The Outlast Trials Early Access Review

ign.com:

The Outlast Trials is a horror movie in reverse, in ways both good and bad. Instead of screaming in terror when something jumps out at you or stabs your character in the face, you usually just laugh as your friends make fun of you from their hiding spots. Instead of a clueless group of protagonists who get picked off one by one, the enemies hunting you and your teammates are the ones with the hilariously poor decision-making skills. While the early access version of this cooperative horror game proves the concept and has a couple of very memorable maps, it’s not one of those games that’s sprung into being almost fully formed. Expected bugs and general lack of polish aside, there’s just not much content yet. Even so, I had an overall good time with this silly, gory, and uneven slaughterfest even in these early stages.

The Outlast Trials throws you and up to four of your friends into insane and improbable Saw-like “death games” in which you must work together to overcome the gory terrors that await. What little story there is so far doesn’t amount to much: you’re abducted by an evil corporation and kept in a prison under the guise of rehabilitation, but instead are subjected to a seemingly random series of murder playgrounds. You can glean some mildly interesting bits of lore by collecting compromising evidence that immoral company men apparently left lying around its death courses, but it’s not exactly mesmerizing stuff. And that’s okay! You’re playing The Outlast Trials because you want to see a crazy lady use a sock puppet to drill a guy’s face off, and there’s certainly an abundance of that.

That said, even when treated with the unseriousness and gore-filled levity that I think The Outlast Trials is going for, the