Outlast Trials earns its pre-game trigger warning within the first five minutes when a pair of boxy night vision goggles is pried off a dismembered corpse and screwed into your skull with an auger dri
Outlast Trials earns its pre-game trigger warning within the first five minutes when a pair of boxy night vision goggles is pried off a dismembered corpse and screwed into your skull with an auger drill. You’ve been swept off the street to take part in the Murkoff Coporation’s “Trials”, an experimental group therapy program that targets those on the edge of society with something to hide that sees you and three other patients attempt to survive expansive Saw movie-esque puzzles. Outlast Trials’ singleplayer introduction truly horrifies, but that terror quickly bleeds away in co-op, where I found the tension too often interrupted by janky key collecting puzzles or frustrating, one-dimensional encounters with brutish psychopaths.
It starts strong, though. The Cold War setting and allusions to the disturbingly real MKULTRA and Operation Paperclip programs anchors it to our horrifying reality, with the test chambers you navigate often resembling underground counterparts to those fake cities built to test the effects of nukes, a “Nuketown” if you will. The opening level is a a faux plantation manor adorned with animatronic exhibits of the burdens you must be dispossessed of in the “Trials”: your youth, your piety, your dreams, all for a chance at rebirth. It’s never totally clear if you’re someone truly harboring a secretive past, burdened by an undeserved guilt, or are just some everyman getting gaslit to serve as a control subject.
That tonal ambiguity is one of the keys to The Outlast Trials’ terror. The first step of this process, as your smoke-spewing therapist loves to remind you, is being broken down, and you enter this world with a believably shattered sense of self. I found this setup uncomfortably easy to get immersed in—the researchers imposing this “therapy” on you speak in a general enough language that I felt it pass through the character I was playing as and peering right into some of the most repressed parts of myself, a level of fear and emotional involvement I was completely unprepared for.
