The Outlast Trials Review

Often, the best horror games thrive on the terror of being alone and having the odds stacked against you. Outlast and its sequel had you struggling through gauntlets of unkillable monsters on your own, even depriving you of a weapon to fight back. The Outlast Trials leaves you similarly without a means of defending yourself, but recommends you play the game with friends, rather than braving its unrelenting terrors without support.

A co-op horror game is a pretty rare beast, but in the case of The Outlast Trials you can very quickly see why developer Red Barrels suggests you rope in pals or join random players online to share in the experience – play through any of the game's missions alone, and you're in for a pretty uncompromisingly joyless time. This is a game that carries on all of the same problems its predecessors had, and a fundamental issue I've always had with horror games in which you're encouraged to sneak around rather than confront enemies – if you were in the same situation, wouldn't your first impulse be to grab a weapon? Rig upgrades acquired from Murkoff’s Engineer give you some means of fighting back, but they’re of little help when you’re being hounded while trying to figure out a mechanism or some such. For the record (and to my eternal shame), I never completed Alien Isolation for similar reasons.

In The Outlast Trials there is at least a convincing reason for your character being bereft of weaponry. You're a test subject, scooped off the streets by the clandestine Murkoff Corporation, bound and trapped in a murderous maze, where a refusal to cooperate and carry out instruction results in horrendous torture and a grisly death. Outfitted with night vision goggles (they're literally drilled into your head during the game's loud and outrageously gory intro) and a battery pack, your customisable Reagent is forced to jump through hoops and execute various tasks, which often involve solving convoluted puzzles, as shrieking psychopaths and mutated killers randomly stroll around the place looking for something, anything, with which to bludgeon you to death.

From the very outset, The Outlast Trials continues the series' grand tradition of lining its environments with mutilated corpses, though in this instance they're failed subjects who didn't make the cut, and ended up being cut to shreds. Horror in Red Barrels' game is about as unsubtle as it gets. There's a lot of being shouted at, a lot of being grabbed and thrown around, rasping drills being brandished, bodies being chucked into grinders, people being electrocuted – it can all be a bit overwhelming at times.

And the constant noise and threat engendered by the numerous killers roaming around the place makes the solving of puzzles or the tracking down of clues a stressful affair – survival horror in this context doesn't work well with the game's puzzle elements. Even Resident Evil has the good sense to leave you to your own devices when you have a conundrum to unravel, but you'll find no such allowances here – there's invariably a raving lunatic stomping about the place screeching some such, preparing to bash the living shit out of you at the drop of a hat.

You can run and hide or slip away into the darkness, of course, or find an object like a brick or bottle to hurl at an enemy to temporarily stun them, and in co-op it's helpful to have allies around to distract the homicidal maniacs. It's also a lot more fun to share in the ordeal with friends, working together to figure out your exit, solving the various puzzles required to complete the trial and hightail it to the shuttle to escape. Between trials, you can retire to Murkoff's holding facility, where you can arm wrestle or play chess with fellow Reagents, while you can spend cash accumulated from trials on new clothing items or decorations for your private bedroom, if you like.

A visit to The Engineer or The Pharmacist enables you to to spend earned tickets on valuable tools for your Rig or Rx Prescriptions to bolster your resilience – especially important when you become infected by green hallucinatory gas, which can cause you to enter a state of psychosis, chased by the supernatural 'Skinner Man'. A quick huff on an antidote consumable usually does the trick. There's certainly a lot to The Outlast Trials, with the main campaign joined by 'Weekly Therapy', which rotates in new tasks to complete. No prizes for guessing how often. But whether you'll be compelled enough to keep going back for more ultimately hinges on how much you get out of co-op multiplayer. Experiencing the game solo is a pretty torrid and thankless slog, so I wouldn't recommend going it alone.

And that's really about the long and short of it when it comes to the lasting appeal of Red Barrels' latest horror foray. It's abundantly clear that this is a game intended for four players working together, and as a single-player experience it's remarkably unappealing. That's without even mentioning objectives that involve slowly sawing off a poor sod's legs, frying a 'snitch' alive in a cage, and all manner of other gruesome objectives that will no doubt delight gore hounds. From schools, to orphanages, hospitals, and police stations, The Outlast Trials throws every conceivable horror trope at the wall to see what sticks, and the result is a messy, relentlessly nasty game that needs to be played with like-minded masochists.