Outlast and Five Nights

Hello and welcome to another installment of Eccentric Spheres.

I've been exploring in the realm of horror again this week, but with games instead of movies. Not that I played these games. No, instead I have enjoyed quality Let's Plays. I started with Markiplier playing Five Nights at Freddy's 1-3, followed by Angry Joe's play-through of Outlast.

Mind you, this is not a review post. I have not played them, so I can't review them with a clean conscience. This is more of an impression post.

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD. AVERT YOUR EYES IF YOU SERIOUSLY INTEND TO PLAY THESE GAMES!

The Five Nights at Freddy's (FNaF) games are small indie games where you take the role of a night watchman in a pizzeria populated by animatronic characters that want to kill you. Each game has it's own strategy you need to figure out in order to survive. These games rely very heavily on jump scares, so if you're allergic to those, stay the hell away. I can't warn you enough about that. Just watching the LP was enough to unnerve me at times and I jumped a lot in my seat. That said, the games are pretty cool, and the fact that you can't move, only look around and use certain objects is a surprisingly effective technique. In most games you have to seek out the danger, but here you're sitting helplessly in place just waiting for the monsters to come to you. Over all FNaF is cartoony and silly but capable of laying down some seriously scary moments. Add to that the mystery of the murdered children and it gets even worse.

To my joy I then found a multi-part series by Angry Joe, in which he and his friend Other Joe played Outlast. I have been so close to buying this game several times, but always held back.

In Outlast you are Miles Upshur, a hard hitting investigative journalist who goes to a mental hospital to look into allegations of abuse and corruption. The kicker is that Miles can't fight. You can only try to outrun the enemies or hide and hope they don't find you.

The atmosphere in this game is top-notch. The graphics and sound are great and overall the guys and girls at Red Barrels have made an awesome game.

But I have several complaints. First off, there is really only one kind of enemy, loonies who want to beat you to death. This is varied a little bit by the hulking giant Walker who hunts you through out the game, the naked cannibal twins who do the same, and the crazy “doctor” who rules over one level. But until the very end that's it. Even in the Women's Ward it's the same dudes over and over again.

Then it's the fact that large parts of the game are pitch black, forcing you to use your camcorders night vision filter. Now this is a cool idea, but when you have to sprint away from crazy murderers in the dark with your camera glued to your face for the tenth time, it get's silly. And considering that the game is incredibly cool looking it's such a shame that you see so little of it. Shades of black and green get repetitive fast. And the repetition is Outlasts biggest problem. Things that terrify you in the beginning just get stale towards the end. Oh look, another scarred loony with a bat, better hide in that locker.

Speaking of the dark, I call shenanigans on the fact that you are blind without your camera, but the loonies can see you just fine most of the time. Also, there are several places that you easily get lost in, something that frustrates me enormously, but the biggest story failure is this:

Towards the end Miles is beaten, bloody and heavily traumatized, but although he manages to escape outside, you have to go back inside again, to find out what's actually going on. You have to go back inside! There's no way anyone would do that. Miles should have run screaming into the night. Considering how easy it would have been to lead him to the end without this tease, I find it almost insulting.

I know it sounds like I didn't enjoy the game, but I did. Despite these problems I think Outlast is a fine game. If you like survival horror, go play it..

So there you have it Ladies and Gentlemen, and until we meet again, have a great week!