5/5 ★ – Rig2Big's review of Outlast.

‼️𝟏𝟎𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄‼️ Let me just start off by saying, whoever at Red Barrels came up with the “ENERGISER” achievement (finish the game on Insane difficulty without reloading camera batteries) is an actual fucking sadist. I actually had a good time beating REGULAR Insane Mode back in 2018, when I was in the 8th grade. Making my own strategies: when to manipulate enemies, where to scrounge for batteries, how to properly unload shit into your pants… knowing if you don’t clutch up, your save file is gone-zo. This… this was cancer. Now that that’s outta the way, Outlast (& Whistleblower) is one of my absolute favorite video games ever made. I remember buying it digitally on Black Friday of 2014—my older sister and I played through the entire thing together. It wasn’t until several years later that I’d fall in love with Outlast. Don’t quite remember what pulled me back in, but I’ll never forget becoming enthralled by the idea of running through the game as fast as I could… and let me be clear, I didn’t have any clue what speedrunning was back then, and I’m really only a selective observer today. I cannot stress enough: this game’s movement mechanics are like almost comically intuitive for such a psych “survival” horror title. Everybody thinks Miles Upshur is breathing heavily all the time because he’s scared… fuck no. He’s breathing heavily because he’s been sprinting through hallways and doing parkour for the last hour(s). Fear turns twiggy journalists into superhuman athletes. When I was 10 years old, the plot choices of Outlast didn’t have much significance to me beyond “it’s a horror video game.” I even had the stomach to call the ending “disappointing.” After reeling me in again as a young-teenager, when I had a slightly more literate eye for media (however unsophisticated), the LORE is what captivated me so much. But I’ll do myself a favor by not getting started on the many intricacies of the Outlast universe… do YOURSELF a favor by watching any of the myriad of Outlast commentary videos. Instead, I’ll leave on today’s note: among all five ENERGISER runs I attempted, it might as well have been impossible to ignore the variants… speculating why they were committed, what their psychological profile looks like, actually listening to the few & far between ramblings of some semi-coherence. You start to get a more comprehensive understanding of what lays beneath the skin of Mount Massive Asylum, and I don’t just mean the conspiratorial underbelly of its human experiments. “There are more victims here than monsters.” This game is a masterfully orchestrated tragedy above anything else… and it’s most authentic story pieces live in the background, if not within abject hypotheses. Unforgiving in every sense of the word.