Outlast elevates immersive suspense to the logical next level that already should have been explored and utilized in earlier interactive horror efforts. The elegant narrative solutions found in this gem of a game oftentimes are overlooked by major media outlets, likely because said superb implementations are presented with such fluency and efficiency that they indeed become optimally transparent and almost - paradoxically - invisible. We will elaborate on these elegant solutions in detail.
The game invites you to take on the body of an investigative reporter who is armed only with a digital camcorder and with rampant curiosity, while the area of interest is the Mount Massive Asylum, an institute that has been closed in the '70s, and now it is operated by a private corporation that boasts the type of reputation Satan could construct a reliable business model on. A little while ago I had to criticize the fresh Amnesia effort - Amnesia - a Machine for Pigs - for leaving a little too much to the silly enormous thing called imagination, in the sense that the game oftentimes gets crushed by its mere - otherwise doubtless sublime - ambitions, proving to be evidently unsuccessful at delivering and revealing - even modeling - the horrors that it seeks to convey in its textual/written context. What you actually experience in the gameworld of Amnesia - a Machine for Pigs, is but a sorrowfully shallow and dated representation of the eloquent/intact madness found in the text and in the voice acting.
Outlast is a vastly more serious and disturbing effort than that, one which manages to accomplish all things A Machine for Pigs aspires to : the notes you find in the gameworld of this title -Outlast - are the only stimuli that give a moment of bitter respite from a relentless modal setting/environment that is openly out there to rip your sanity to shreds just to wipe its loathsome ass out with it. Read on to know more, and welcome, perv!
