By KEVIN HOOVER
OUTLAST TRIALS, in a word, is this: experimental. Developer Red Barrels’ original Outlast, released back in 2013, was fresh fodder for a barrage of YouTube reaction videos. The eventual DLC, Whistleblower, was more of the same: a frightening new take on survival horror that indicated the developers were going to succeed by not attempting to recast the same formula of the Resident Evil’s and Silent Hill’s before them. 2017’s Outlast 2, inspired heavily by the Jim Jones Guyana tragedy, established the first-person POV fearfest as a bona fide franchise, and gamers showed up with their wallets in hand. Thus, Outlast 3 was an inevitability, and an official announcement touting as much was made in late 2017.
OUTLAST TRIALS is not Outlast 3. Instead, what lies within is a fun multiplayer experience that, despite sharing the same DNA with its predecessors, feels alien to its heritage. A few of the series’ shared gameplay mechanics and an attempt to tie into the main line with enormous amounts of hidden in-game documents give OUTLAST TRIALS vaguely familiar window dressing, but the core game doesn’t benefit from being branded as an Outlast entry.
Although the Whistleblower DLC functioned as a prequel/sequel mashup, OUTLAST TRIALS is definitively situated before the Miles Upshur saga of the original game. Set during the early years of the Cold War, the shadowy Murkoff Corporation, in need of test subjects for their brainwashing technology, lure in unsuspecting candidates with the promise of a better life in exchange for participating in their studies. After building out a custom character, aka “Reagent,” with a handful of options including facial textures and voice pitch, then getting your feet wet with a simple jaunt through a tutorial mission, it’s off to the central hub of the impending hell: The Sleep Room. It’s here where everything begins and ends; a congregational spot to purchase upgrades, buy new cosmetics, and glean through all the missions currently available. Those missions – “Trials” – are what make up the game at large.
Outlast games are not known for holding back, and it’s a distinction that OUTLAST TRIALS embodies to the fullest. The opening disclaimer warns to turn back ye with issues surrounding lampooning of religious iconography, sexual content or excessive gore, and that’s all on display in the first 15 minutes. Inhibitions in check, one of the few instances of cinematic storytelling unfolds at the onset, briefly explaining why you’ve chosen to submit to that which is Murkoff’s version of Rat Park. The trials themselves are fashioned as individual stages built inside of a giant warehouse, each with several objectives that require completion to finish out an overarching directive. In a morbidly humorous touch, trials are named in a way that draws comparisons to the end goal: “Kill the Snitch” is self-explanatory, but “Cleanse the Orphans” carries on in a grotesquely horrifying way that isn’t immediately clear. Enemies are sparse, with each stage typically only outfitted with two or three, but considering they can kill, and you – with only minuscule means in which to defend yourself and no real way to fight back – are always at a considerable disadvantage. Aside from the unlockable buffs at the Sleep Room, within the trials are healing items, respawn pills, camera batteries and a handful of single-use bricks and bottles which can be used as distractions or provide a rudimentary attack. The kicker: when you die, you’ll drop all of it, including necessary key items, mandating a jaunt back to collect it all anew.
Having played any of the previous entries isn’t a requirement here, although for those who have, canonical connections unearthed through in-game documents help shed some light on the nefarious dealings at Murkoff. Control mechanics are easy enough to pick up, and seasoned players will feel right at home behind the eerie iridescent glow of night vision goggles, a graphical effect that elicits chills anytime the menacing eyes of an attacker are reflected back. And the hide-or-be-hacked element returns; prepare to spend a lot of time inside of trash cans, lockers and car trunks attempting to stave off an untimely ending. Finish – or fail – individual trials and the performance-commensurate rewards of XP and currency can be spent upgrading characters, purchasing new cosmetics, and unlocking skill trees, marking a break from the series’ formula. These include buffs like passive healing abilities or basic defensive tactics. Granted, you’re not really fighting back, but tossing a smoke-deploying land mine or peeping through walls to track enemy movements can buy some precious moments to impede a cattle prod-wielding pervert from electrocuting you to death.
Make no mistake, this is intended to be an online multiplayer package, and that’s where the most fun is to be had. Players can opt to play solo, but the difficulty curve is steep and doesn’t seem to adjust relative to being a one-reagent playthrough. “Kill the Snitch,” for example, requires searching out keys that are stuffed away inside of corpses, a challenge made all the more difficult by having to identify the correct bodies based upon emblems painted across their torsos: A door that requires a crown-emblazoned key must be plucked from a crown-etched corpse. Sometimes, finding those keys can be tedious for a loner. One specific solo playthrough had me convinced that the game was generating everything but the crown key, and it took nearly 45 minutes to find it. That’s not a time investment that I’d normally mind making, especially considering how much I enjoyed exploring the many grisly environments. But just as I’d get a chance to take in the scenery, an alarm would signal an appearance by The Pusher, an emaciated and sore-covered antagonist who always seems to show up at the worst possible time. Outfitted with a fumigator stocked with hallucinatory gas, The Pusher searches in hopes of dousing players with his spray, triggering a psychotic effect and summoning the spectral Skinner Man. Run and hide in hopes of outlasting the psychosis lest your health gauge drain dry, or use an antidote to immediately erase the effect. It’s a cool aesthetic the first few times it happens; not so much when you’ve been slogging through a stage for nearly an hour and having to deal with The Pusher’s bullshit every several minutes.
Outlast games induce stress by stripping away. The lack of weapons and barren, lifeless environs cultivate a feeling of despair that leaves players feeling as if they had survived, as opposed to having bested a final boss. TRIALS, by contrast, is practically brimming with life and zeal. Reagents are constantly under scrutiny by Murkoff employees positioned within labs at various locations in each stage. And there’s a host of mannequins and sinister automatons throughout carrying on in different pursuits. A non-threatening robot at every turn that serves as a tour guide is starkly dissimilar to the religious zealots in Outlast 2 trying to flush you out of a cornfield with pitchforks. And seeing someone in a lab coat jot away a clipboard dilutes the dread and despair the series is known for. Or, perhaps it ramps it up: Horror is in the eye of the beholder, but this particular beholder found it all to be less nerve-racking than previous entries.
As mentioned, what’s here is an experiment that mostly works, yet also feels like it could overstay its welcome very quickly and never truly feels like an Outlast game at heart. Although new challenges have been added for the recent official release (the game was a part of early access on PC dating back to May 2023), levels and missions lose their shine with each play. A rotating weekly trial adds an interesting wrinkle to the mix but utilizing the same stages only with modifiers – fewer health items, for example – will likely only appeal to those trying to wring out every ounce of replayability. Until Outlast 3 materializes, OUTLAST TRIALS provides a viable multiplayer and moderately sufficient single-player excursion to whet the appetite, if only before being relegated to the “once in a while” section of your gaming library sooner than expected.
OUTLAST TRIALS is available now for PC, XBOX One, XBOX Series S/X, PS4 and PS5.
