Outlast 2

If you are looking for a horror game, don't buy this one. It is many things, but scary is not one of them; not to someone who has played Silent Hill (a game series that Outlast 2 heavily references, but fails to match in any but the most superficial way), or Cry Of Fear (an obscure, but masterful indie game), or even Scratches. I have played for 12 hours, and I wasn’t scared once. I was, however, very frequently frustrated and angry. You see, the gameplay mostly consists of running away from enemies, and, since you will often have no idea where you are supposed to be running, and the controls leave a lot to be desired, you will die. A lot. It is not scary at all, but boring and annoying in the extreme. By the midpoint of the game, every time another chase sequence started, I sighed and was like, “Here we go…again.” The graphics are decent when you are inside a building, but, when you are outdoors, the draw distance sucks, which is a shame, because the game could offer really impressive views if they weren’t hidden by fog. What really kept me going was the story; unfortunately, the closer I got to the end, the less sense it made, and the ending is the “figure it out for yourself” sort that I don’t much care for. A very interesting twist was teased, but not properly developed, though I may have missed some clues. The school segments that take up about 30% of the game are mostly filler, considering that you can piece together the story almost right away, and then you are stuck running around the same school building with identical-looking offices and classrooms over and over again. If you cut away the repetition (both story- and gameplay-wise), Outlast 2 would probably be half as long, if that. I think it would have worked much better as an adventure game with an emphasis on exploration and puzzles instead of headlong chases where you can barely see anything.