This is a promising game and I hope to see more come out of it in it’s final release. I hope they expand upon both that, and singleplayer mechanics, as the singleplayer experience is certainly lacking.Īt it’s center, Outlast is a game about Murkoff Facilities and the horrible acts they commit. At least for me, the draw to the Outlast series is the story that takes place within each game and the ability to uncover the truth. While it’s an excellent co-op game, it’s not very suited for singleplayer or exploration.
It’s an early beta test, so it’s not surprising that as of right now there isn’t much to it, but it still does worry me. The only aspect I’m worried about is the story. The tutorial by the way is extremely unsettling, it does an amazing job of setting up an atmosphere of unease. We only meet her briefly in the tutorial, but her introduction is fantastic. Cardboard cutouts of people, clear set ups, fences and cameras around the rat maze you’ve been set in gives you the feeling of being in your very own Saw trap. It feels like an Outlast game, but more than that, it makes you feel like a lab rat.
The sets are immersive, like I said before. Horror survival is fun, but not when you have to repeat it more than a few times. You will get caught by a lurker and get into trouble, and if you’re playing on singleplayer it will become a repetitive, frustrating process very quickly before you figure the level out.
The only qualm I have with these mechanics is that they’re essential to completing a trial. You can save your teammates if you please, an icon will pop up to lead you to them if you choose to follow, but if the antagonists spot you completing this time consuming task, it could cost you your life. The ability to pull an enemy off of them and the ability to administer first aid can both be overpowered if not injected into the game correct, but Trials manages to find a good balance in these mechanics. There are multiple ways to help your fellow test subjects. In the first Outlast games, you’re a lone, helpless survivor… in Trials, you’re a group of helpless survivors. I think the set design was critical to maintaining the feel of an outlast game while introducing multiplayer, but more than that, they nailed the mechanics.
Comms are optional, as the game gives you an alternate way to communicate if you want to at all. Spawning into a trial with up to four players, I quickly realized that the aspect of multiplayer doesn’t dilute the experience one bit. The multiplayer experience in Trials is excellent. Not having enough to join your lobby, not having enough to play missions… the beta seems to have open, public lobbies, which is absolutely helpful in finding teammates (and probably essential in such an early beta). A common problem in multiplayer games is, simply put, not having enough friends.
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