Outlast Trials gets its pre-game trigger warning within the first five minutes when a pair of square night vision goggles are pulled from a dismembered corpse and screwed into your skull with an auger drill. You’ve been swept off the streets to participate in the Murkoff Corporation’s “trials,” an experimental group therapy program that targets people on the margins of society with something to hide that sees you and three other patients attempt of surviving the expansive Saw movie-puzzles. Outlast Trials’ single-player intro is truly horrifying, but that terror quickly dissipates in co-op, where I found the tension too often interrupted by key-collecting puzzles or frustrating, one-dimensional encounters with brutal psychopaths.
This form of psychiatric violence really stuck with me in a way that’s definitely different from other horror games.
It starts strong though. The Cold War setting and allusions to the disturbing real-life programs MKULTRA and Operation Paperclip ground it in our gruesome reality, with the test chambers you navigate often resembling the underground counterparts of those fake cities built to test the effects nuclear weapons, a “Nuketown” if you will. The opening level is a faux plantation mansion adorned with animatronic displays of the burdens you must be stripped of in the “Trials”: your youth, your piety, your dreams, all for a chance at rebirth. It’s never quite clear whether you’re someone who truly harbors a secret past, burdened with undeserved guilt, or whether you’re just an ordinary man who gets gassed up to serve as a control subject.
This tonal ambiguity is one of the keys to the terror of The Outlast Trials. The first step in this process, as your therapist who spits smoke likes to remind you, is to be broken down and you enter this world with a seemingly broken sense of self. I found this setup uncomfortably easy to immerse in – the researchers who force this “therapy” on you speak in a language general enough that I felt it cut right through the character I was playing and stared directly into some of the more repressed parts of myself, a level of fear and emotional involvement that I was completely unprepared for.
“You were always different, weren’t you?” My therapist remarked wryly as I held a box containing microfilmed recordings of all my personal history – as a queer person, being called that by a medical professional made me so incredibly nauseous for fear that it brought back all the worst memories of being locked up, feeling like a freak in need of a cure. It’s heavy, and maybe too much for some, but this form of psychiatric violence really touched me in a way that’s distinctly different from other horror games.
Navigating these tunnels is enjoyable, although your character seems to be walking with their whole foot flat like a Neanderthal and making as much noise as possible. The confined hallways leave little room for movement, frequently forcing confrontation with some sort of patient on patrol, the most common of which is the generic Outlast brand mumbling psychos. Cowering under a bed or closet is still the most reliable way to avoid getting your face ripped off, but the ability to launch stunning projectiles and place nerve gas mines opens up limited counterplay options for a well-coordinated group.
Collecting the keys from the mangled corpses he leaves in his wake and recharging the generators just put me to sleep.
The two most notable encounters I had were with Mother Gooseberry, a self-flagellating nun armed with a power drill hidden inside a hand puppet, and the Skinner Man, an emaciated rat-man who doused with insanity-inducing chemicals. Mother Gooseberry is scary, sure, but Skinner Man’s hallucinogens force you to find and consume an antidote before the affliction of “madness” overwhelms you, turning the world around you into a paranoid delirium. The first time I was poisoned, this horrible 12-foot-tall skeleton man was dragging my heels while looking down at me, bellowing, a sequence straight out of David Lynch’s “Fire Walk With Me.”
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All of the above comes to a sudden, anti-climactic end, with you being sucked into a pneumatic tube into one of the saddest social hubs I’ve ever seen in a game. This is where Outlast Trials m ‘lost, focusing on structured co-op missions like Payday 2’s Heists, with garish cosmetic options and the ability to decorate your asylum cell. The sudden and jarring transition away from a horror experience that seemed so unique and personally terrifying caused whiplash, with the mysterious and enigmatic therapist in your ear happily informing you that the price of freedom is ten coins. special, successfully annihilating any lingering tension.
I ultimately found multiplayer so much less interesting than the opener, awkwardly kiting psychopaths through dark corridors while collecting keycards and filling up generators while my teammates did the same in different corners of the map . At a glance, that sentiment is shared with some fans of the series – among the overall “very positive” Steam reviews is a good chunk of the Outlast community who feel like Trials is fumbling the bag with its multiplayer focus.
The live-service model seems at odds with a game that leans towards something targeted, like a politically charged statement about the trauma of growing up as an outcast in a paranoid conservative culture. Playing through the second try, “Kill the Snitch”, was hard work both alone and with a well-coordinated band. The cop-hire with a shock baton biting our heels was no more menacing than the generic psychopaths, and collecting keys from the mutilated corpses he leaves in his wake and recharging the generators put me to sleep.
This feeling of having something going through me only reappeared when I was reprimanded by my therapist for accepting a “B” grade. “You settle for good enough? Isn’t that what got you here? You get out of therapy what you put into it.” Being the tired target of this supervisor’s verbal abuse had the hair on my neck again on end. For me, the narrative strengths of Outlast Trials are ultimately ill-served by its live services package, but its early access launch has been a success so far: it’s been on Steam’s top seller chart for four weeks. NOW.
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