The most terrifying game ever created?
Outlast is a first-person horror game in an abandoned asylum overrun by violence and death. As an investigative journalist, you must uncover its dark secrets while fighting to survive. The unsettling environments and unpredictable threats create a lingering sense of dread.
With smooth controls, a tense atmosphere, and relentless pacing, the game keeps players constantly on edge. Drawing inspiration from Amnesia: The Dark Descent, it builds on familiar mechanics while introducing unique elements that enhance the experience. By refining classic horror elements, Outlast delivers an intense and immersive journey through fear and madness.
Gameplay mechanics and features
Outlast throws you straight into a true survival horror experience—one where fighting back isn’t an option. As the game's protagonist, Miles Upshur, your only hope is to run, hide, or outsmart the terrifying residents of Mount Massive Asylum. Every moment is a test of your instincts, forcing you to stay alert, think fast, and find ways to evade the relentless horrors that stalk the halls. The game never lets up, making sure you’re always on edge, questioning every shadow and distant sound.
At its core, the game is all about stealth. There’s no fighting back—just hiding, sneaking, and running for your life. You’ll have to duck into lockers, crawl under beds, and use the darkness to stay out of sight. The parkour-inspired movement lets you vault over obstacles and squeeze through gaps, adding an intense sense of urgency to every chase. The asylum isn’t just creepy—it’s designed to keep you on edge, forcing you to always think two steps ahead.
The game's enemies are unpredictable and relentless. They don’t follow predictable patterns, meaning danger can strike from anywhere at any time. Whether through a sudden ambush or a slow, suspenseful pursuit, the asylum’s inhabitants are always hunting. Their intelligence and aggressive persistence make every encounter feel dynamic and uniquely terrifying.
Blood, guts, and gore
Outlast is scary—at first. The game does well at getting you into the shoes of the protagonist and making sure you have a hard time (which is kind of the point). The story is a common one, but it's very effective on screen, especially for the many realistic scenes of blood and gore. Outlast is not a game for the fainthearted: it's gross, it's violent, and it gets under your skin.
Now, Outlast makes the one mistake you should never make in any horror game: routine. The first time everything is new, terrifying, unpleasant, and distressing, and it truly is a scary game, the sort that makes your hair stand on end and your pulse race. But after the first impact, Outlast slips into routine. Its "scare" resources run out pretty fast, and so every challenge in the game is a slight variation on the above, which means that they're overcome in almost the same way each time too: "Go there, activate a button or lever, and repeat.".
Outlast is a very linear game. It's rare to find a section of the game where you move freely, open doors, or enter rooms that you shouldn't. This linearity has two clear objectives: the first is to keep you scared. If the game didn't have control over what you do or where you go, it couldn't activate certain unexpected events that make you jump out of your chair.
The second effect of this linearity is that if you look thoroughly at Outlast, you'll see that it is just a giant puzzle. Each section of the game has a specific order, and if you don't do it that way, then you probably won't survive. Finding the "invisible path"—the" bit that involves crawling on all fours, hiding in lockers or under beds, dodging deformed enemies, or running for your life in intense chases—is the key to progressing through the game.
Outlast isn't trying to psychologically terrorize you beyond that first hour. Once you're past this initial trauma, Outlast is just about guts, blood, and mutilation, accompanied by multiple frights, all the while at the top, terrifying volume.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing because, among other things, Outlast knows when to activate these sequences and make you scream for your mommy. But unlike other games like Amnesia (pretty much the reference game for the genre) where you're truly gripped by fear throughout the game environment and the plot, Outlast is just going for easy "BOO! SCARED YOU!" moments.
Realistic movement
One of the highlights of Outlast is the controls and how they affect the game. Although it plays like any other first-person game, our movements on the screen are very realistic: how the body sways, our hands support us on the floor or round corners, how we run and look back, etc. All the controls transmit realism and human movement and put you firmly in the shoes of poor Miles.
A video camera will be your only tool in the game. It serves to let you see in the dark through its infrared mode, but the batteries run out when you use it, and you must find replacements through the level. The use of the camera offers many agonizing moments in Outlast, although it's unlikely that you'll run out of battery because the game balances the difficulty level by giving you batteries when you need them most.
Remarkable graphics and powerful sound
Outlast uses Unreal Engine 3. It's well-used and generally very good. Even better, any midrange computer can push it to its limits but still enjoy excellent performance.
The game combines light and shadow and the infrared camera to excellent effect (the camera filter is very realistic). The blood on the walls, the dead bodies scattered about the place, and the guts—as well as some of the nicer things you'll see on your travels—are also worth mentioning.
Overall, Outlast has some remarkable graphics, which are overshadowed by irritating little problems that are typical of Unreal Engine 3, like physical objects not existing (those curtains that look like walls ... aarrgh!)
When it comes to sound—the real star of all horror games—Outlast is very strong. Dialogs are terrifying, with otherworldly voices and screams, footsteps, and things breaking, all focused on giving you a terrifying experience.
Expanded content with a DLC
The Whistleblower DLC expands Outlast’s story, letting you play as Waylon Park, the man who exposed Mount Massive’s dark secrets. As a software engineer working for Murkoff, Waylon was the one who leaked classified information to journalists, including Miles. Trapped inside the asylum, cut off from his family, and forced to witness horrifying experiments, he grows determined to expose the truth. With fresh enemies, intense encounters, and extended gameplay, the DLC adds even more tension and terror to the gameplay.
Conclusion
Outlast is a great game for scaring the bits out of you and has moments that'll take you a while to forget. The whole production is quite remarkable, and although it's a very linear game, it doesn't take away from the excellent level design. The controls and some of the scenes stand out. Is Outlast the best horror game of all time? In the end, it depends on who's playing it and how sensitive they are. But in any case, if you like the genre, you should give it a try.
