Red Barrels has decided to explore new issues with Outlast 2, putting aside the closed environments of the beginnings in favor of a story that takes place largely outdoors, during a long night cursed.The plot revolves around Blake Langermann, a video operator who deals with carrying out journalistic services of inquiry together with his wife Lynn, going from time to time to the place of the crime. This time the two are headed by helicopter to the desert of Arizona,
where the corpse of a young pregnant woman was found, perhaps the victim of a religious cult. But something goes wrong, one of the engines crashes and the aircraft crashes to the ground: when we wake up, as Blake, we have only time to recover the camera, reach the crash and find that Lynn has mysteriously disappeared. They took her away, but who was and why? It’s pitch dark,
but the camcorder’s infrared allows us to see houses in the distance, a windmill and the inevitable maize plantations. Someone needs to know what happened: better hurry and knock on some door. Or maybe not?
Outlast 2 is violent, dark, sick and damn addictive: a classy survival horror
SHEEP IN THE MIDDLE OF WOLVES
Outlast 2 re-proposes the “passive” survival horror dynamics that the fans of the series know well : the protagonist of this new, distressing adventure is a normal man, even a bit cowardly, who confines himself to witnessing the horror he sees by recording specific sequences and photographing letters and messages, but then fleeing to the ground when someone threatens him.
An approach inevitably frustrating because it is easy to imagine how anyone, put on the ropes, possesses the instinct of self-preservation necessary to challenge a stone or a club to try to defend itself; but necessary in order to instill in the player the true fear, the tension of who knows that he must pay attention to his own steps to avoid alerting the crazy individuals who are chasing him, and that there would be no qualms to kill him in the way as painful as possible.
Blake arrives at this conclusion after a few minutes, when he runs into the carcasses of gutted animals and apparently uninhabited houses, inside which there are however evidence of a cult, the one created by the guru Sullivan Knoth, which pushes people to sacrifice their children in the name of an evil and vindictive god.
The figure of Knoth, broken through notes scattered around the scenarios, looks as crazy as disturbing: it is an exalted that meets its lower instincts rape and killing young women, strong of an almost supernatural ascendancy on their “flock” .
In fact, his men were to kidnap Lynn, convinced that he is about to give birth to the son of the antichrist, and Blake will have to do everything possible to find and rescue her; although at some point the question becomes even more thorny, because the forces in the field are actually two and have opposite but equally sinister objectives.
