Served by high-caliber graphics, alternating between psychosis, totally assumed bloody horror and demanding quests, The Outlast Trials is a unique game. It is so addictive and rich that we forgive its sometimes frustrating, always merciless mechanics.
First warning: This game is not for the faint of heart. The third installment in the hit Outlast franchise from Montreal indie studio Red Barrels, The Outlast Trials, available in early access since May 18, dives unapologetically into the most gory horror. You are quickly drowned in hectoliters of blood, shredded limbs and berserk who stab you, electrocute you and devour you.
Inspired by the inhuman psychiatric experiments carried out in the 1960s, The Outlast Trials makes the player a guinea pig sent to a Murkoff company complex comprising a dozen buildings connected by tunnels. The purpose of this institution is to destroy his personality and rebuild it. The player must pass through three “programs” each with several trials in order to access the final trial and be free.
Everything is weird, twisted, scary in this complex. Human guinea pigs are tortured, perverse and completely insane guards scream, insult and shred everything that comes within their reach. A vicious policeman squirts blood in the name of the law, an obese mom punishes naughty kids by piercing their skulls and sending them to a crusher. Everywhere, screens give you instructions or remind you, as in a sect, of the basic precepts of Murkoff, where the first crime is to be born and where children must be savagely punished for their own good.
And the worst part is that you are practically powerless in front of these monsters. You can momentarily stun them or electrocute them if you’re lucky enough to have the right accessory on hand, but they’ll always end up killing you if they corner you. Bottles of medicine to restore health are rare, we are injected with psychotic compounds that give hallucinations, we are often in the dark because our night vision goggles have a very limited autonomy.
Trash, of course, and often bordering on unbearable. But its excessiveness reminds us that it is a game and that we must not let ourselves be impressed, otherwise we will have nightmares. The tests are difficult, our many deaths and our poor success rate in the tests are there to testify to it.
The quality of the animations and the very polished graphics is astonishing when you know that we are dealing with an independent work. But Red Barrels has clearly put the means there for six years, fueled by the success of the first opuses, so that The Outlast Trials has nothing to envy to major productions of major studios which would have had 10 times more craftsmen.
It is also within a quartet that we experienced our first successes after having failed miserably in our first missions. The creation of groups is very efficient and fast, does not require any online subscription and is carried out in a central building where all the guinea pigs wake up, at the start of the game or after their death. You have the choice from the start of the size of the group, from two to four players with whom you can communicate verbally. While waiting for the transfer to an event, the players have fun in the central hall or can challenge each other to a game of arm wrestling.
The only hiccup for us in the online game was that it only took us an hour to find two racist players, one who shouted “White Power!” when his white avatar beat a black man at arm wrestling, another who wanted to kick us out of the quartet because our pseudonym seemed “oriental” to him. We have disabled “chat”. Unfortunately, this type of bad encounter is all too common in online gambling.
Our other frustration concerns the great difficulty in picking up the various objects of interest. Sometimes it takes a couple of tries to get to exactly the right distance, at the right angle, for the “Pick Up” message to appear.
More generally, at the beginning we found some missions far too difficult and lacked guidance on the stages to be completed, the location of the objectives and how to escape the bad guys. This observation is to be taken with a grain of salt since we found, after joining groups of players, that the most experienced were not at all confused. Patience, therefore, beginner players.
The game is worth the effort, because Red Barrels has obviously hit a home run with its third installment, a disturbing work of remarkable originality, even in the crowded world of survival horror video games.
