L.G.C. |Reviews| — Outlast

Your intrepid heroes get ooky spooky, play with grains, and hyperventilate properly. Outlast faces the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: Outlast
Webzone: http://store.steampowered.com/app/238320
Devel: Red Barrels
Engine: Unreal Engine 3
Price: €/$ 19.99 / CDN$ 21.99

Wazzat: Hell is an experiment you can’t survive in Outlast, a first-person survival horror game developed by veterans of some of the biggest game franchises in history. As investigative journalist Miles Upshur, explore Mount Massive Asylum and try to survive long enough to discover its terrible secret… if you dare.

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

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Aside from your standard UE3 load times this critter runs like silk-sauce

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Runs at a smooth 60FPS at 4k
Mind you, most of the game is darkness, so I’m not sure how hard a feat that actually is

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Shiny / Sounds

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Grain effects… grain effects everywhere.
It’s a gimmick.
I’ve never experienced grain (sober) IRL.
If I’m unable to disable that shite you loose a chair automagicly.
- That said, it looks better than SOMA.
- Alright, not “better” but it’s definitely on par.
^ is annoying and sucks some of the fun out of the game.
Aside from that the soundtrack is passable, and the voice acting gets the jerb done.

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It gets the ooky spooky down for sure, but it’s not particularly original in how it does it
Bad Framing, shakycam, I keep expecting a giant guinea pig to show up and try to eat me
Someone really hates those violin strings though
At some points, the tense chase music sounds a lot like the fight theme from Star Trek. Kind of kills the immersion
The voice acting is decently done, but again, no points for originality. Crazy murderous psychos 1 through 8? Check
The breathing sucks…Get it? Ha ha ha
Visually, the game is about on par with what you’d expect for a game that came out last year.

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I would like an option to disable the grain effects and radial blur, not just motion blur.
If you have Texture sharpening enabled in the NVidia settings, you’re going to see red pixel lines around shadows. My guess, it’s a bug with ambient occlusion and texture filtering in some games.
- Having an option to disable AO wouldn’t go amiss, either!
I want to choke the main character to death, just so he learns how to hyperventilate properly.
You can also tell exactly where the enemies are even in pitch darkness, based solely on your character’s ESP enabled hyperventilation. Can’t see a damn thing yet, if they’re really close to you, your character’s breathing will give them away.
The background music was alright during those bits where it was subtle.
But then came the lady singing some sort of Opera-bit accompanied by twangy-ass music and it broke whatever little immersion I had left.

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Control

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Default gerbil is a little twitchy but that’s how I likes it.
Slide slide slippty slide
I’ve Shift to Nope since you can outrun anything in the game.

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Yeah, the camera is way too twitchy
Otherwise, standard FPS/Horror Fare. Nothing special

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Even with the slider almost all the way down, the mouse is far too sensitive for my taste.
But since this game doesn’t exactly require precision aiming I can excuse it.

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FUN?

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Jump scare + hide in something… the game.
AKA Press Left button to hide.
These games simply do not work for me.
I can buy the monsters, Jesus priest, and the scientist.
I can’t, however, believe for one second that I would not have located a plank, hammer, metal rod, 16-inch Purple Double-Headed Dildo (available at Blairs Emporium, use offer code LGCDD for 10% off at purchase), A CHAIR,SOMETHING! To defend myself.
It’s hella difficult to make /w the scared when I’m all “That, that thing over there. I could totally make a weapon out of that”
- Or at least solid snake the motherfuckers when they’re not looking
Now let’s address the most unbelievable aspect..
A FK mothering night vision camcorder that runs on a AA battery.
Yes, it uses a single 1.5v battery.
At the end of the day it’s a competently done jump scare game that is not fugly.
If you like teh horror pick it up on sale.
Seriously, the price of this game drops more often than an IIS server

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The camera positioning is designed to set up jump scares. It’s annoying
- “Jump Scares from this side, this side OR this side? Which is it gonna be!?!”
Must this man slam every door he comes across? That’s racist
I’m also not a big fan of the trapped in the asylum cliche. Doesn’t help with the investment
My big issue with this sort of survival horror genre is that it feels like a chore. You have no recourse, it’s just a bunch of tedious stealth stuff. And it is tedious
Good thing this dude has the last camcorder in existence that uses AA batteries. If he was using one with an li-ion battery, he’d have been screwed in a few hours\
The night vision is a neat replacement for the traditional flashlight, but it just kept reminding me of the Paris Hilton Sex tape.
I didn’t mind SOMA, because it at least had a neat and original concept. This? Bleh
I literally had to choke through playing an hour of this game. I hope that statement illustrates my distaste for it

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I like the horror genre.
I don’t like games that have to rely on jump-scares to keep themselves relevant.
And even then, most of the “jump-scares” aren’t really particularly scary.
As hard as this game tries to build up an atmosphere, it fails miserably
Some of the background tracks are distracting as balls.
I found the red pixel bug to be far more interesting than the entire first hour of the game.
I put in another 20 minutes or so after yesterday’s stream, just so I would be sure I wasn’t going to change my mind. I didn’t.
I like horror games, especially the Frictional brand of horror (Penumbra, Amensia: The Dark Descent, SOMA).
It’s not that I think jump-scares aren’t a valid horror trope, they certainly are.
Doom 3 was the perfect example of how to make a horror game that relies on jump-scares. I love Doom 3.
This game is trying the Frictional thing of dropping you in defenseless and saying have at. But while SOMA and Amnesia Dark Descent reinforced your powerlessness with creative atmosphere building and audiovisual clues, this game just relies on gore and jump-scares hoping they’ll be enough to keep you going.
They’re not, Brad. They’re really not.

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Final –