The Outlast Trials Review

ign.com:

With all of the gory appeal of a cheesy horror movie, The Outlast Trials works even better than it did when I played it in Early Access last year. There’s just something magical about hiding with your besties in wardrobes and under beds as a deeply rude lady with a power drill for a hand hunts you down. What better way to spend a Friday night with the lads? Each of its death games is unique and filled with devilish and gruesome horrors, including formidable killers with cunning and lethal AI, and upgrading your character’s abilities and gadgets is a fantastic reward for surviving all those bloody corridors. Its biggest weakness is that there just aren’t that many levels to play, which isn’t a great feeling when matches are supposed to be all about striking fear into you and your BFFs. Still, my crew and I had a lot of fun with The Outlast Trials, even if that novelty bled out quicker than we would have liked.

For those tuning in to this multiplayer torture porn extravaganza for the first time, The Outlast Trials is a cooperative survival-horror game distinguished by its ridiculously macabre vibes. You and up to three of your friends become inmates in a “rehabilitation” center and “volunteer” for a series of death games that have you eluding rampaging sadists (entirely unable to defend yourself) while completing puzzles, like opening a series of gates using keys fished out of discarded corpses or searching for hidden psychopaths using a proximity detector, before making a mad dash for the exit. While you might think being hunted by vicious maniacs is an intensely terrifying experience, the over-the-top nature of these villains, who take a taser to their crotch or perform ventriloquism for their hand puppet sidekick while they chase you, made me laugh way more than it creeped me out. The fact that you spend each mission in the company of your fellow inmates as you saw the legs off of innocent prisoners and toss a wagon full of animatronic children into a wood chipper