I will never understand why Outlast caused such a stir back in 2013, more so after playing its sequel. I suppose I get why folks liked it: playing a videogame version of all those found footage horror films you either love or hate or love to> hate, is a pretty nifty thing.

But there were so many valves to turn, jump scares and unsurprising plot twists.

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What’s your favourite moon in a game? The lipless satellite of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, perhaps? Overwatch’s rather cosy lunar map? Somebody asked me this a few weeks ago — genuinely, we’d been talking about First Man — and to my surprise I found myself thinking of Outlast 2.

There is little about Red Barrels’ schlocky, prurient first-person horror outing that deserves real admiration, but you can’t deny the power of its moon. It’s a wonderful ambient device in a game that is otherwise one gigantic charnelpile, a glowing cavemouth amid the clouds which ices the surfaces of barren lakes and raises the skeletons of farmyards from foetid darkness. It’s also something of a timekeeper, waning and waxing as the story proceeds towards a possibly Biblical, possibly scientific apocalypse.

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Cults in games have a long, proud tradition of getting to go full wackadoo. Mostly, they’re a really nice device to lean on, especially in a game where you want to fill the world with collectibles and audio logs and you need some narrative to build that space. Also, they’re pretty easy in that, if you don’t give a flip about collectibles, you can generally parse that cults are evil and cultists deserve to die. I may have learned a few things about that the hard way this year. That said, Far Cry 5 releases this week and focuses on a cult in America that uses religion and being pretty crap people in general to take over an entire state. In preparation, we look back at some of the wackier cults to be featured in games’ proud lineage of brainwashing.

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We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol’ Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well – as do a host of other games from 2017’s great and good.

Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you’re so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I’d have gone for in each category. (more…)

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion checks to see which ten games sold best on Steam over the past week. He just can’t sleep until he knows whether Prey made it to number one or not. … [visit site to read more]

Horror splatterfest Outlast 2 [official site] has been patched to reduce the difficulty and boost the measly battery life of the player s night vision camera two issues that Adam flagged up in his review.

The camera is your main tool for seeing the game’s over-the-top gore through the shadows, and worrying about how much juice it has left can get in the way of exploring what is a technically brilliant setting. … [visit site to read more]

Did you know: the weekly Steam charts, in which we round-up the ten games which sold best on Steam over the previous week, are broadly the most-read articles on RPS these days?

That means I can never stop. Never. Stop.

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If you ve ever wanted to experience crucifixion from a first-person perspective, Outlast 2 [official site] will let you scratch that one off your bucket list. Moving away from the first game s psychiatric hospital, developers Red Barrels unearth another necropolis worth of horror tropes in a splatterfest about apocalypse, antichrists and clashing cults.

The most frustrating thing about Outlast 2 is that it s few redeeming features deserve a far better game around them. … [visit site to read more]

First-person stealth-o-spooker Outlast 2 [official site] will start haunting PC on April 25th, developers Red Barrels have announced. This sequel is leaving behind the kooky-ooky asylum of the first game, fun as it was, to tell a new story about investigating a religious cult in rural America. Would you believe that they like committing murders? … [visit site to read more]