The Outlast Trials Review: Shocking Horrors to Enjoy with Friends

If you’ve played the past Outlast games, you know the drill – it’s just you against hordes of terrifying psychos in dark, creepy places. But The Outlast Trials throws a new twist into the mix, letting you bring along some friends to face the fear.

In this prequel to the iconic horror series, you and up to three other victims, uh, “volunteers” are trapped in a remote facility run by the infamous Murkoff Corporation. As part of their twisted experiments, you’ve got to run a gauntlet of deadly trials, escaping from various elaborately creepy levels filled with traps, mutants, and plenty of shocks. The basics stay the same – it’s all about stealth and survival using your trusty night vision camera. But now you can squad up to distract enemies, solve puzzles, and maybe stop your buddies from soiling themselves.

It’s an ingenious move from the indie devs at Red Barrels. They’ve taken the skin-crawling tension that made Outlast so distinct and converted it into a riotously fun, team-based party game. One minute you’re yelping as you all get chased by a freakish clown with a drill for a hand, the next you’re laughing yourselves silly as you microwave the severed head of an unlucky inmate. The chaos only ramps up as you level up with wacky abilities and take on remixed, harder versions of the trials. Sure, it may lose some scares with extra company. But gaining good friends to cry with can be just as satisfying.

So if you’re down for some hilariously screams with your crew, it’s time to commit yourself to The Outlast Trials. Just be warned, this escape room from hell tends to get under your skin!

Running Scared

The Outlast Trials sticks to the series’ signature stealth survival gameplay, where you’re helpless against the psychos chasing you down. With only a camcorder with night vision to guide you, you’ll be crouching and hiding for your life in the darkness.

Those familiar battery icons will once again be your lifeline. Manage them wisely and don’t waste power when you don’t need to see. Because getting lost in a blacked-out level is a surefire way to soil your inmate jumpsuit when the freaks descend on you. At least there’s no shortage of lockers, beds, and boxes to dive into. Just pray they don’t search there!

Adding to the tension are some gnarly puzzle minigames you’ll need to complete while avoiding detection. How steady are your hands when you’re digging around in an eviscerated corpse for a key? Can you pick a lock before the seven-foot bald mutant spots you? Get ready to find out! The tasks range from starting generators to pushing a prisoner along in a wheelchair while he begs for mercy. Morbid, but hey, we’re all just trying to survive here.

As you level up, you’ll unlock special RIG abilities that give you a fighting chance, like deploying smokescreens or even healing your teammates. And with permanent Prescription upgrades, soon you’ll be sliding under closing gates like an action star and roundhouse kicking psychos into the abyss. But don’t expect to be handing out beatdowns – the name of the game is still escape, not combat.

Going solo is doable, but extremely tough. With no one to watch your back, everything depends on your skill and bravery alone. But where’s the fun without any witnesses to your epic fails and witty freakout banter? Gather some fellow victims and take advantage of the chaos that cooperative play brings.

Distract psychos so your friends can sneak by, join forces to solve cryptic puzzles, toss bottles to misdirect enemies on their trail. Some objectives even change based on your group size, keeping things dynamic. And reviving downed teammates stops everyone’s run from ending prematurely. The laughs and shouts when cornered together make horror enjoyable in a whole new way. Just remember, the bigger the team, the less scary it gets. But gaining good friends to cry with can be just as satisfying.

Chambers of Horrors

The Outlast Trials features a collection of intricately designed levels that pull out all the stops when it comes to stomach-churning atmosphere. Get ready to crawl through blood-drenched hospitals, circuses full of mutilated dolls, and cell blocks lined with prisoners’ scrawled mad ramblings.

You’ll begin in a tutorial set in the facility’s grim-looking cell blocks and medical labs. But soon you’ll get to explore five main multi-stage maps, each with their own nightmarish quirks:

A decrepit police station full of dark holding cells and offices, where you’ll push a condemned man along in a wheelchair while avoiding a sociopathic patrolman. An abandoned orphanage, its walls screaming with creepy children’s drawings and rooms filled with tiny skeletal remains. A rundown courthouse, its halls of justice transformed into a labyrinth of saw blades, jail cells, and a literal house of mirrors. An eerie carnival where the clowns have red balloons filled with blood and a rollercoaster track leads straight into a crusher. And a mechanical toy factory – think Five Nights at Freddy’s but with more dismembered baby dolls.

The visual design consistently impresses with insane attention to detail – posters are peeling off the walls, blood drips from overhead pipes, and headless bodies are stuffed unceremoniously into the scenery. While the premise of “escape from an evil facility” remains constant, the environments have enough little surprises to keep your group on its toes.

And just when familiarity sets in, The Outlast Trials throws remixed versions at you with different layouts, new hazards, and reimagined challenges. Though after being chased through the orphanage for the 10th time or digging around in another barrel of limbs, the repetitive nature does start to dull the edge a bit. But the Series X enhancements make even return visits a visual treat. Just be sure to watch your step!

The (Psycho) Players

The Outlast Trials assembles a memorable lineup of utterly deranged psychos to hunt you down, led by the infamous Mother Gooseberry. With her blood-spattered nursery rhyme outfit and freakish drill hand puppet, she’s the stuff of nightmares. Her taunts through a shrill kazoo speaker may sound silly, but good luck laughing once she carves into you.

Other standouts include a highway patrol officer who really gets a charge out of his taser and cattle prod. A towering bald mutant called The Brute who smashes everything in sight. And a stalker with thermal vision goggles who can seek you out even in pitch blackness.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Outlast without an abundance of jump scares. Baddies can emerge from almost anywhere – beds, lockers, holes in walls. One wrong turn and you’ll run right into the arms of a subdued prisoner just waiting to plant their shiv firmly in your kidney. Traps like barbed wire and noisy glass shards also deliver panicked yelps. And there’s always the risk of your vision glitching out with psychosis, causing you to hallucinate deadly visions.

Playing with friends dilutes the fear, but opens the door for hilarious freak-out moments. Having someone to watch your back or pull you from a hiding spot at the last second stops the tension from overwhelming solo players. That safety in numbers does make the AI seem less oppressive though. Enemies can often be easily duped or distracted while objectives get completed. But even experienced teams can get cornered by a barrage of baddies, making for chaotic run-ins with plenty of screaming. It’s just as fun, albeit for different reasons.

At the end of the day, The Outlast Trials probably won’t leave you soiling the bedsheets with primal terror. But it will get your heart pounding and adrenaline pumping. This thrill ride comes fully loaded with all the shocks, jumps, and scares that fans have come to hunger for. So bid your sanity goodbye and step inside – Mother Gooseberry can’t wait to meet you!

Pimp My Cell

The Outlast Trials offers plenty of room for players to flex their personal flair. Cosmetic options let you deck out your patient’s cell with items like plush rats, straitjackets hung like tapestries, and anatomy diagrams for that real “loony bin chic” look. I guess when you’re trapped in an asylum, you make the padded room feel like home!

You can also unlock new outfits to let your character slay in style while getting slayed themselves. Most are different variants of prison jumpsuits. But true fashionistas go for the high-visibility yellow raincoat – perfect for those long, terrified sprints in the darkness.

Beyond the cosmetics, a rewarding progression system gives you perks and upgrades to aim for by braving harder difficulties. Leveling up earns you tokens to unlock new passive buffs and usable RIG abilities. The perks range from basic mobility boosts like sliding and faster movement while carrying objects, to more advanced techniques like kicking down stunned enemies. And the gear you equip before trials can literally be lifesavers, letting you throw up smokescreens, shoot flares that stun opponents, or even spot baddies through walls.

Each item makes you feel slightly less helpless against the onslaught of horrors gunning for you. And the extra assistance pays dividends for tackling the higher challenge presets unlocked later on. So it becomes addictive to push yourself to hit new milestones, unlocking the tools needed to then survive the next harrowing gauntlet of trials. This power trip feedback loop scratches a satisfying itch.

A prestige system also awaits truly dedicated players who max out a character’s level. Retiring them resets your progress, but you keep all clothing and room items as a badge of honor. You also gain bonus tokens to kickstart leveling the next guinea pig. So the nightmare never has to end for those devoted to becoming Murkoff’s most traumatized lab rat!

A Frightening Feast for the Senses

It’s clear Red Barrels pulled out all the stops when designing The Outlast Trials’ visual presentation. The decaying environments are incredibly detailed, from peeling paint and blood-smeared tiles, to viable fingerprints on dusty light switches. And with Series X enhancements, everything shines with an impressive level of clarity and sharpness. Hiding in plain sight has never looked so good!

Dynamic lighting also drenches each room and corridor in an ominous gloom, always keeping you on edge about what horrors lurk just out of view. Having your vision swim in and out of darkened focus becomes its own sensory trip, as your eyes struggle to make sense of the environment. It’s amazing how such a simple trick can be so unsettling. The distanced screams and ambient noises layer on even more tension.

From a technical standpoint, The Outlast Trials also impresses with rock solid performance. On both PC and consoles, it maintained a flawless 60 fps frame rate throughout, with barely any hitches or drops. This polish suggests the extra time spent in Early Access was put to good use working out kinks. Now the game runs as smooth as a bald mutant’s head!

It all combines into a palpable atmosphere that feels like you’re trapped inside a nightmare funhouse filled with horrors around every turn. The Outlast Trials wants to overwhelm your senses… and succeeds. The visual and auditory information overloadirrors the panic your characters feel, letting you relate to their terrified plight on a deeper level. It’s horror dialed up to 11 – like you’re experiencing a psychotic episode of your own!

Tales from the Madhouse

It’s no surprise that a frantic multiplayer escape room game doesn’t focus heavily on plot. But for Outlast fans, nuggets of lore fill in backstory on the infamous Murkoff Corporation’s early days dabbling in twisted human experiments. The Outlast Trials serves as an unsettling prequel showing the sinister roots that built this house of horrors.

Notes and classified documents found mid-trial hint at the big picture events leading up to Murkoff’s future atrocities. Set during the Cold War era, they touch on secret CIA brainwashing tests done on innocent civilians under claims of “rehabilitating” them. Of course, the real goal is manufacturing sleeper agent saboteurs for potential war with the Reds.

The details on these horrific MKUltra-esque programs are sparse during gameplay. But collecting artifacts offers some chilling insights, like how subjects are psychologically broken down through trauma, torture, electroshock treatment, and forced to commit increasingly deranged acts. All while researchers coldly observe, hoping to determine the thresholds of human morality.

It connects directly to the first Outlast’s Mount Massive Asylum, where similar experimentation on vulnerable patients took place. Murkoff is priming its demented research muscles, using minorities and vagrants that society would not miss. The Outlast Trials serves as the sanitized corporate proof-of-concept stage before being enacted more covertly on a wider scale.

So the narrative breadcrumbs exist for dedicated lore divers. But moment-to-moment, most players will simply be experiencing the trials firsthand, focused on survival rather than the ivory tower scheming that enables it. The story adds appreciated context, but isn’t essential. The Outlast Trials lets its sensory assaults do the talking. Though it does make me wonder – if these test subjects seem crazy now, imagine what sick missions they’d be sent on once released back into the world!

The Final Thoughts: A Trip Worth Committing To

When it comes to crafting a terrifying atmosphere and turning up the tension, The Outlast Trials shows Red Barrels still has the magic touch. The haunting environments and shocking enemies deliver exactly the type of panicked, screaming fun people love the series for. The addition of co-op play offers a fresh, frantic dynamic that works better than expected. Solving objectives quickly to stay alive or distracting a 7-foot brute so your friend can sneak by leads to chaotic moments that bond you closer through trauma.

The rewards for pressing on into higher difficulties also hit the mark. Gaining access to wild RIG gear and mobility upgrades had me addicted to pushing further outside my comfort zone. Though the repetitive nature of the same maps and enemies does start to lessen the magic after extended play sessions. Even with remixed layouts and the excellent next-gen facelift keeping things visually appealing, the limited scope leads to some monotony over time.

But for players craving tense, Movement-shooter thrills or hilarious game nights with good friends, The Outlast Trials absolutely delivers. Red Barrels stuck the asylum landing with this multiplayer reimagining, even if it doesn’t provide enough to extended solitary confinement. Bring along some corpsemates to this psycho ward – misery and laughter love company! Just be warned, once the game gets under your skin, it might be hard to ever feel totally sane again…

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