CHENNAI: Horror movies can be actually frightening, or delightfully hilarious based on your perspective, which makes them fall under a very ambiguous category of fear entertainment. The same however, cannot be said with videogames — the atmosphere is incredibly immersive. You control the character, and games like Outlast 2 set the perfect background music and environment. Your greatest challenge is to not scream and actually run away at a jump scare.
Outlast 2 released a few weeks back, and has widened quite a few eyes (in terror). You are an investigative journalist on a copter, armed with a video camera. You crash land in a rural setting where everyone is part of a weird, extremely creepy cult. Everything is dark and foggy. You run around, rather stupidly, and move towards the source of the supposed commotion and occasionally draw attention to yourself, shouting for help.
Outlast 2 isn’t one of those experiential first-person games where your aim is to escape from one single ghost or monster that haunts a house. No, no. The recent Resident Evil is tame in comparison to this. Outlast takes creepy, disgusting, visceral gore to another level— the kind of stuff that the monster from Insidious would dream about.
In addition to this, Outlast had the difficulty level so high, that it then earned a reputation of being more frustrating than actually frightening. The developer, Red Barrels actually released a patch to reduce the difficulty at a global level.
A lot of connections have been drawn with the preceding game, and it has been credited for having a lot of creativity for a horror game. But there are limits — the gameplay is linear, so cracking an escape route is more trial and error than strategic thinking. That’s good too, in a way — you can’t make it out of the game without dying a thousand deaths, and that’s precisely the idea behind Outlast.
The violence is horribly graphic, the surroundings extremely eerie, and with the off-the-chart amount of disgust — the game is sure to raise the pulse rate of even the calmest of people.
Use your headphones, turn out the lights and play it alone.