How does Outlast Trials fare in the Live Service Genre?
A horror take on the Live Service Genre.
When you think about it, Outlast Trials is a really, really strange concept. Outlast is a series with a reputation for fostering an atmosphere of hopelessness and fear through isolating the player in derelict environments. The series has earned a place in the industry as a solid horror franchise.
But then you have Outlast Trials, a 4 player cooperative horror game, which sounds like an oxymoron. How can the experience be scary if you’re cooperating with up to 3 players? The feelings of loneliness and helplessness is basically non-existent.
Well, Outlast Trials doesn’t actually try to be scary. It’s a stressful experience for sure, but it doesn’t attempt to be scary, and that’s completely fine.
Trust the therapy
Outlast Trials take place in the Murkoff facility, a place where homeless volunteers apply to become “reagents”. What they find however is a completely morally repugnant program, which has them commit acts of cruelty, and undergo horrific experiments.
You play as your own reagent. You can customize your avatar with a variety of clothing, night vision goggles, hair, and facial features. After an introductory sequence, you find yourself in the “sleep room” where you can customize your own room, obtain upgrades, and interact with other reagents.
The sleep room is an area that is just so interesting to be in. You can look through windows and see scientists and guards going about their business. Scientists are writing down notes, constantly analyzing you and the other reagents, making you feel like a guinea pig. You can also find an entrance way to a corridor with lush greenery, and the sounds of birds chirping. This corridor is unlocked until you’ve done the necessary trials however, inviting mystery and intrigue to what lies ahead, and gives you a goal to keep playing.
You can walk around and talk to other characters to learn of the politics within the facility. The sleep room is an excellent form of environmental storytelling, and it just serves as the intermediary stage between trials.
As far as context goes for Outlast as a multiplayer experience, it’s great! Multiplayer games can often struggle with how to best contextualize the player character’s role in the game’s universe, and Outlast does it in perhaps the best way possible. The game’s characters — particularly the sadistic scientist Dr Easterman — constantly remind you of how utterly expendable you are. They will constantly manipulate you psychologically, and make you feel like you’re forever spinning your wheels at the bottom of the facility’s social hierarchy.
The Trials
After you’ve found some partners or choose to fly solo, you can begin your first trial. At launch, there are 5 environments which are used for a variety of trials. These include killing a snitch at a police station, killing 3 children (in the form of mannequins) at a fun park, indoctrinating children at a religious orphanage, destroying evidence and killing witnesses at a courthouse, and physically disfiguring a man clothed as a sex toy in a toy factory.
In these levels, the formula is the same. You go through the level accomplishing objectives such as turning on generators, pushing carts, finding keys, etc. These seem pretty bland and uninspired on paper, but in the midst of all this, you’re avoiding enemies and traps across the environment. You also need to find supplies such as lock picks, health pickups, and antidotes to cure your sanity. So in between the main objectives, you’re doing a lot of secondary objects; avoiding enemies and gathering supplies. It ensures that the level is always engaging you, as they tend to reach up to 30 minutes long or more.
These levels are varied. They all have their own character and instances of environmental storytelling. Each location is actually more of a recreation, rather than the genuine article. This means you’ll see mannequins all over the place, rooms in a shoddy state, and the corpses of other reagents littering the level. Each level is memorable, and feels so much more than a series of interconnected rooms.
The trials themselves are excellent. The ones which act as main story sequences are exciting, test your social cooperation, and your ability to look for details in the environment, which could be the difference between life and death. My favorite trial is actually the first one in the police station where you kill a snitch preparing to testify against the Murkoff corporation. It starts off linear, with players needing to band together to get through the station effectively, but it then introduces little pockets of non-linear objectives. One player can push the snitch in a chair on a track, while the other three search for keys and supplies to open the next few doors in good health.
In saying that, there are secondary trials that range from really good, to downright annoying. One trial for example has you go through the court house level while the layout of the level changes by closing gates. While you do this, you are meant to find buckets of acid which hurt you if you run or jump, meaning you’ll have to traverse the level slowly. In the midst of all that, enemies are running about ready to ruin your day.
There are more good secondary trials than bad ones, but when they’re bad, they’re really bad. While the enemy encounters keep you on your toes, it can end up being more annoying than exciting. Sometimes you enter a room and an enemy sees you, you run around the block to lose them, go back to the objective room, they see you again, rinse and repeat. There is only one trial where this becomes a major problem as the objective requires slow analysis of the environment, but it is also out in the open so you have little hope of doing it without being seen. Maybe if there were objects in the environment you could sabotage to draw the attention of enemies away from the objectives, it would be more manageable.
A Michelangelo stuck in a block of Marble
After each trial you are given money and EXP based on your grade. Money can be used purely for cosmetic purposes, while EXP allows you to level up and unlock passive upgrades in the form of amps, rigs and prescriptions.
Prescriptions are straight upgrades that have no downside whatsoever. They help foster a sense of player progression that feels really rewarding, like an extra inventory slot. Amps are similar, but you can only equip 3 at a time, with each being from a certain tree. Some of them are okay, like refilling health when you’re hiding, but some others are essential, such as being able to move over broken glass without making sound.
Lastly, you have the rigs in the game. Rigs are special abilities that players can equip to make situations easier to deal with. This includes a throwable stun which stuns enemies for a short time, a mine that takes awhile to prime but creates camouflage, boosting adrenaline, and stuns the enemy for longer. You also have x-ray, which allows you to detect enemies behind walls, and a health rig which allows you to heal player health and sanity.
While interesting, some of these upgrades are flat out better than others. The x-ray upgrade is pretty useless, while it spots enemies and items for you in the environment, it becomes less useful as you gain experience in the game. The healing rig is decent, but in a game that incentivizes not taking damage by promising a better score, you can find yourself not needing to use it all if you’re smart.
The other two rigs are good as they essentially save you from any situation involving enemies. The mine in particular allows for area denial, and the ability to do objectives with little pressure. I think the x-ray and healing rigs need something more to set themselves apart. One suggestion for the healing rig is to allow reviving of dead players, and the x-ray could have passive bonuses, like seeing enemy footprints.
One thing that is certain with Outlast is that the polish. In my 70+ hours of playing, I have only encountered 1 game bug. Everything works, the animations are great, the sound is great, everything feels finished. Really the only consistent quirk I notice is that if you get hit while jumping, the staggering animation plays after you’ve landed in a very strange way.
The graphics are great, the facility is clean with a smidge of decay upon closer inspection. The levels are all derelict with their own art direction to separate them from each other. Every level, especially the fun park, seems to take pride in their utter depravity. Whether it’d be the abundance of gore laying around, the broken glass, etc.
The enemy design — particularly the main antagonists — is excellent. You can really look at these characters and see the history and their utter depravity. This leads me to comment on the voice acting of the game, which is some of the best I have ever heard. Mother Gooseberry particularly is phenomenal. You can tell the actress really understood the script, and adjusted accordingly. It is especially apparent when you’re just barely hiding in the dark, and hear them bickering, pissed off when they can’t find you.
Be Reborn
Once you’ve played enough trials, you can then become “reborn”, and be released back into the world. This is essentially the prestige system of Outlast Trials. You do a difficult solo trial, which involves you finding keys, manipulating frequencies, and then exiting the facility. Afterwards, you create a new reagent, and you have access to more difficult trials. While it is a unique interpretation, it gets old fast. While it would require more development time for a relatively simple mechanic, I think having a pool of potential levels that gets chosen when being reborn would be more interesting.
After finishing the reborn mission, you also get a unique ending that gives more information on the world of Outlast. The less said the better, but they work as a way to draw the player’s interest in going through the process again to learn more about the world. They can range from purposely confusing, to downright intense.
I almost forgot to mention the matchmaking system. As far as matchmaking systems go, it is “okay”. The problem is that you can’t set up your own lobbies. You can only search for three types of matches: any trial, same program, and same trial. Same trial has never worked for me, which is unsurprising considering how many trials are in the game. Same program only seems to work for the initial program, and the rotating weekly program. If you wanna get into a game quickly, any trial is the only worthwhile option. This is frustrating as the only way to reliably do the trials you specifically want to do, is to get your friends on, which is unreliable.
Finally, we got the end game content. While polished, the end game content is pretty lacking. The new missions are challenging and interesting, but there are still too few of them to make the end game content worthwhile. In fact, while I complement the interesting trials, they tend to rely too heavily on having excessive enemy placement. Instead, it would be better if they did a new twist on the levels, like having a modified level layout, extra objectives, or unique hazards.
The rewards for the end game content is pretty “eh”. You get unique posters, some outfits, but nothing else aside from that. There’s not much to really keep you engaged after you hit the level cap, aside from collecting the lore files scattered around each level. You can also continue to obtain new clothes for your avatar, but its still too uninspired, and doesn’t really feel rewarding. Hopefully as the game matures, it will provide more content in the end game space.
Something Special
Outlast Trials on first glance seems like a cookie cutter attempt to cash in on the live service model. On closer inspection however, the game was created with love and passion that actually makes an attempt to fit the identity of Outlast into a multiplayer environment.
The worldbuilding, the presentation, the mission structure, and other features all come together to form an experience that is greater than the sum of its parts. The multiplayer doesn’t feel like an extension of the Outlast universe, but a vital part of it.
Some trials are frustrating, the matchmaking could be better, and some of the gameplay elements have not been fully realized, but Outlast Trials is so incredibly polished that you can look past these shortcomings and lose yourself in the game world.
It will be interesting to see how Outlast Trials continues along the live service journey, but seeing how the game matures is exciting. I hope that other multiplayer games will take note of particularly how the game incorporates the multiplayer environment, and make it make sense in the context of the universe.
Outlast Trials doesn’t focus on the horror. It does have a horrific atmosphere that will gag players just by looking at it, but its focus on cooperation and storytelling makes it an incredibly compelling experience.
Thanks for reading my article! I hope you had as much fun reading it as I did writing it. Be sure to comment your thoughts below, follow me on Twitter, connect with me on LinkedIn, and wait for my next piece.
See ya!
Outlast Trials is great, and after enough therapy, it will become something truly special.
