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A disappointing co-op experiment for this spooky series - The Outlast Trials Quick First Impressions

3K View2023-05-23

The Outlast Trials

7.6

ScienceDarkPsychological HorrorSurvivalActionFirst-PersonRealisticAlternate History

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

I strongly recommend skipping The Outlast Trials for now, unless you have a group of three other friends who all love the previous Outlast games and who are all available to play together at the same time. The Outlast Trials is a bold experiment for developer Red Barrels, taking the basic elements of its stealth horror franchise and adding co-op and live service elements for the first time. Unfortunately, that experiment is a failure, at least in its current state.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve spent six hours testing myself in The Outlast Trials so far, including getting through the game’s thrilling introduction, playing through the first trial twice—once solo and once with a full squad of four—and several failed attempts at rallying a group for the second trial. At this point, I can’t see myself sinking much more time into the game unless it gets some big changes.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• A strong beginning. The Outlast Trials opens with the unnamed player character being scooped up off the streets and introduced to a brutal laboratory where others like them are being subjected to insane, cruel experiments. This sequence takes between thirty minutes and an hour to complete, and it’s the only part of the game that is clearly designed completely for solo play. As such, it almost immediately captured that classic Outlast feel for me. In particular, the creepy mansion setting that I was thrown into for my introductory trial felt very reminiscent of the abandoned asylum setting of the first Outlast.

• Mother Gooseberry. If there’s one thing Outlast games are known for, it’s disturbing antagonists, and Mother Gooseberry definitely struck me as a great addition to the series when she was introduced in that tutorial. She’s a criminally insane woman who loves putting on children’s shows using the twisted duck puppet that she has on one of her arms. Just one problem: Said puppet has a giant drill spinning around in its mouth. That’s going to leave a mark.

• Lore. While storytelling isn’t a serious focus for The Outlast Trials beyond its dark tutorial segment, it does have plenty of lore to uncover by picking up documents within different levels and reading them back in the hub area. The game’s unsettling tale of inhumane science experiments is clearly inspired by the real history of the CIA’s MKUltra project, a chilling series of two-decade series of human rights abuses that has inspired conspiracy theorists since the ’70s, but which was, in fact, very much real. That’s a great well for The Outlast Trials to draw from, and whatever other problems I have with the game, I’d certainly like to see how it develops and delivers on these themes.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVING

• Single-player balance. Though co-op is the big selling point as a first-time addition to the series, Red Barrels has been adamant that The Outlast Trials is completely playable solo. That’s technically true, but only if you really love wasting time and hate yourself. I took on the game’s first trial all by my lonesome. This one had me sneaking into a police station where I was supposed to take a snitch to his execution while avoiding a deranged police officer wielding an electrified baton, among other bad guys.

Within minutes, it became obvious just how much these levels are designed with co-op play in mind. Playing as a crew, as many as three players can distract enemies, leading them on a chase, while the fourth player focuses on whatever the current objective is—filling generators with gas, pushing the electric chair the snitch is strapped to along a track, finding keys with symbols on them, and so on. Without that backup, the level devolved into an aggravating trial-and-error process, where I had to wait excruciatingly long stretches while hiding before enemies would finally clear a path. And the final challenge was the worst part, requiring me to hold a switch down while a meter filled up slowly, even as the aforementioned police officer patrolled that area.

There's one last extremely cruel design decision too. If you run out of the limited lives available in solo play, you just...lose. You go back to the hub without anything gained, losing all progress that you made through the challenge. You might get a tiny amount of experience points toward leveling up—I honestly can’t remember—but as someone who lost my final life literally steps from completing the first trial after two hours of careful stealth play, I cannot even begin to express how dejected and frustrated I felt by this terrible design.

• Lack of horror. The first two Outlast games are not fun, but that’s why horror weirdos like me loved them. Playing those games is like playing through a ten-hour-long anxiety attack. It’s brilliant. But when I played The Outlast Trials in the way it’s clearly intended to be played—cooperatively in a group of four—it was completely drained of the tension and terror that I’ve come to expect from this series. Want to know the fastest way to make a creepy killer like Mother Gooseberry less scary? Having three other dorks who are bouncing around the level like the Three Stooges. My co-op experiences in this game were less about being scared and more about mastering the mechanical limitations of the game.

• Matchmaking limitations. Teaming up with strangers in The Outlast Trials is an option, but not one that worked very well for me. The game’s progression is broken down into several trials in different settings, and then further from there into specific challenges and difficulties for those trials. Though I was able to select a specific trial and challenge before entering the group finder, the game just threw me into the first group of four it could find, with the party leader seemingly picked at random and no actual trial selected.

This meant almost every group I got put in just wanted to play the first trial and first challenge, because it was usually at least half level one players who had just started. I know I’m not the only one who was frustrated by this too; I witnessed several occasions where I joined a group with someone much higher level who left the moment they realized they were in a group with lowbies. The game desperately needs more options for targeting teammates.

💬 Have you been thoroughly scared away from The Outlast Trials, or are you going to brave this nightmare, whether alone or with friends? Let me know in the comments!