Outlast

Outlast, a jump out of the chair horror game, has plenty of moments when you feel like you have begun your descent into the bowels of hell. An intense game that does not leave you with much to defend yourself, your best defense will be to run and hide most of the time. You start the game as the investigative journalist Miles Upshur, who decides to check out the abandoned asylum. It sounds like a great idea because it does not seem like much could possibly go wrong. The environments of Outlast are quite impressive, and you have one of the best looking and sounding games that has been seen in a long time.

This game does a good job at building dread when you enter new areas or closed doors. Like a lot of great games, the richness of the game lies in the smaller details that have made it feel like a real world. Besides running for your life throughout the game, you search for notes that build the back story. Some of the enemies in the game, however, look petrifying from afar, but once you see them up close and personal, they look kind of silly and harmless. Considering that you will be running much of the time, it does not matter much because you will rarely get close enough to get a good look.

You are largely left powerless in Outlast. You have no weapons to defend yourself with, and your only guardian angel takes the form of a video camera that has night vision. Unfortunately, you only get so much battery life, and that can heighten the tension as you have to plan your battery use correctly if it will last. The game has some terribly banal objectives like getting three generators to work for an area. Similar to other games, it relies on three-collection objectives which can start to feel tedious and uninspiring. After you die a couple times, and you WILL die a few times, you start to memorize the layout. In this game, the scares do not always come from the ghouls, but it takes place based on the real world spooks.

A lot of the game has you dart from sewers to lockers to under beds. Throughout the game, you have a sustained dread, and the horrifying music adds to the effects. When one of the patients comes closer, you will start to hear your heartbeat, which delivers an intense effect. The graphics in the game make it wonderful to the eyes, and when you step in a pool of blood, you will see a trail of bloody foot prints. A visit to the sewers will have the water splash in a realistic way. You never completely let your guard down in Outlast and that makes it an excellent game for the horror genre.

Pros

• Bloody, violent and terrifying all at once
• The controls have a realistic feel

Cons

• You run out of resources fast
• The storyline could be improved a bit