Outlast 2

Genre: First-Person Stealth / Horror Game

Players: 1

.

Review:

Outlast 2 is a Horror game that retains the stealth-based gameplay of the first game, but features a seemingly unrelated story and characters. In this game, you play as a cameraman and husband to a reporter heading out to a remote American wilderness in search for clues to a murder, and quickly find yourself in a town full of murderous cult members.

Like the first game, Outlast 2 denies players any ability to fight off enemies, instead insisting that they hide or, often, flee. The gameplay here is more of an evolution of the first game, with some extra features like a camera tool that lets you pick up sounds when pointing the mic in the right direction.

The gameplay not having changed much also means that this game has many of the first game’s flaws, including many of the issues I had with the first game’s controls. It’s nothing game-breaking, but it certainly can be frustrating to try to open or shut a door slowly and feel like doing so is clumsy and ineffective.

As for the game’s presentation, this game is in some ways better and in some ways worse. For one thing, I simply didn’t find the sound design in this game as good as what was in the first game. On the other hand, the graphics here are phenomenal. This is a much more recent game than the original Outlast, and the port to Switch is superb, with the framerate cut to 30FPS but otherwise much of the quality of other versions intact, with resolution set to 720p in handheld mode and apparently 1008p docked (that’s not a typo – this game is just short of 1080p, apparently), with just a few of the game’s details scaled back. Despite the horrific imagery here, this is one of the best-looking games on the Switch.

Much like the first game, I’m not terribly impressed with the character models for enemies, but this time around the environments are absolutely superb – you can feel the rot in the walls of the cultist’s houses, and the creepy nighttime atmosphere is convincingly realistic, and does a great job adding to the nerve-wracking intensity of the game.

Unfortunately, the story this time around isn’t quite as good, with things starting out with contrivance and dipping into absurdity within the first five minutes, as your helicopter crashes for seemingly no reason and then by the time you wake, the pilot has already been killed and strung up by the villagers who you landed within walking distance of. This isn’t a spoiler, this is the game’s opening. By the time the first dream sequence makes an homage to The Shining, I was audibly groaning. Suffice it to say, despite being a somewhat more down-to-Earth situation than the first game’s insane asylum, the game’s refusal to practice restraint and use slower pacing to build up suspense cheapens the otherwise tired story of the village’s murderous cultists.

Still, even with Outlast 2’s flaws, it’s still effective as a Horror game, and it’s a master class in how to do a great port of a modern game to Switch. If you’re a fan of the genre, it’s well worth picking up.

tl;dr – Outlast 2 is a Horror game where players that has players hiding from murderous cultists in a remote part of the US. Its sound design isn’t quite as good as the first game, and the story leaves something to be desired, but the game’s graphics are fantastic. This is one of the best ports of a modern game to the Switch, and fans of Horror games will find it well worth a look.

Grade: B

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}