Outlast 2, Analysis
Outlast 2 is one of the most anticipated games among horror lovers. The pleasant surprise that was the first installment of the Red Barrel title made what yesterday was a sleeper, now be an expectant name. The genre of fear owes a lot to names like those
in this series, Amnesia and others who from a first-person point of view knew how to recover a genre that seemed lost after the drift of some of their
big names, such as Resident Evil or Silent Hill . Now, Outlast 2 wants to cover more land leaving behind the asylum that we visited at the time and making us tread for the first time an Arizona desert in which there is a civilization away from reason. What happens there …
The protagonists of this adventure are, at first, Blake and Lynn Langermann. She is an important reporter who wants to discover what happened
with the murder of a pregnant woman, and to get to unravel the truth she takes Blake, the character that we control and who, in addition to being a cameraman, is Lynn’s husband. The introduction of the game already breaks any initial scheme, since the helicopter
with which they approach in this kind of village in the middle of the desert suffers an accident and ends up falling violently. Blake, us, is alone with his
camera and starts looking for where his wife has gone. The corpse is not next to the helicopter so it is most likely alive. Thus begins one of the most terrifying and disturbing games of recent times.
The staging is very similar to what we saw in the first Outlast. We do not have weapons nor are we specialists when it comes to combat, so the
only thing we are equipped with is our camera, which serves as a ‘flashlight’ to move us in the dark – with that night vision so characteristic of the series – and to record and capture certain elements that we are finding. The development,
therefore, follows the guidelines that are already a sign of Red Barrel: to advance exploring diverse places while we avoid being seen by enemies, hiding in all kinds of places, looking for how to build the way forward and discovering what is happening in that place.
And what happens is not very encouraging. Without wishing to enter destripes, since part of the game’s grace is precisely the argument, we will explain that Blake is in the middle of a kind of religious sect where there are several sacrifices while following the path
of its leader, Sullivan Knoth. This town, far from civilization, is an authentic butcher shop of fanatics. But they are not alone, since there is also a
heretical faction that fights against them. In the middle of all this is Blake, who is looking for his wife while trying to unravel what is happening there.
The plot and the development of it have a very significant weight in the progress of the game. We are facing a linear experience, where we are going
through a series of chapters and events that have no reverse. That’s where one of the successes of the game lies: the fact that gameplay and narrative go hand in hand. With scripts, yes, with evident trial-error to be able to overcome
each zone, but with great strength and solidity due to the elaborate setting and the constant changes of locations. Unlike the first Outlast,
here the places and the size of them have been increased, making us as soon as we are in the middle of the forest or inside a church, in a prison, a field of corn or caves in the middle of nowhere.
Our skills and objects to be found are reduced to very few options. The camera allows us to see in the dark with night vision, but it also allows us to record the important moments of the game to have the best possible record of everything that happens
there. If in an area we do not remove the camera, we can lose the recording of important elements at the narrative level for example. In this sense, it is again demanding the constant change of the battery of the battery: we will go collecting
batteries where we pass to recharge and continue recording with the camera. It is a mechanic that at least in normal difficulty will not come to embitter the
game, although it is true that in some moments if we have not managed the duration of the camera well we can run out of night vision in places that are completely dark.
Our list of options is completed with being able to run and hide in many places. When changing the location of the asylum of the first delivery,
our hiding options have also changed. We keep some, like under the beds, but in general we have more options. From the classic enter
a closet to others, like getting inside an empty barrel, hiding under the water in a river or unthinkable places at certain times.
Outlast 2 works as an experience of terror that completely absorbs the player and does not leave him a moment of tranquility. The areas of action
have been expanded and this allows us to provide a variety of mechanics, although we are not dealing with a game that has multiple options to solve. Two early examples of the title: on the one hand, when we approach some
houses on the riverbank, where we have the possibility to pass between the houses while the guards make their rounds of recognition or, on the
other, we jump into the water and leave moving diving below the catwalks. Be that as it may, the key is to learn the patterns. To get it we have some extra help. Sometimes it is impossible to see who is on the other
side of a house (if you open the door you make noise or, directly, they see you) or a wall. For these moments you can activate the microphone of the
camera, pointing to the place where we hear noises, we can guess their steps. In addition to finding out about some macabre conversations.
