Friday, March 27, 2020

Game EXP: Outlast II (NS)


I'll be honest with you.  This was a hard article to write.  There were multiple times that I started writing, reconsidered what I wanted to cover in this game, then would catch myself not having been writing for the last 15 minutes.  

I played this game on the Switch for the same reason that I play most games that were released after 2014 not on my computer because my laptop cannot handle a lot of what graphically heavy games require of the necessary hardware.  So that is where this experience is going to be coming from.  I also played the first game in the Outlast series back in August, 2018 with a First Impressions and a Full Review article, so I was familiar with the series coming into the second game.  Having watched the announcement trailer I got strong Jonestown vibes, what with the religious iconography and the preaching from a megaphone or speaker with a forest in the background, then the full trailer following, I felt like I knew what I was getting into.  A Christian cult against a guy with a video camera.  But there is plenty more to this game than that, and it is not a simple rehash of the first game.

First off, it is established that your character, Blake Langermann is working with his wife Lynn Langermann investigating a story about a woman found dead in the outback of Arizona.  The game opens with a helicopter crash and Lynn taken, so there is a bit of the cliched saving the captured woman bit going on.  In a couple of instances throughout the game, you manage to catch up with Lynn and she takes your hand and you are now controlling two people.  Each time this happened, you no longer had the ability to run, only walk, which meant or seemed to mean that I would not be harmed.  This immediately took me out of the game as I was thinking more of this action, being lead, as a game mechanic rather than a continuation of the story.

Looking a Little Rugged, But at Least There're Three Bandages Left.
Early on, I recognized the handful of other differences between this game and the first, most notably that you have an inventory system consisting of only batteries and bandages.  Yes, in Outlast II you have health somewhat, or more correctly, you can sustain, usually, up to three attacks from enemies before you are killed, although there are plenty of enemies who will one-hit-kill you if given the chance.  Also knowing that you "collected" information when the camera was up, I tended to have it up a lot in this game, although it seemed that this still drained the battery whereas in the first Outlast it did not, but I could be wrong on that note. The other update I enjoyed was that a list-of-sorts was showing you how many either documents or videos each section of the game had.  Sometimes I found that I had missed something, so I ran back the way I came trying to find what it was that I missed, but more often than not, I only discovered the missing media after collecting others noticed that I was missing more than one; I will talk a little more about this later on.

I would say that there were a handful of changes from the first game to this one.  The first being that a lot of this game takes place out in the open, whereas in the first was primarily indoors.  This meant that the night vision on the video camera was less effective.  Or at least that was how I interpreted it to be.  The less effective night vision could also have been a design choice as in the first game I often found myself not using my last battery as the zero power night vision would work well enough for me to be able to see.  In this game, it was nearly impossible to see anything when the battery light was blinking red and the battery was out.  Now that I think about it, I think my anxiety from Amnesia: The Dark Descent and running out of lantern oil/tinderboxes played a bit in my fear of running out of batteries while trying to navigate a cornfield in the middle of the night or in the bottom of a mine (because finding compatible batteries in the bottom of a nearly abandoned mine is completely plausible, but this is a video game so we can be forgiving).  All of that being said, the fear of being alone in the dark while being chased by aggressive zealots was pretty real in a virtual sense.

This is Probably Not a Happy Place.
The second change was that the events happening around our main protagonist Blake Langermann in the present trigger hallucinogenic memories that blend realities, but this is not made clear early on in the game, which is not a criticism.  These moments can happen when Blake is running from a zealot brandishing a rusty knife, runs into a ramshackle cabin slams the door closed and then finds himself in a classroom lit only by an overhead display, are more disorienting than anything else. There were times when I felt relieved to be experiencing hallucinations because that meant that I could not be killed in the real world, but that does not mean that there were no threats present.  At some point, as it becomes more evident that when Blake "goes" to the Catholic school, that he is reliving a traumatic event from his past, specifically when he, Lynn, and another classmate were in fourth grade, which made me dread the idea of a demonic priest chasing Blake throughout the school.  I feel like I never fully understood the design choice for this creature that chased you through your memories other than something that looked frightening to both a nine-year-old (being the average age of a fourth grader) and a 39-year-old (the average age of me).


But. It's. Right. THERE!
There were a couple of things about Outlast II that I was not a fan of, most of those being design choices on the part of the developer Red Barrels.  The first came across more as a humorous troll move than anything meant to be serious.  Throughout the entire game, as you are running and slinking through ramshackle huts, to farmsteads, to underground mines, I came across I do not know how many flashlights.  Both flashlights that looked like they had been discarded as well as ones that were carefully placed on a shelf or table waiting to be picked up at a moments notice.  But because this is Outlast, this was merely set decoration, you could neither interact with them or actually use them.  Rather frustrating when your primary source of light is the night vision that eats up battery power at a stupidly fast rate.

Who's Doing What Now?
The other frustrating thing about Outlast II was the same issue I had with the first Outlast as well as similar survival horror games like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is how much of the story is communicated through found documents.  Because Blake Langermann carries a camera, that is his primary source for collecting information.  Anytime you come across a document, he will pick it up and take a picture, which his camcorder, which then gives you a visual record of that item.  Because these are optional items, some of which you have to go out of your way for and be actively searching for (often eating up more battery power than if you had just continued down that path instead of wandering off into the woods), there is a real chance that you could go through a majority of the game without understanding the overarching story.  Why was Papa Knoth trying to capture and kill Lynn?  What was with the splinter Heretics group that was working against Papa Knoth but also against outsiders?  What was with the encampment of sick and dying people covered in blisters and sores doing that canyon?  How was the Murkoff Corporation from the first Outlast game connected with the events in this game?  You could hypothetically play the entire game without any of this knowledge in your quest to save Lynn.  And that last bit about Murkoff Corporation having an off-site experimental station in the surrounding area I only found out because I missed that leaked corporate document at some point.

Get the Recording, Or Die Trying?
I ran.
I think my biggest criticism is that the story happening around Blake and Lynn was oftentimes confusing.  In the first game, documents help tell the story of what was happening at Mount Massive Asylum (operated by the Murkoff Corporation), what experiments were being conducted there and such, but here there were two different factions essentially at war with each other with Lynn caught in the middle and Blake trying to rescue her.  With very few exceptions, every person that Blake came across was considered a potentially deadly enemy that needed to run away from, regardless if they were on the side of Papa Knoth or a member of the Heretics.  And it felt like a lot of the documents you find in various buildings or tucked away behind rocks in a ravine (why?) merely added flavor for this world you found yourself in.  Then there were Blake's hallucinations that acted as a B-Story that I felt was good character development for Blake (somewhat), but may not have been as effective in helping to tell the A-Story.  Yes, I recognize that they are connected through religious iconography and how religion can be twisted from its original meaning for the benefit of a single person and that this had been done in Blake and Lynn's past and was being perpetrated by Papa Knoth. . . I don't know, maybe I am missing something either in the context of the letters I found or the ones that I missed; I did end up missing 22 out of 108 so that is highly probable, but hey, a 79.6% rate on a blind playthrough isn't too bad.


But you know what?  I did really enjoy Outlast II and looking back, I feel like there were fewer instances of getting frustrated with being killed over and over again by the same enemy or group of enemies like I experienced in the first game.  There were a few instances where I was unsure where to go which was pretty frustrating although I did look up a walkthrough while on the farm because there was a path around a corner that I was not seeing, and another time that I had missed a hole in a fence that was obscured by a young cornfield.  And yeah, there were several enemies that performed one-hit-kills and one in particular (above) that straight up killed me while I tried to get away from it (and would have been frustrating for no death speed runs).  What my takeaway was that felt that the insta-kill deaths were meant to be like a puzzle to solve in that one approach did not work because I died, but the following attempt did work.  I realize this is a bit immersion breaking, but that was just a way I tended to think about how this game operated.  I did enjoy the outdoor areas as the frequency with which Blake found himself outside and indoors was spaced in a way that never made me feel that I was in a single environment for too long.

This is Probably a Bad Sign.
I ended up spending just about 10 hours in Outlast II, which is a good amount of time for a first-person survival horror game where all you can do is run and hide (although I found myself hiding a lot less considering all of the places you could hide).  The tension remained high for nearly the entirety of the game and I did like the inclusion of the hallucinations partly because of how seamless they were (as above) and because I love when games can give the impressions that what the character is seeing is not there but you are still forced to act around what is happening.  Having played the game on normal difficulty, I would be a little afraid to see what the higher difficulty settings are, and I do not know if I will be revisiting Papa Knoth and his followers in the near future, but I cannot guarantee that I will not be back.



~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Pray For You


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