Outlast

[IamLEAM1983]

Ogle around the most popular channels around YouTube and you'll realize that Let's Players have come to dominate the scene. PewDiePie needs no introduction, with the foul-mouthed Swede having contributed to much of the success of Amnesia : The Dark Descent. He and a few others, such as Toby Turner, are part of what you could call the cabal of “comedy LPers”, who trundle through terrifying experiences not only as terrible players, but also as grinning idiots who feel the need to overact the otherwise clever scares doled out by the occasionally well thought-out game.

Looking at them, you start to see a pattern to these offerings. The usual YouTube Comedy LPer is subjected to quickly-assembled Unity Engine fodder, dealing cheap scares thanks to a deliberately low draw distance and a dearth of pixel art. If not that, then you're presented with a very gimmicky title. There's games about endless corridors and rubber band-A.I.-controlled antagonists that kill you if you so much as breathe on them; there's games about pizza deliveries gone wrong where non-animated models pass for the pinnacle of horror (not the T pose! Please, anything but the T pose!) and your usual lot of self-aware titles that try and start out all cutesy-wutesy and then plaster annoyingly fake bugs and artist renditions of the software tearing itself apart and turning into the Cenobytes' backyard. On occasion, you'll see a Triple-A horror release on the PC being covered, but the end result rarely is horror to begin with. Doom 3, for instance, is so quick to empower you with everything you'll need to clean Mars of its infesting Hell-spawn that you're quickly left playing just another shooter.

In recent years, indie studios have gotten horror painfully, but always pleasantly right. The tension of knowing the Slender Man is stalking you needs no further introduction, while the Harvesters of Castle Brennenberg have entered the medium's history as some of its most implacable and terrifying antagonists. Red Barrels, a studio founded by ex-Ubisoft and EA Montreal employees, has used its history in the industry to deliver something that feels like it's had the backing of a major publisher, while still delivering the kind of tense, harrowing atmosphere so very few publishers actually would support, nowadays.

That game is called Outlast, and it is absolutely terrifying.

You play as Miles Upshur, an independent investigative journalist who's made it his mission to investigate the shady business practices of the Murkoff Corporation. As a corporate venture, Murkoff is known for its propensity to defraud its clients under the guise of humanitarian work and general charity. You quickly get the sense that the service provider has been under government observation for a time, now, and that a few good and strong blows to its infrastructure would bring it tumbling down.

In 1975, the Colorado-based Mount Massive Psychiatric Hospital was closed down following the investigation of a particularly gruesome case of manslaughter perpetrated by one of its patients. As of 2009, however, Mount Massive has been reopened by the fine gents at Murkoff, who rechristen it as their company's Psychiatric Services division. Smelling a rat, you, as Upshur, make the lonely drive up to the isolated facility in the Colorado countryside. You arrive at night, the guardsman's post is empty and military transport vehicles litter the front parking spaces. Expecting an hour or so spent documenting and interviewing workers, you've packed a notepad and a camcorder.

Predictably enough, it doesn't take much more after your forced B&E through to the asylum's interior to figure out that something went horribly, horribly wrong. As terrifying as Mount Massive may be, your objective is to document everything, to uncover the tragedy of what transpired here, and to survive and, fittingly, outlast the mansion itself – until such time as you'll be able to ensure your ability to leave.

Right off the bat, the game shows its colors quite frankly. You'll find no weapons here for you to use, not even makeshift ones. Your best and only weapons are your wits and your camcorder, which comes equipped with a Nightvision function. You can run, you can hide, or you can die. That's it.

Of particular note is the fact that Upshur isn't just a name and a floating camera – you'll see his body if you angle your view down. Look down and crawl along the floor and you'll see him brace himself with his free hand, along with his cast shadow. Peek past corners and Miles' hand grips the edge of the wall, sprint and his feet briefly come into view as he beats the pavement. There's a great sense of physicality to Upshur, which feeds into his desired sense of vulnerability. It doesn't help that despite being a silent protagonist, Miles is a very breathy individual, rising tension cleverly causing his breath to grow shallower, and jumps and suffered hits triggering a variety of grunts. He has his own screams, his own grunts of pain and his exhausted pants – everything so he comes across as a decidedly mortal man. You, as the player, can acutely feel Miles' mortality, which means you're quickly made very directly responsible for his safety. To stay safe, all you have at your disposal is what has got to be the cheapest camcorder ever assembled. It lends a fun, Found Footage-ish feel to parts of the proceedings where you'll keep your lens raised, and the camera's Nightvision function allows you to see in near-pitch black conditions. Unfortunately, any use of your camera drains its battery, and a single cell lasts about five to ten minutes. You'll find some topped-off batteries, some half-drained ones – and it's up to you to manage your energy consumption.

Apart for the gameplay element that calls for Mount Massive to be littered with the exact battery make and model for your 'corder, this lends a surprisingly realistic bend to the fiction. It doesn't help that the Horror House of the Week isn't littered with inhuman critters, but rather with very human monsters who simply have lost it in the worst ways possible. Any serious psychiatrist would scoff at the Hollywood-born notion that severe mental problems always carry some sort of homicidal bent, but Outlast eventually justifies its use of that trope. Without gunplay or super-advanced mechanics, the very bones of the game depend on how gut-wrenching Red Barrels can prospectively ensure the experience will be, with the Vice Magazine-esque visuals Upshur captures while running for his dear life creating much of the tension.

For instance, a darkened corridor might only reverberate with the noise of an escaped patient's disjointed and blood-soaked diatribes, but raising your camcorder's Nightvision mode to compensate might show you that the homicidal nutjob in question is staring right at you, pupils glinting with a sickly greenish-white sheen in his infrared and digitally boosted surroundings. Add to that the sight of a nasty-looking shiv or a bit of iron rebar or perhaps the disturbing realization that your would-be killer is buck-naked in complete darkness, and all the elements for incredibly tense moments can fall into place. More than once have I huddled under a hospital bed, silently cursing my lack of saved batteries and my power indicator's brazen red blinkings, even as the sick lovechild of Bill Goldberg and of a Hellraiser Cenobyte tromped around in the hospital room I'd ducked into, muttering murderous nonsense about needing to find “little pigs”.

It doesn't help that the A.I. is just sufficiently dumb and just sufficiently alert. Slinking past a distracted sicko is a possibility, even in moderately lit areas – but they all tend to home in to my camcorder's barely audible twin little tones, when my battery of the moment runs low. It might feel cheap at first, but it quickly coaches you to plan ahead. The frailer and more lithe catatonic patients can zero in on you out of absolutely nowhere, but they don't hit all that hard if you can wriggle yourself free in time. The more solidly-built Naked Dudes (for a lack of a better term) are slower on the uptake but deal more damage, but losing them in a darkened patch is a definitive possibility.

As for Cenobyte Goldberg – I'd say avoid. Avoid at all costs.

When the game throws a puzzle at you, it's never a terribly complicated affair. It's usually some variant on “Flip X number of switches to activate Y”, with the game relying on its tried-and-tested twisted menagerie to keep you moving. When it's not that, you find yourself in an open courtyard, an environment in which your camcorder is of absolutely no use. You're stuck navigating using lightning flashes and the lit areas provided by the smattering of lamp-posts. If anything, this actually ratchets up the tension to a severe degree, as you never know when your patch of protective darkness will turn as bright as a spring day thanks to Benjamin Franklin's lousy best friend.

You suck, Nature. You got me killed again.

Visually, Mount Massive is a dilapidated and gore-slathered feast for the eyes. Designed as an early next-gen entry for PCs and the next console iterations, it's intent is to push modern hardware to its absolute limits, particularly in terms of texture work. It's very rare that you find yourself unveiling something that's so polished for twenty bucks. As said earlier, the infrared vision effects are top-notch, the raised camcorder adding just the right amount of “fake HD”-slash-780p grainy goodness to your normally clear field of view. Blood glistens in a way that finally doesn't look like strawberry jam, and stepping into puddles forces you to leave bloody footprints your assailants can actually use to track you down. There's a metric fuckton of nice little visual touches that really sell Mount Massive as a place that used to be orderly but that's recently succumbed to complete and utter insanity.

A word to the wise, though : Outlast was designed from the ground up for 72-bit Windows builds. Most enthusiasts are likely to be using 72-bit hardware, but for those of us still running on 32-bit Windows installations, stability or startup problems can and probably will occur. If you don't have four gigs of RAM and the ability to tune its use by programs and the operating system, you're better off not giving this a shot.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go make sure all the lights in the house are turned on.