Instead, you must rely on stealth by creeping in darkness, hiding in closets or barrels and under beds, and occasionally using thrown bottles and bricks to distract or temporarily stun enemies when you’re stuck in a tight spot. While it’s not particularly exhilarating to, for example, fill a generator with gas and turn it on, the fact that you have to do so while being hunted by murderers and under great duress goes a long way to making things extremely chaotic and panic-inducing.ĭid I mention that you don’t have any weapons? Certainly nothing that will turn the hunters into the hunted, at least. Of course, the absurdly macabre goals you’re presented with merely serve as complicated and unavoidably noisy chores that you’re expected to perform as numerous psychopaths hunt you, drawn to the sound of your actions. There’s another where you have to punish a group of wicked animatronic children by shoving them into a meat grinder, working around various obstacles as you slowly push the cart of misbehaving dolls toward their demise. At least when South Park does it it’s usually funny.Įach of the three maps in the early access version has its own bizarre and twisted objectives that must be completed before your untimely death, like one where you’re forced to turn an impure orphanage into a malevolent religious establishment by replacing all the secular materials with unholy profanity.

I get that shock and gratuitous violence is sorta the whole point, but it often feels like they’re trying so hard to be gross and extreme or make some kind of unsubtle statement that I just shook my head at the tactless, edgelordian overkill. One level features a maniacal police officer who enjoys tasering his own genitals and rattles off nonsense like “I don’t recognize this country anymore,” while in another you’re repeatedly shown a bunch of penises for seemingly no reason at all, and then forced to recreate a crucifixion for an audience of school children.

That said, even when treated with the unseriousness and gore-filled levity that I think The Outlast Trials is going for, the over-the-top violence, deeply unsexy lechery, and extremely on-the-nose subject matter can be a bit much sometimes.

Outlast trials trailer