Outlast 2. It sucks. Like the original.

Dunno if it's just me, but horror games have devolved to waiting for loud noises and shock value with games like Outlast 2 being a prime example. I recently watched some Outlast 2 gameplay and read up on it's story on the Outlast wiki, and wow. Repetitive chase scenes, ridiculous amounts of jump scares, scripted sequences every 2 minutes, buckets of gore, dead children, syphilis, implied child molestation and rape...it's not even scary, it's kind of lazy. I'm not a prude or whatever but the fact they originally planned to include an actual child rape scene is kind of alarming (you can find the leftover audio files on the internet). To be fair, I never enjoyed the first one all that much either and I never understood all the hype it got with it's cut and paste gameplay. It seems like more and more horror games are like this, and I really hope the trend doesn't continue any further.

...but hey the graphics are great!

What do you guys think about it?

a month later

Never played it, but I watched a no commentary run of the game when I was bored once. The big issue I had with the game was actually the lack of combat. I know that that is supposed to be a selling point for Outlast, but Outlast 2 doesnt really create an environment where this makes sense. Ignoring the fact that you never so much as even shove any enemy you run into, the entire area is littered with blades and makeshift weapons that seem like they would be perfectly acceptable to use in any other game. It gets to a point where you are powerless to so much as kick away crawling enemies that have the strength (and appearance) of rotting corpses. Ive only watched a little bit of the first Outlast, but the enemies there seemed to be imposing and sufficiently horrific to warrant not being able to fight back during gameplay. In the second, you are just fighting overzealous pot-bellied farmers with pitchforks and sickles.

It might be overreacting a little bit (I really dont watch any scary movies or play any horror games), but the whole 'stupid zealous midwestern hick' seemed really stereotypical and overdone in a lot of horror material. All the Catholic imagery seems to have been just thrown in for shock value as well. I get that they were just looking for an interesting location for a horror game where they could go wild with the gore or whatever, but did you have to allude to southern evangelical Christians with your villians? I just can see a lot of rural people being offended by this kind of portrayal.

Overall it didnt seem too bad though, just heavily reliant on cliches. The graphics looked nice and the chase sequences had a lot of cool looking parkour, but Ive never played it so Idk if its actually that fun.