One of the hardest reviews I’ve ever had to write was for Outlast 2. The game was so unnerving that it was hard to psych myself up enough to play it sometimes. The Outlast Trials, Red Barrels’ first game since then, doesn’t consistently reach those same heights, but it is memorably scary at times, and when it’s not frightening, it’s plenty rewarding in other ways. Taking a single-player horror series like Outlast and repurposing it as a four-player PvE game sounds like the kind of publisher-mandated live-service experiment too many teams have been tasked with lately. But as an indie team, Red Barrels seems to have steered its own course, and that may be why The Outlast Trials still feels like Outlast rather than a cynical project bearing the name.
The Outlast Trials is set in the Cold War, where you’ll customize your figurative guinea pig for a lengthy series of vicious experiments within the Murkoff Facility. The game’s opening moments, along with the lore, paint a scene so gruesome and wicked that’ll be familiar to series veterans, but disquieting to those new to the Outlast universe.. After training to become sleeper agents who are psychologically deconstructed, tormented, and then brainwashed, you’re eventually let back out into the free world awaiting your activation as a secret weapon. The context of your overarching mission is at least as dark as anything this team has done before–and it’s set its bar quite high previously.
In practice, these experiments play out on various large maps like a police station, a courthouse, a carnival, and more. Each one is propped up as a facsimile of the real thing as you run through the Murkoff-made mazes like a lab rat. This involves many signature Outlast elements, none more emblematic than carefully crawling through the dark in first-person while desperately seeking salvation–or at least batteries–before your night vision runs out of juice.