My summer has been kind of miserable so far. Work is (somehow) fine. Personal relationships are fine. But everything else is either terrible or exhausting. Under the circumstances, you’d think I’d be checking out Stardew Valley after work (yeah, I haven’t played it yet). Think again: I started playing Outlast.
I can’t speak to its early access phase or the transition to 1.0 earlier this year, as I just got my hands on it for the first time this week. I’m curious about the game and its seasonal patterns, but my brain has a funny quirk: the more stressed I am in real life, the better it gets at playing stressful games. That’s why I currently find myself searching for keys among rotting corpses and hiding in closets from severely deformed monsters.
Manage Cookie Settings
This might require a little more background, but without going into too much detail (since this isn’t a blog post): sometimes it’s hard to balance A lot of things Suddenly, you may collapse or become miserable. But you can also hold on and wait for the storm to pass. mine
When the temperature outside regularly reaches 40ºC (yes, southern Europe), burning off the calories with a daily walk is out of the question, and entertainment such as movies or TV probably isn’t Correct Siesta is great when your brain is spinning in circles. Siesta isn’t everything. So I started playing video games because they’re a more complex activity. I’ve been playing Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, which is great, but hitting a lot of frustrating roadblocks lately isn’t my best feeling. I needed to blow off some steam by playing some simpler, yet frantic, yet original games. Enter The Outlast Trials.
“This is going to be terrible,” I thought to myself earlier this week as I played my first online trial with a group of strangers. After all, playing survivors in Dead by Daylight is a pretty terrible experience without a group of reliable friends. To my surprise, however, we managed to communicate pretty well, thanks to a stable ping system and a simple yet informative user interface. Since Outlast Trials also seems to be more of a true cooperative experience than a competitive sprint through levels, it seems like the community is more friendly and helpful. Despite my rookie mistakes, I didn’t get kicked out of the lobby, and running away from killers and falling into traps with random people felt more fun than it should have been.
Not surprisingly, I can transfer all my stress into the game: I tend to be more aware of my surroundings when I’m nervous, and this is true in video games as well. My best Quake games were played after drinking too much caffeine. This was similar. While I made a lot of rookie mistakes, I actually reacted fairly quickly to random events and complications, otherwise I would have at least ducked under the nearest table for a few seconds (which is my attitude towards single-player games with this DNA). But not anymore. No sudden jump scares startle me, and I’m willing to play another round instead of quitting and decompressing after two failures.
As for the game itself, I found it to be a lovely blend of handcrafted environments full of grotesqueries and disturbing implications with a more traditional cooperative horror experience. Feel It’s nice and responsive, and the “live service” element seems well-tuned and natural without being overbearing, which is better than I’d say for many of its competitors. I’m not a huge fan of Outlast, but Red Barrels does know how to make a game that feels polished and tight.
Is the point of this article to say that you should play Saw-style horror games when you’re feeling down? Of course not. Different games heal different people. In fact, I don’t even know why I ended up choosing Outlast to “relax” instead of something more logical or with a head full of mixed feelings and conflicting thoughts, but I guess that’s the beauty of video games, there’s artistic intent behind them, even if it’s terrible.
