Outlast II is a creation of Red Barrels and a horror game in first-person, with strong content of action and adventure, released in 2017. Here we face several dangers, everything that has life wants to kill you in this little chaotic town in the middle of nowhere named Temple Gate, created by extremist Cristian, Papa Knoth, and his followers, which are preparing themselves for the end of the world events.

In the first game of the franchise, our character is the bravest man on the Earth, because, with his wife, Lynn, we are going to investigate a murder case of a young pregnant girl, named Jane Doe, in a place far away from civilization, when the helicopter that is transporting us suffers an accident and fall.

From then on everything becomes a living hell, when we wake up carrying only one camera that we find around Temple Gate, we advance to search for Blake’s wife (our main character’s wife) and information about the crime, but we fail during a while and, even when we find her, the habitants of this underworld takes her away from us, again.

So, your life in this game will be running into several types of danger while you try to find Lynn, in an almost infinite circle. Prepare yourself, you going to be tense in the whole gameplay, paying attention to each step and breath.



Why we are being chased?

Well, first open your mind, maybe you be a little confused, but as we play Outlast II the narrative line will be making everything clear as we advance. As I mentioned before, everyone here wants to kill you, and, without understanding anything at all in the beginning, as any other human would do, we run until we feel safe again (on a few occasions the game will let you breathe again), but why?

The main reason is that somehow Lynn is pregnant with the antichrist, yes, Beelzebub, the Devil, Lucifer, etc., and since they are extremist Cristian, Papa Knoth’s group wants to kill the child and we have to save them before this happens (Black doesn’t know about the pregnancy and keeps wondering if it is real when he heard about it).

It’s not only that, at a determined point we will be able to take her off these people, but our happiness is short and momentaneous because there is another group, the Heretics, a group that follows satanism and we find them in abandoned mines around the city, they are going to capture our wife again, but this time they want to protect the child and possibility the childbirth. Do you understand? Crazy, right? The developers went far but they leave everything well-done and explained (even if that seems crazy, it makes “sense”).



The alternation between two worlds

If facing a city full of crazy people that want to kill you is bad, imagine now that you have to face an abandoned and terrifying school. Let me explain, Blake suffers from some hallucinations during the narrative, usually, we heard a trumpet sound (would that be a sign of the biblical apocalypse?) and a bright light emerges from nowhere, in this moment we find ourselves in a religious school, a place where our character studied when he was young, alongside with Lynn and a close friend named Jessica.

To be honest, when the part that we are on this previously mentioned environment ends, I let a sigh of relief. Here we are going to chase Jessica’s memories of when she was a child because Blake knows how she died and he blames himself because of it, and for these reasons his nightmares torment him. As we advance, we discover a monster which we find to be the real reason for our “nightmares”, it has a horrendous appearance and it starts to chase and talk to us (in a terrifying and loud noise), a tip: don’t get to close of it, it’s certainly going to kill you.

After a chase that will make you lose your sleep and pull out your hair, Blake arrives at the end and recover a clear memory of the tragic way that his old friend was murdered, it’s really sad, and, despising the game led us to believe during the whole gameplay of our characters guilty, he couldn’t do anything at all. It’s absurd and violent.



Villains

In every part of Outlast II’s story, Red Barreld is worried to give us a disturbing villain, so, here I decided to separate a topic only to introduce them, leaving aside the monster that I mentioned before, the one that we see in the school. Contrary to the first game where misleading enemies are the simplest thing to do, here they are clever, they will find you in every possible place, high grass, closets, and barrels. So, run!

Well, to start, we face a woman, named Marta, with a scythe that keeps repeating: “Do you want God? I’ll give you”, her looks are not welcoming, she is right at the beginning, in the city, with 2 meters and an even bigger weapon, searching for you everywhere, including, when we find the only person in kilometers that can offer help, she also finds this person, and she gave him a tragic end. Besides this, the city habitants, when they discover that Blakes is the father of the antichrist, they start to chase him.



And it didn’t stop there, in a moment we are led to a kind of Temple Gate’s underworld, exactly, I also didn’t think that it could be worst, in this place we find several sick people looking ugly and injured (I don’t recommend getting closer to anyone, they can attack you, it doesn’t matter with if are injured or not). These people, for some unknown reason, think that you are their savior, a Jesus reincarnation, every outsider is addressed like that, and, because of this, they are going to crucify you, literally.

We can release ourselves after some bizarre cutscenes that show them hitting nails and lifting you in the cross, but to escape this nightmare, we have to run off the next villain, or better, villains. The appearance of these is different because here we see a tiny man mounted on a giant neck (like Nunu of LoL) firing arrows nonstop, besides other habitants trying to kill you.



Finally, in an absolute sinister environment which I’ll talk about later, in the mines we’ll find a final group of people wanting to kill you, heretics are just crazy, in all the scenes they will let you with your mouth wide open, besides running as if your life is in danger. These usually come in a group, so it’s going to be harder, because opposing the other, if you find a hole, they will also go down the hole, with an extreme determination just to kill you.

Here, we do a mechanism that happened during the first game and also in other moments on Outlast II, but I decided to put it here only because of this moment of the gameplay, which for me, is the stressful part. I’m talking about the mechanism of turning on/off or catching something to be able to advance, like a good memory or reference. In this case, we are going to turn off switches to advance with tranquility, while we are wanted and chased by the heretic’s leader in a place filled with water, and to hide we need to dive, being unable to see anything besides the villain’s torch.



Some new features of the franchise

With the success of the first game, I believe that Red Barrels didn’t want to change the gameplay, taking the example of the mechanism that I mentioned before, but we’ll find some new features in Outlast II.

The first one is probably the most interesting, the camera now, besides having a dark vision, also has a mic that allows us to hear better and also recognize the direction of the sound, helping a lot to understand dialogues, and consequently the story, and also to locate enemies, helping us in our scape.

But yet, now is possible to see the number of batteries by looking at the pocket of Blake’s jacket with a specific command that varies depending on where are you playing, we can also see a huge quantity of bandages, another new feature with we compare to the first game.



Audio still is a strong point

Relating to the audio game, there is a continuity of good work, after all, we don’t change a winning team, there is also an excellent subtitle system together with characters’ voices, which are equally sinister, don’t wait for an amicable tone, everything has aggressivity and a certain cynicism, making everything even more scaring.

Besides these details, music and environment sound contribute a lot to the player’s tension, it’s hallucinating how certain noises can awaken your attention, announcing an imminent danger or a momentary peace, here it’s almost impossible to walk 10 steps easily, everything is made to disturb you every single time.



The ambiance is insane

I already said that the game was made to leave you tense, right? Here it’s no different, because with graphics of excellent quality to the year that was released and well-thought and produced arts, the psychological horror gets complete.

I’m going to divide this into pieces, our first local will be a city in the middle of the desert, a creepy place, dark and with not so welcoming habitats, with high grass, old houses made of wood and really dirty places, like animals’ slaughterer with blood all over the place. There is also a detail that is kind of morbid, in several spots is possible to find babies’ corpses, in the beginning, I didn’t know how to distinguish if it was corpses or dolls, but since we are talking about Outlast, I believe that is the first option.

Another of the main locations, the school, is in my opinion, the worst of them all, despite it looks like an ordinary school, the whole thing, sound, darkness, screams, and the monster are placed together to leave this experience unpleasing and disturbing. In this context, when I walked by the long corridors full of lockers around, I couldn’t stop thinking that at any moment I would be scared by a jumpscare or by a deafening noise.

Lastly, but not least, the ambient of the final part of the game is the mines, the Heretics place, well, I believe that a place like that abandoned is already creepy enough, now imagine this with literally a blood rain. Yes, the entire game is programmed to scare you, your psychology is already exhausted by the end and you just want to turn everything off as the horror keeps increasing, and it still has the chases, these mines will have immense darkness and complicate paths.

Outlast II is available for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows.