Tag: outlast

2485: The Value of Short Experiences

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You know me, dear reader, I love getting my teeth into a meaty RPG as much as the next man — assuming the next man is as much of a loser as I am — but sometimes it’s nice to cleanse the palate with something shorter. Perhaps even something that you can finish in a single sitting.

I thought this with Outlast and its DLC, which I played recently, and I’ve also thought it with the visual novel Negligee, which I’m going to do a writeup for on MoeGamer later this week. I also think it whenever I play games that are friendly to bite-size sessions, like arcade-style games where the emphasis is on getting better at a short, sharp experience rather than slogging your way through hundreds of levels.

There seems to be something of an assumption among many people online these days that a game somehow lacks value if its developers don’t “support” it post-release with regular updates. Now, in some cases, this makes sense — massively multiplayer games like Final Fantasy XIV would grow stale quickly if they didn’t get an injection of new stuff to do now and then, for example — but in others, particularly games that are heavily story-based, there’s a great deal of value in simply drawing a line under it, saying “that’s it” and calling it finished.

This clamouring for constant updates is particularly pronounced in the mobile game sector, where a lot of games seem to have designs on being “massively multiplayer” experiences anyway, even when they involve little to no actual player interaction. Google Play and App Store reviewers (and, to a marginally lesser extent, Steam reviewers) will get seriously whiny if even the dumbest of timewasters doesn’t have regular updates with new levels or seasonal events or whatever — and even worse if the experience costs “too much” for what they perceive the mythical money-to-hours ratio is supposed to be — and it always bothers me a bit. Are they seriously saying that they don’t want that game to ever end, that they’ll be happy doing nothing but flicking birds at pigs or matching candy sweets forever? I can’t imagine feeling that way. I need new and interesting things to do on a fairly regular basis; while my longstanding love affair with Final Fantasy XIV would seem to run counter to this statement, that game does at least reinvent itself with new stuff every so often, and I play other things alongside it anyway.

Back to the original point, though: there is a great deal of value in shorter experiences that forego bloat and filler in favour of a concise but still enjoyable experience. Not everything needs to be a 50+ hour epic, at least partly because no-one has time to play all the 50+ hour epics that are already out there, let alone a new one.

Outlast would have got exhausting and tiresome if it was any longer than it was — the main game was already skating on that boundary by the time I finished it; I much preferred the snappier DLC — and Negligee tells the story it wants to tell in less than an hour, albeit with eleven different endings to encourage replays. A game that provides an enjoyable experience without taking over your whole life is something to be celebrated, particularly when you’re waiting for the next exciting thing to come over the horizon as I am right now with the imminent Final Fantasy XV. And I for one am glad that there are plenty of developers out there who don’t feel the need to add unnecessary bloat to their games for the sake of an artificially inflated playtime, or a set of Achievements, or simply because the ever-whiny general public insists that £15 is “too much” for a game that is over in two hours.

Short game developers, I salute you, and you’ll always have my business in that awkward period just before a big release! 🙂

2477: Outlast

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It’s Halloween, the perfect time to play a scary game! As such, I played through Outlast today, a game which I’ve been meaning to try for ages, and which my wife was kind enough to gift me a copy of. (It was 75% off for Halloween, too, so she didn’t really need any convincing.)

Outlast is a first-person horror adventure game in which you have no combat capabilities. The only thing you’re armed with is a camcorder, which can be used to film events (which triggers the protagonist taking notes on them) and, more importantly, see in the dark. Your camcorder has infinite battery unless you’re using the night-vision, in which case it drains at an alarming rate, meaning you need to ration its use as much as possible. There are, however, batteries scattered around the game world to replenish your charge.

In Outlast, you play the role of a journalist who received a tip-off as to mysterious, strange and downright horrible goings on at a mental asylum, once closed down but subsequently reopened by a private corporation. As these things tend to go, said private corporation puts up a charitable facade when really they’re into some horrible shit, and it’s your job to investigate exactly what they’ve been up to. I shan’t spoil any more of the story specifics here, as the game is well worth playing.

In terms of gameplay, Outlast is largely exploration-based. You don’t have a map of any description, so you have to rely on your own sense of direction and the subtle environmental clues the game places around — doors left open a crack, realistic signs on walls, that sort of thing. Most of the game consists of you trying to figure out how to get through your current environment, though occasionally you are beset by sometimes naked psychopaths (seriously, there were many more cocks in this game than I was expecting) who want nothing more than to see what you look like inside-out. When the game shifts tempo in this way, it turns into something of a stealth game where you have to outwit your foes. You can’t kill or even incapacitate your foes in any way, so the closest Outlast comes to “combat” is running away until you manage to get out of sight of your pursuers long enough for them to give up the chase.

A lot of Outlast is spent crawling around in the dark, as you might expect, but the game does mix things up a bit with its environments. One particularly memorable sequence towards the end of the game sees you fumbling around outside in the dark and rain, meaning even your camera’s night vision isn’t a lot of help — you have to firstly figure out where you’re supposed to go, and then how to get there.

As a horror game, Outlast is pretty effective, with a menacing atmosphere throughout and jump scares used sparingly for maximum impact when they do happen. I didn’t find it as outright disturbing as something like Silent Hill because it doesn’t have as much of the psychological metaphor stuff going on as Konami’s classics, but it’s pretty creepy, and the feeling of panic when you’re running away from enemies reminded me of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which likewise eschewed combat in favour of making you run away dramatically.

The plot is a bit weird and it kind of felt a bit like they weren’t sure whether to do a supernatural-themed story or a Resident Evil-style “big evil corporation” story, so ultimately it ended up as a bit of a mishmash of both. It worked, however, and had a suitably satisfying conclusions — and, although I’m yet to play it, most people seem to think that the DLC Whistleblower, which unfolds from the perspective of the character who sends an email to the main game’s protagonist, is a superior experience with a better sense of closure. I’ll have to check that out soon.

Overall, then, I enjoyed Outlast. At only about 5 hours from start to finish, it’s a game you can easily beat in a single sitting, and doing so feels like the way the game was intended to be experienced. It’s a relatively unusual take on the horror genre by lacking in combat –though this style has grown in popularity in the last few years thanks to titles like Amnesia, Until Dawn and the aforementioned Silent Hill: Shattered Memories — but the lack of an attack button doesn’t mean it lacks any sort of gameplay depth. Rather, it does what it does extremely well, and was a fine way to spend Halloween, so far as I’m concerned.