror tricks up its sleeve too. For example, sometimes an enemy will mimic the appearance of your partner, complete with the nametag above their head and everything, except when you look closely the name will be a little bitwrong, indicating that they’re in fact a monster. At first we wondered if this was a bug, but the ensuing paranoia where we’d run into each other and simultaneously, skittishly ask each other ‘Is that you?’ shows what an effective horror tool it actually is. The in-world reason for this happening is, I assume, the fact that there’s some kind of psychosis-inducing MK-Ultra gas leaking all over the place, but whatever: it’s great.
Where my hands-on didn’t click was in the excruciating mission length, which is stretched out by pretty humdrum objectives randomly placed around the level. In this case, we had to search for clues, which would lead to keys, which would lead to gates, and we don’t have any idea where in the level any of these things are. It means you stick around for a little too long, and do too much back-and-forthing looking for those question mark icons that pop up when you’re near an objective. The idea of getting killed 40 minutes into a mission because you’ve spent the last 10 minutes looking for that one key isn’t a thrilling thought, and is indicative of some iffy pacing (at least in that opening level).
But for the most part, The Outlast Trials was a thrill ride, fusing the classic Outlast loop of hiding, running away, and squealing in fear with a hint of Dead by Daylight or Friday the 13th (albeit with AI enemies). Where the co-op aspect offsets some of the fear factor of playing solo, as the inevitable chatter between your mates drowns out the brooding sound design, it actually imbues the game with new scares, such as sprinting for the same hidey-hole, or trying to batter down doors together or revive your pal while a monster descends on you.
So long as that mission length and structure isn’t copy-pasted across the rest of the game, The Outlast Trials could turn out to be the co-op horrorshow I didn’t know I needed.
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