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.