Resident Evil 9 could be on the way. State of Decay 3 is also in the works. But while we wait for that next generation of horror games, now might be the time to finally take a visit to - or to revisit - Mount Massive Asylum and the Colorado Plateau. More than a decade since the o
Resident Evil 9 could be on the way. State of Decay 3 is also in the works. But while we wait for that next generation of horror games, now might be the time to finally take a visit to - or to revisit - Mount Massive Asylum and the Colorado Plateau. More than a decade since the original Outlast was released, developer Red Barrels has decided to cut the prices for all three of its original games. And this isn't just a temporary sale - from now on, Outlast, The Whistleblower, and Outlast 2 are going to be cheaper forever. At the same time, a new update for The Outlast Trials has just arrived. If you need more convincing, even now, some 12 years later, this remains one of the best-rated horror series on Steam.
Another month has begun and so another batch of games will be joining Xbox Game Pass for PC. Microsoft have revealed a list of games joining their subscription library for May and hey look, more Final Fantasy. Adventures of fantastical sports star Tidus in Final Fantasy X and X-2
Another month has begun and so another batch of games will be joining Xbox Game Pass for PC. Microsoft have revealed a list of games joining their subscription library for May and hey look, more Final Fantasy. Adventures of fantastical sports star Tidus in Final Fantasy X and X-2 are on the way along with Psychonauts, Outlast 2, Dragon Quest Builders 2, and more. As ever, that also means some games are leaving the service too. Here's what's coming to the PC side this month.
Today's Deal: Save 75% on Outlast 2 and 80% on Outlast !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Monday at 10AM Pacific Time
Today's Deal: Save 75% on Outlast 2 and 80% on Outlast !*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time. I will never understand why Outlast caused such a stir back in 2013, more so after playing its sequel. I suppose I get why folks liked it: playing a videogame version of all
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
I will never understand why Outlast caused such a stir back in 2013, more so after playing its sequel. I suppose I get why folks liked it: playing a videogame version of all those found footage horror films you either love or hate or love to hate, is a pretty nifty thing.
But there were so many valves to turn, jump scares and unsurprising plot twists.
RPS is having an Apocalypse Day! We’re celebrating the end of the world and games about it. Check back tomorrow, if we’re still all here. What’s your favourite moon in a game? The lipless satellite of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, perhaps? Overwatch’s rather cosy lunar map?
RPS is having an Apocalypse Day! We’re celebrating the end of the world and games about it. Check back tomorrow, if we’re still all here.
What’s your favourite moon in a game? The lipless satellite of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, perhaps? Overwatch’s rather cosy lunar map? Somebody asked me this a few weeks ago — genuinely, we’d been talking about First Man — and to my surprise I found myself thinking of Outlast 2.
There is little about Red Barrels’ schlocky, prurient first-person horror outing that deserves real admiration, but you can’t deny the power of its moon. It’s a wonderful ambient device in a game that is otherwise one gigantic charnelpile, a glowing cavemouth amid the clouds which ices the surfaces of barren lakes and raises the skeletons of farmyards from foetid darkness. It’s also something of a timekeeper, waning and waxing as the story proceeds towards a possibly Biblical, possibly scientific apocalypse.
When shopping for horror games, there are a number of things to consider. Does the game in question operate a first or third-person perspective? Are we fighting/pegging it from zombies, cultists, government soldiers, supernatural beings or all of the above? Does it let us walk ac
When shopping for horror games, there are a number of things to consider. Does the game in question operate a first or third-person perspective? Are we fighting/pegging it from zombies, cultists, government soldiers, supernatural beings or all of the above? Does it let us walk across a charred baby pit—hang on, what?
For me, Outlast 2's tone will be forever captured by Tim's striking post-E3 2016 preview headline, no matter how it dials back its difficulty and/or introduces less hostile story modes. If you fancy taking on the cult-battling, camcorder-flashing, hide-in-lockers horror venture yourself—you brave thing, you—know that it's on sale on the Humble Store for £7.81/your regional equivalent off until tomorrow.
Here's an excerpt from James' 85-scored review, which speaks to the game's rather extreme ending:
Long after the final minutes of Outlast 2, I felt queasy, uncertain that what I saw had actually happened. It’s one of the most bizarre ending sequences I’ve witnessed, tapping into a fear I’ve known since my first week at Sunday school. It's not a fear about being hunted, artistic viscera spills, or neatly arranged corpses on spikes (though there’s plenty of that stuff). It’s fear of the drastic measures people will take to ensure their salvation, the burden of guilt, and whether or not the big guy up top exists and gives a damn.
Huge spoilers within, obviously, but James explores the above in greater detail over here.
Outlast 2, aka the horror game which features a "charred baby pit" , was notoriously hard at launch. Studio Red Barrels did end up dialing back the difficulty a few months after its early 2017 release date, and having played it since then, I can confirm it's not as bloody frustra
Outlast 2, aka the horror game which features a "charred baby pit", was notoriously hard at launch. Studio Red Barrels did end up dialing back the difficulty a few months after its early 2017 release date, and having played it since then, I can confirm it's not as bloody frustrating as it was at first. But for those who prefer story to nail-biting monstrosity evasion and, uh, dying, there's a Story Mode now.
But unlike Soma's recent non-lethal playthrough option, you'll still be able to die in Outlast 2's story mode, and there will still be monsters. "It is still possible to die," the notes read, "but we’ve decreased the number of enemies and have lowered their speed, damage and perception."
Changes have also been made to the pacing of the game, allowing more passive players to poke around the game's sinister environments. But more importantly, the update has also lead to the introduction of more grimness.
"Also, we’ve taken the opportunity to reinsert some of the things we had to remove from the original game in order to get an M rating. These changes are not drastic in our opinion and do not impact gameplay, but they had to be made to avoid an Adult Only rating."
Could this removed material be the reason Australia's classification board initially refused to classify the game?
The new Story Mode of Outlast 2 allows players to experience the game with minimal challenges, fewer enemy encounters and more breathing room to fully immerse yourself in the universe. It is still possible to die, but we’ve decreased the number of enemies and have lowered their s
The new Story Mode of Outlast 2 allows players to experience the game with minimal challenges, fewer enemy encounters and more breathing room to fully immerse yourself in the universe.
It is still possible to die, but we’ve decreased the number of enemies and have lowered their speed, damage and perception.
We’ve also made tweaks to the pacing of the game to make more room for exploration, instead of chases.
Also, we’ve taken the opportunity to reinsert some of the things we had to remove from the original game in order to get an M rating. These changes are not drastic in our opinion and do not impact gameplay, but they had to be made to avoid an Adult Only rating.
The new Story Mode of Outlast 2 allows players to experience the game with minimal challenges, fewer enemy encounters and more breathing room to fully immerse yourself in the universe. It is still possible to die, but we’ve decreased the number of enemies and have lowered their s
The new Story Mode of Outlast 2 allows players to experience the game with minimal challenges, fewer enemy encounters and more breathing room to fully immerse yourself in the universe.
It is still possible to die, but we’ve decreased the number of enemies and have lowered their speed, damage and perception.
We’ve also made tweaks to the pacing of the game to make more room for exploration, instead of chases.
Also, we’ve taken the opportunity to reinsert some of the things we had to remove from the original game in order to get an M rating. These changes are not drastic in our opinion and do not impact gameplay, but they had to be made to avoid an Adult Only rating.
Cults in games have a long, proud tradition of getting to go full wackadoo. Mostly, they’re a really nice device to lean on, especially in a game where you want to fill the world with collectibles and audio logs and you need some narrative to build that space. Also, they’re prett
Cults in games have a long, proud tradition of getting to go full wackadoo. Mostly, they’re a really nice device to lean on, especially in a game where you want to fill the world with collectibles and audio logs and you need some narrative to build that space. Also, they’re pretty easy in that, if you don’t give a flip about collectibles, you can generally parse that cults are evil and cultists deserve to die. I may have learned a few things about that the hard way this year. That said, Far Cry 5 releases this week and focuses on a cult in America that uses religion and being pretty crap people in general to take over an entire state. In preparation, we look back at some of the wackier cults to be featured in games’ proud lineage of brainwashing.
Jump scares are often considered cheap scares, and to some extent that reputation is justified. I've played games and seen films where the scares are exhausting rather than exciting, and they're not much more sophisticated than someone jumping out of a cupboard and shouting 'boo'
Jump scares are often considered cheap scares, and to some extent that reputation is justified. I've played games and seen films where the scares are exhausting rather than exciting, and they're not much more sophisticated than someone jumping out of a cupboard and shouting 'boo'. Context is everything, though—jump scares can be a valid device in horror if it doesn't feel like the only thing the creators are throwing at you.
"If you don’t do the suspense correctly," said James Wan, director of movies like The Conjuring and Saw, back in 2016, "then your jump scares are not going to work." The same principle applies to games.
Fear tactics
"They definitely have a place," says Dion Lay, who was lead writer on Alien: Isolation at Creative Assembly, when I ask about jump scares. "One of the reasons I love horror is because the genre is wide enough to be so many different things—slasher, ghost story, even comedy—and there are so many tools to use. Jump scares are one of the minor tools—more like a bit of spice you add to the main course—but used correctly they can help maintain pace and tension without exhausting the player. You can even use a dummy jump scare or fake out to signal to the player that they can relax a little—'you’ve had your scare for now, we'll let you take a breather.' They're good to contrast with the prolonged terror of the main threat, or the slow burn of the dread cultivated by the location and soundtrack."
In 2014, we voted Alien: Isolation our game of the year. It's a sophisticated survival horror game where you're pursued by an unpredictable alien foe for most of the story's 20-hour lifespan. There's no shortage of what I would call jump scares, as the alien and android foes try to kill you, but they don't feel cheap because you have a lot of information about what's going on. If the alien is in the vent above, you'll see drool spilling out of it. The motion tracker gives you an idea of where enemies are at all times. And if an android's eyes are lit up, it'll probably come to life and grab you. You'll jump a lot, but the quality of the space station setting creates a consistent tension, and these peaks effectively break up a long game.
Image taken by user HadAnd0426
"Jump scares are an ingredient," says Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin, developer of both Outlast games. "Throughout the development of Outlast 2, we’ve had people telling us the game doesn’t have enough jump scares and others who felt there were too many. Horror is incredibly subjective and good jump scares aren’t easy to do well because it’s all about what leads up to the big scream. You need to stretch the tension for the right amount of time, to the point that the player almost wants the jump scare to happen because they can’t take the stress anymore." When they hit, they have to hit hard. "Good jump scares should stay with you, putting you in a state of discomfort for the whole game."
"In my opinion, the most important aspect of jump scares is the threat of them," says Thomas Grip, creative director of Frictional Games, developer of Soma and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. "They act in a similar manner to fail states—they're something that the player is afraid of, or at least anxious about. Once you get the players to realise that jump scares will be a thing, they will start to anticipate them, adding to the fear factor in different scenes. So, when a player enters a new room, they're worried that something might pop out and give them a spook, and that puts them in an anxious state—even if the scare never comes."
Unlike fail states, Grip says, jump scares offer consequences to the player without disrupting the flow of the game. "If you use them too much, however, players will get used to them and the effect will wear off. What you're looking for is using just the right amount of jump scares to keep players on their toes."
Jordan Thomas, who worked on all three BioShock games and is now making co-op horror game The Blackout Club, says that easy access to game engines has played a key role in the rise of jump scare-driven games. "I think the intersection between the rise of streamers, the rise of torture porn in other media (not so much games) and the cheapness of indie game engines has made the horror genre—which used to be rare to the point of being actively depressing—flooded with the lowest rent, C and D-movie versions of videogames where you're walking around with a badly-rendered flashlight texture and things pop out of closets at you. That is not the horror that I was hoping would be born around the 2000s."
Let's plays and reaction videos
Earlier this decade, the Let's Play and reaction videos that sprung up around games like Slender: The Eight Pages, Amnesia, Outlast and PT suggested that the way people were consuming horror games was changing.
"When we launched the very first trailer of Outlast in October 2012, we kept seeing comments about some dude named PewDiePie," says Morin. A 2013 video of PewDiePie playing Outlast, embedded above, has been viewed over 18 million times. "People were saying how they couldn’t wait for him to play the game and how he would freak out because of the name of our studio, Red Barrels. In finding out who this guy was, we discovered the YouTuber phenomenon. The timing of Outlast was good, so we decided to roll with it."
Reaction videos have become synonymous with the horror genre, which has benefits in terms of exposure, but also rumbles the all-important surprises of a horror game to a potentially massive audience. "It is a bit of a weird relationship, because you don’t want your horror game to be spoiled but then as a new studio with a new IP, you need the visibility," Morin says.
"In the end, you just hope those who intend on playing the game won’t watch the full playthroughs. You can’t know for sure if sales will be lost due to people watching full playthroughs. As far as I know, no one has this type of data. Since the first Outlast has been downloaded by 15 million people, I’m guessing there are two different groups, and those who watch YouTubers play singleplayer horror games wouldn’t consider buying them anyway."
"I think one of the first examples I watched of those was actually Alien: Isolation just after it was released," says Creative Assembly's Dion Lay when I ask if reaction videos have influenced the direction of horror games. "I was surprised how much I enjoyed watching someone else play a game. It’s like being in a cinema where everyone in it jumps, then laughs with relief, and the shared experience enhances the feeling. I can imagine developers having a ‘What is our Let’s Play moment?’ question when making a game, but I don’t think they would influence the direction beyond wanting the game to give players talking points, or making it a cinematic experience."
Frictional's Thomas Grip, however, thinks the rise of YouTube reaction videos have affected the direction of horror games "quite a bit". "When a YouTuber plays a game, it's in their best interest to put on a show that will entertain their audience. They go into a game being much more mindful of their own reactions compared to your average player. For some games, horror being a prime example, this means that their behaviour is close to the intended experience.
"For instance, I want my players to pay close attention to different sounds, to peek around corners and so forth. When playing horror games, YouTubers tend to gravitate towards this sort of behaviour, meaning they present the game in a good light. When people watch these videos, they learn how to approach the game, which they can later apply to their own playthrough." Grip believes the benefit is that audiences are more open to the idea of inhabiting their character's narrative role in a horror game. This means developers can lean more on storytelling and mood more than traditionally gamey elements like crafting systems or combat—indeed, Andy praised Frictional's Soma for its minimalism.
The state of horror
Big budget horror had a good year in 2017, with both Resident Evil 7 and The Evil Within 2 impressing. Each brought their own inventive angles to well-worn templates of the genre, with Resi 7's videotapes presenting Saw-style fragments of thrilling horror scenarios and The Evil Within 2 experimenting with more open environments. Besides those, the likes of Detention, Darkwood, Little Nightmares and Prey each blend horror with different genres in refreshing ways—even if I will call out Prey's mimic enemies for offering so many jump scares that it tested my tolerance a bit. You don't have to dig particularly deep to find cheap jump scare-driven games on Steam, but the most interesting voices in horror are surfacing regardless.
"I think we've come through the era of the jump scare to an extent, although there are still thousands of them being produced, and we're beginning to see horror creep into simulations and games I would actually enjoy," Thomas says. He cites survival game The Forest as an example of an open-ended scary game where players can figure out solutions themselves. "There's no right way to play that game—you're constructing any success that you have." Thomas likes the idea of jump scares generated by systems, rather than scripted events—he wants his next game to allow four players, in co-op, to create the kind of scary moments you'd only usually see in cutscenes.
"If jump scares happened in The Blackout Club, they happened out of the rules and out of your decisions, as opposed to because we ambushed you with scripting. Like [2014 movie] It Follows, which is my touchstone in a lot of ways, what I'm hoping you're feeling is that something is hunting me, and it's getting closer. And yes, maybe it's eventually going to jump out, but I'm much more interested in that curve towards the unknown. That curve towards a crisis of faith."
My interviewees all agree that jump scares have some place in horror games—whether they're generated by the combination of the player and the game's systems, or used as peaks in games with long stretches of tension. They're easy to use cheaply, but if the player is captivated by the game's setting or story, they're likely to go along with them.
"I'm not a fan of horror games that just feel like a random collection of scares," says Grip when I ask what makes a great scary game. "Instead I want a cohesive experience where you're trying to replicate a certain kind of scenario. I want the game to feel like a unfolding narrative, and not just a theme park attraction. In order to do this the player needs to know what sort of character they're playing as, and what this character is trying to achieve. This might sound pretty basic, but it's something I find lacking in many horror games."
The player's imagination is arguably the most powerful tool in making a great horror game. "The environmental clues, background lore, sounds and so forth should give the player vivid mental imagery of the horrors that await," Grip says. "The hard part is keeping the threats vague enough to keep the player's imagination running, but still clear enough for the player to feel like they are, indeed, playing a game. This is really, really hard and achieving that balance is often what makes or breaks a horror game."
We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully comm
We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol’ Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well – as do a host of other games from 2017’s great and good.
Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you’re so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I’d have gone for in each category.
" I walked across a charred baby pit in Outlast 2 and didn’t like it much ," is an unusual headline but one that captures the grim tone of Red Barrels Studio's combat-less, duck-and-cover horror sequel. Those were Tim's words from E3 last year, which James affirmed in his review
"I walked across a charred baby pit in Outlast 2 and didn’t like it much," is an unusual headline but one that captures the grim tone of Red Barrels Studio's combat-less, duck-and-cover horror sequel. Those were Tim's words from E3 last year, which James affirmed in his review back in April.
From now through Thursday November 16 at 10am PT/6pm GMT, Outlast 2 is half price on Steam, should you wish to experience its scares for yourself.
Here's James' spoiler-free take on the game's ending in relation to the above:
Long after the final minutes of Outlast 2, I felt queasy, uncertain that what I saw had actually happened. It’s one of the most bizarre ending sequences I’ve witnessed, tapping into a fear I’ve known since my first week at Sunday school. It's not a fear about being hunted, artistic viscera spills, or neatly arranged corpses on spikes (though there’s plenty of that stuff). It’s fear of the drastic measures people will take to ensure their salvation, the burden of guilt, and whether or not the big guy up top exists and gives a damn.
And here's its launch trailer:
At half price, Outlast 2 costs £11.49/$14.99. If you fancy spending a few quid more, the Outlast Trinity Bundle is also subject to a 68 percent discount—netting you the first game, its Whistleblower DLC, and Outlast 2 for £14.10/$18.69.
While set in the same universe, both games are unrelated. Besides, you know, all that gut-churning horror.
Today's Deal: Save 50% on Outlast 2 !* Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are! *Offer ends Thursday at 10AM Pacific Time
Today's Deal: Save 50% on Outlast 2!*
Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are!
In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion checks to see which ten games sold best on Steam over the past week. He just can’t sleep until he knows whether Prey made it to number one or not. …
Horror splatterfest Outlast 2 has been patched to reduce the difficulty and boost the measly battery life of the player s night vision camera two issues that Adam flagged up in his review . The camera is your main tool for seeing the game’s over-the-top gore through the shadows,
Horror splatterfest Outlast 2 [official site] has been patched to reduce the difficulty and boost the measly battery life of the player s night vision camera two issues that Adam flagged up in his review.
The camera is your main tool for seeing the game’s over-the-top gore through the shadows, and worrying about how much juice it has left can get in the way of exploring what is a technically brilliant setting. … [visit site to read more]
Outlast 2 is, by all reports, a very good horror game. We scored it an 85 in our review , calling it "a beautiful, brutal journey through extreme spiritual anxieties," while a friend of mine who's playing it expresses his appreciation in a somewhat more raw fashion, through long
Outlast 2 is, by all reports, a very good horror game. We scored it an 85 in our review, calling it "a beautiful, brutal journey through extreme spiritual anxieties," while a friend of mine who's playing it expresses his appreciation in a somewhat more raw fashion, through long outbursts of frightened, "Gotta-get-away" obscenities. Some players are apparently struggling with it, however, and so today developer Red Barrels released an update that dials things back a bit for players who want the horror experience without the punishing gameplay.
"Today's patch introduces some minor adjustments to the game’s difficulty in key areas and moments," the studio said on Steam. "On Normal difficulty this will offer players a more appropriately balanced experience while still maintaining higher levels of challenge on Hard and Nightmare difficulties."
The update also makes "a number of bug fixes and small improvements" to the game, although the Simplified Chinese translation is still in the works and won't be ready until (hopefully) next week. The full patch notes are below—and for a little more help with the horror, be sure to catch James' list of seven things he wishes he'd known before he started playing, right here.
Global rebalancing of the game difficulty.
Microphone no longer uses extra batteries.
Increased the size of subtitles.
Fixed an issue on Intel HD 4000 cards where most dynamic lights were missing.
Fixed an issue where flickering black squares appear in the center of the screen at some specific resolutions.
Fixed an issue with alternate controller mappings and the camcorder UI.
Fixed an issue with double doors where one of them is locked.
Fixed an issue causing lost save games when Steam somehow fails to initialize.
Fixed some heretic sound effects.
Fixed multiple minor gameplay issues (collisions, crawling, tutorials, etc.)
Fixed multiple rare crashes.
Added a "-refreshrate 60" command-line parameter to specify a preferred refresh rate (replace 60 by the desired refresh rate).
Added a "-notexturelimit" command-line parameter to remove texture size limits based on VRAM amount.
Added a "-borderless" command-line parameter to use borderless fullscreen and not have to edit INI files.
