Outlast Torrent is an action survival game developed and published by Red Barrels. You’re seemingly powerless in Outlast, indicating that your primary tools for survival involve sprinting and concealing. Charging down a corridor with a creature hot on your heels, crashing through a sequence of doors without knowledge of what lies beyond, and eventually discovering a wardrobe to sequester yourself in and elude your pursuer deliver an exhilarating and spine-chilling thrill. And once adversaries commence tearing apart rooms and prying open closets in pursuit of you – yes, you can envision just how anxiety-inducing this game becomes.
Your protector in Outlast manifests as a camera with a night-vision feature. A significant portion of the asylum is shrouded in darkness, compelling you to perceive the world through a vivid-green lens. This contributes to an impressive sense of tension, magnified by the fact that the camera relies on batteries scattered throughout the environment. Outlast compels you to be frugal with your resources, as depleting power in a particularly dim area compelled me to reload a previous save file and replay a substantial portion of a level. This penalty seemed harsh initially but ultimately functioned as a lesson in the indispensability of meticulous planning to survive in this realm.
Where Outlast Torrent Magnet falters a bit is when it attempts to force conventional game design elements into the horror encounter. Navigating cautiously through a dank basement infested with adversaries is commendable – but having to activate three generators to restore power to the area? Not so appealing. While I’m not opposed to the “locate three things” structure common in many games, its inclusion in Outlast tended to briefly extract me from the experience and deflate the tension.
Additionally, the absence of any means of self-defense for your character implies that if you’re detected and cornered by one of your pursuers, you’ll likely need to restart that section. I found myself perishing in specific confrontations multiple times until I memorized the level layout and enemy behaviors. This isn’t exceptionally uncommon for a stealth game, but Outlast’s potency lies in its well-paced horror, and repetition dulls that impact. Rather than being terrified, I was simply vexed that I had to keep perishing to decipher how to solve certain environmental puzzles.
Fortunately, these instances were significantly outnumbered by prolonged periods of tense, gratifying exploration that rewards you with a well-crafted and disconcerting narrative. Thorough exploration unveils numerous documents and journals that contribute to unfolding tragic stories of mentally afflicted patients tormented by malevolent scientists, injecting an unexpected touch of humanity into this gruesome narrative. It’s also one of those horror games that excel both when played alone in the dark and when a group of individuals gathers around the television to collectively experience the frights.
Outlast Torrent can confidently stand as a distinctive and frightening survival horror game. In contrast to many contemporary horror games, it recognizes that the most fear-inducing monsters are those you can’t eliminate but must escape from, creating an exceptionally eerie ambiance that left me defenseless against its well-timed jump scares. Irritating design decisions and enforced instances of repetition tend to detract from the mood, but woven between them is an encounter that is frightening as all get out.
Outlast Torrent System Requirements
- OS: Windows XP/7/8/10/11
- Processor: 2.2 GHz Dual Core CPU
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 5 GB available space
