I really don’t want to die. Someday I will, though, and it will probably suck. I worry about drowning, being burned alive, bears having me for dinner (it happens where I’m from), or tripping and bashing my head open on a gumball machine—and most popular horror games are good at turning those fears, other than the gumball one, into palpable threats. But in focusing so much on depicting the act of dying, they ignore why I’m scared of dying. 

Games are good at delivering terror. They specialize in the apprehension that precedes an awful revelation. But once you’ve died, which is the horrific revelation part, suddenly there’s no longer anything to anticipate, and therefore nothing to be terrified of. Death becomes a certainty, and in traditional try-again games, it’s making the experience far less scary than it could be. 

In my review of Outlast 2, I said that its “commitment to building such a disorienting horror simulation is as admirable as it is annoying.” Most scenes take about five deaths to figure out. Five deaths is enough to see a monster, learn its simple AI routine, and memorize your escape route as well as your walk home from work. Since you know that finishing the game requires staying alive until the end, the overarching narrative tension also loses strength. And because you can die and restart at the last checkpoint, those spooky punches lose more of their sting with each attempt. Sure, sometimes you’ll get a grisly animation, and if getting your dick split in half over and over can sustain your interest here into oblivion, great. But even Resident Evil 7, which starts off with some of the best innovations in horror game history, falls into the same shoot or hide or die death trap over time. 

Popular horror games in the same style know how to tap into fleeting dick-splitting fears and often confront deeper psychological fears in their overarching themes, but the threat of death and repetition is still the dull captain steering the tension. It’s about time they stop trying so hard to kill us.  

Death to death

Death has always been games' most popular punishment. You can fail to perform a task and in the fiction of the world, die. Bummer! Back to the last checkpoint. Threatening the player with lost time through death is an easy way to build tension, but the tension is entirely detached from the fiction. There’s no time to focus on the monsters chasing us. 

During my second playthrough of Frictional Games' SOMA, I installed a mod called “Wuss Mode” that turns off predatory enemy AI. Instead of sneaking around the monsters, I got to know them—and yeah, I know what it sounds like. I watched them lumber around each environment like blind dogs. I didn’t feel physically threatened, but in observing the creatures, I started to sympathize with them. Like Frankenstein's monster, they were only dangerous in appearance, fearsome only in their most recognizable human qualities. What were they thinking? Why were they thinking? I had time to consider SOMA’s headier themes on what it means to be alive, to be a human. I was fine the first time I played it, but without obligatory videogame baddies shoving me through the experience, I soaked it in like a good novel, pausing on moving passages at will.

I still felt scared, not because I was being bludgeoned with a biomechanical arm, but because because I was confronted with some awful, scary truths about the nature of life. There’s terror in the build up towards a horrific revelation in finding out what the monsters represent, and uninterrupted time to reflect those ideas back onto myself. Consciousness, man. What even is that stuff? Hell if I know. And that’s scary enough. Some of the best horror games are built around the same idea, of producing horror without death as a system.

But some just want to be schlocky fun, a ride through some spooks and gore and dim hallways. That’s all good and wholesome, but the issue remains: death and repetition are still a tedious, emotional dead end. If they’re a necessary part of the experience, how can games sustain interest and scares five attempts in?  

Systems make great painkillers

What games like Outlast 2 and Amnesia get wrong is often cited as their boldest design choice: putting limitations on or completely removing combat. I don’t mean to say that I want to kill every enemy in those games, but restricting players to a tiny set of interactions is also a good way to stunt their creativity. If the enemies are on full alert and I’m stuck hiding, I only have two primary options: sneak or run. Chances are I’ll die doing both, and I’ll need to make several attempts to learn patrol routes or where to sprint next to trigger a checkpoint. 

I can’t pick up an errant plank and bash a cultist over the head with it or grab a torch and light an oil drum on fire as a distraction—there’s no incentive to being clever and terror only works if you don’t know where the boogeyman is hiding. But as opposed to one right way and one wrong way to navigate an area, taking a more systems-driven approach to horror game design can give you a dozen ways to get through with style, 10 ways to barely scrape by, and countless ways to screw up and die.

In Dishonored 2, if I’m backed into a corner, I can still improvise an escape plan. Maybe I toss a bucket to distract and then swan dive into my doppleganger from six stories up. Or possess a guard, hop to a rat, and scurry away. It’s not the perfect example because it turns the player into a clever god, but still makes me wonder what a horror version of such a system-focused game would look like.

Imagine one that has the kind of player freedom that enables this astounding Dishonored 2 run, but instead of killing dozens of guards, you knock over a stack of books in the library to throw the monster off your tail. Then you sneak up and stab it with a broken broomstick, which permanently slows the monster down, giving you time to cover yourself in mud to hide your scent or build construct some combustible traps out of found objects in the workshop.  

With that kind of systemic variety, something like Resident Evil 7 could feel like an unsanctioned Home Alone sequel where the burglars want to eat your face. I’d love nothing more than to see Jack react to a barrage of swinging paint cans to the mug.

The more options a player has to evade a threat, then the more deaths can be justifiably blamed on the lack of player ingenuity rather than narrow level design or failing to do the prescribed sprint-and-stealth dance. To be clear, the kind of systems I’m suggesting should not make the player feel more powerful than their pursuer. They just need to provide more exit routes and the chance to think creatively in desperate moments. I just want to run through a few more options before going with ‘die and try again.’ I want to feel solely responsible for my survival and I want surviving to be a new process every time. 

Still, the problem of the horrific revelation remains. When the player dies and gets to try again, smart systems can make terror renewable, but what about the comedown after you see the monster? And what if it backs you into a corner, helpless? Should that be game over? If terror can be a renewable resource, then so can horror. 

Variety is the spice of death

While I don’t consider it to be the second coming of survival horror so many do, Resident Evil 7’s first few hours house some of the best ideas for dealing with death I’ve seen in popular horror games. All videogames have the death problem, convinced that as soon as a bad guy gets you, they’ll just kill you and call it a day. A villain that just murders as quickly and efficiently as possible is a boring one.

Jack Baker, the first monster you meet in Resident Evil 7, is a more complex, charismatic dude than a tag-‘em-and-bag-‘em killer looking to just clock out for the day. He’s the kind of guy who wants to take his time. He calls out your name like a schoolyard bully, compares you to a pig and summons you for dinner, grins and laughs and stares directly at you from across the room. And he never outright sprints for you, opting for a steady, brisk walk as if your end is already assured. 

When Jack does catch you, the majority of deaths end with a gruesome animation and a game over screen—the terror falls off and diminishes as we start again. But during a few specific instances, death is not the end.  

Early on, Jack can corner you in a room behind the kitchen and knock you to the floor after which he chops off your leg with a shovel. You can pick up your leg and add it to your inventory, which you’ll need to do if you want to survive. And that’s the surprise, that you can survive the whole ordeal. In any other game, I’d expect to just bleed out (and you can), but Jack crosses the room, crouches, and taunts you with a bottle of healing medicine.

If you manage to crawl over and grab the bottle, you can put your leg back in place, pour some magic medicine on it, and watch it fuse back together. You put your goddamn leg back on. And then Jack slams his shovel down, let’s you know daddy’s coming, and the chase is back on. 

These scenes, rare as they are, all teach the player that Jack is a true madman. They also inform you about the state of the world (and strange regenerative state of Ethan, the main character), as well as delivering a punchy horror scene. When I watched my leg fuse mend and then heard Jack coming for me again, I was terrified of him as a person and horrified of what he might be capable of. He was no longer strictly a walking game over state. 

Death, like horror tropes in film, can and should be subverted in order to maintain tension before and after scares take place. Players shouldn’t be able to predict what happens before or after they shake hands with a threat, be it a monster or a man or a bunny with vampire teeth. Horror games are best when they strive to stay unfamiliar, and in adopting a familiar die-and-try-again videogame death system, they’re knocking the wind out of their scares already before anyone presses start.  

For more on horror, check out list of the best horror games on PC, our list of the horror game clichés that need to stop, and our hands-on impressions of Serious Metal Detecting, which isn't a horror game but playing it is like staring into a dark mirror and feeling nothing, forever and always. 

On the off-chance you've been hiding behind the couch since watching the duo of Outlast 2 trailers that landed last week, let me remind you that Red Barrels' latest survival horror offering is out today. You might've caught James' review yesterday, or his words on how it has one of the most intense endings of any horror game ever. Then again, you might have avoided all that as you're yet to play the first game. 

If that's you, let me tell you the Humble Store is giving away a copy of the original Outlast free-of-charge with every purchase of Outlast 2 for as long as stocks last. As it stands, Miles Upshur's venture into the Mount Massive asylum costs £14.99/$19.99 via the retailer, so by parting with £22.99/$29.99 for its sequel, you stand to make a decent saving. 

For the sake of recapping, here's an extract from Chris' 2013 review:  

"With no weapons to fight off the lunatics, you can hide – inside lockers or under beds – and watch as your pursuers either stalk slowly past to look for you elsewhere, or suddenly spot you, drag you from your hiding place, and tear you to pieces. Or you can run: vault over obstacles, leap across broken staircases, pull yourself into vents, squeeze between obstructions, and yank doors open and then barricade them behind you, all which feels fluid and natural, like a nightmare version of Mirror's Edge. When you're not running or hiding, you'll be scouring the building for spare batteries for your camera, for keys to unlock doors, or for the nearest exit." 

And here's another look at Outlast's launch trailer:

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First up, big spoiler warning. If you plan on playing Outlast 2 at any point in the future (and I think you should), then don't watch this video. You’re going to "enjoy" the ending for yourself anyway. However, if you really don’t think you’ll play Outlast 2, then you might be interested to know that the ending, which we've captured in the video above, is absolutely bonkers. 

Secondly, if you don’t like blood or gore, here's another caveat. The final stretch of Outlast 2 features some scenes—a big one in particular—that are pretty extreme, even by horror game standards. Consider your eyes and/or stomach warned. 

Still here? Okay, here’s the context for what you're about to see. You play as a journalist who sets out with his wife, who's also a journalist, to investigate a missing person case in rural Arizona. Things go wrong, as expected, and the wife gets kidnapped by an extreme Christian cult. From there, well, let’s just say the cult was onto something...

If you really want to play Outlast 2 (and you should want to), but can’t handle the anxiety from chase scenes or dying repeatedly and just want to partake in a apocalyptic Christian horror house, then we can help. 

First, you’ll need to locate the folder where your Outlast 2 configuration files are stored. The easiest way to do this is to go into Steam, right click on Outlast 2, and select ‘Properties’. In the window that pops up, click on the ‘Local Files’ tab and then on the ‘Browse Local Files’ button.

This brings up the Outlast 2 installation folder, but you can also browse to it manually. From here, head into the ‘OLGame’ folder followed by the ‘Config’ folder. Open ‘DefaultGame.ini’ with any compatible text editor. Notepad works just fine.

To enable the console in game you need to change ‘bCheatsEnabled=false’ to ‘bCheatsEnabled=true’. The value shouldn’t be hard to find since it’s located right at the beginning of the document. It might be worth saving a copy of the original .ini in case things go south, but either way, once you’ve changed the value, save the file, close the document, and boot up Outlast 2.

Load up your game and then press the tilde key (~) to bring up the console.Type ‘god’ into the console and press enter to become unkillable. You should get a small text notification that god mode is indeed on, but you’ll know either way soon enough.

If things get to be a bit overwhelming, type ‘ghost’ into the console, which makes you turn invisible, turns of collision, and lets you fly freely through the map. It’s a last ditch effort for more fearful players, but it’s also a great tool for game photographers and Outlast 2 is one of the most photogenic horror games out there.

I haven’t tested any of the cheats extensively, so don’t expect smooth sailing throughout. Chances are you’ll fall into a pit or get ambushed by some cultists in scenes that typically kill you. If it happens, try disabling the cheats in the console by entering them again or reloading the last checkpoint.

For more tips on playing Outlast 2, check out our guide right here.

First things first: breathe. Outlast 2’s intense chase scenes, disempowering stealth sequences, and gruesome imagery are built to make you anxious. But with a clearer idea of the smoke and mirrors Outlast 2 uses to get under your skin, it becomes a much easier mountain of corpses to climb. We can help. 

You can sneak closer to enemies than you think 

At least on the default difficulty, you can. They’re a pretty dull bunch that don’t operate on strict vision cones. Unless you’re standing under a spotlight screaming their name, they won’t know where you are. So long as you’re not in their line of sight and you’re crouched, they won’t see you. If you’re crouched in bushes, then you can walk right in front of them—just make sure not to get too close. Touching the enemy, as always, is bad.

Don’t worry about being spotted (too much)

You’re going to get spotted. Outlast 2 gives you pretty shoddy tools to keep track of enemy locations and that’s definitely on purpose. You’re meant to be left with only one option regularly: to run. And really, it’s a pretty reliable option. Unless you immediately hop into another barrel or beneath the nearest bed, enemies won’t have the easiest time finding you. Running off to find another hiding spot might mean taking a hit or two, but getting reckless can be the best way to move forward.

Not all enemies sprint directly toward you 

Some don’t even want to hurt you at all. This will become pretty obvious during the very first encounter in the game, which took me way more tries than I’d like to admit. It’s not the best way to kick off the game, in my opinion, but it’s designed to teach you that not every monster is going to make a beeline towards you, full sprint. You might need to kite some slower enemies around objects. Some may not even hurt you unless you get too close. Whether or not someone wants to kill you is a primary source of tension in Outlast 2, so keep your wits about you when meeting new ‘people’.

Use your camera functions in short bursts 

There’s no need to leave night vision and the microphone on the entire time you’re hiding in a barrel or creeping down a dark corridor. Unless you’re the type to leave no stone unturned, chances are you’ll run low or out of battery on a regular basis. Pop your mic or night vision on and off to verify an enemy’s location, then shore up your guts and run.

Looking behind you is usually a bad idea 

Pressing Alt to look behind you during a chase scene is a cool camera trick that makes Outlast 2’s most intense scenes feel directly out of a horror movie—if you’re the person in the horror movie who trips and dies early on. More often than not, pressing it means you’ll run into something when you’re not looking ahead. And really, it’s not a helpful tool at all. Glancing over your shoulder will only tell you what you already know: there’s a mob with machetes on your tail and they don’t look happy.

Get on your belly to find extra batteries and bandages

If you’ve ever dropped a quarter and had to retrieve it from beneath the fridge, then you know where to look for even more batteries and bandages than normal. Press C to crawl around like an animal, which is what you are, to find some extra (healing) power if you need it. The small crack between the wall and dressers isn’t a bad place to snoop either.

What if the most deranged, doom-saying cultists are right? Outlast 2 prods this question with a pointy stick until it bleeds, festers, and wails in agony. While it plays very similarly to the original, Outlast 2 takes its Christian themes into extremely uncomfortable and surprising territory, avoiding what could have been a familiar trek through cultish cliches. 

Structurally, it’s a conventional first-person horror game, a string of tense stealth scenarios where you hide from monsters before they chase you through dense forests and flooded mines. The story is too opaque and a maddening amount of trial-and-error is needed to figure out most of the stealth sequences, but through it all, Outlast 2 is a train of depravity steered by a good old-fashioned fear of God. 

Picture this

As a freelance journalist, you’re investigating the disappearance of a Jane Doe. Your wife is quickly kidnapped by a cult, the genesis of which is fascinating, mostly told through discarded letters and environmental cues. But the details are hard to process when an entire village is actively hunting for you. Outlast 2 maintains such a relentless pace that there’s almost no time to figure out what’s really going on.

Besides the vague story and some directed flashback sequences that feel like a detour, the slow progression through rural Arizona is layered with enough apocalyptic Christian imagery to be a complete journey. Expect to witness the best of the worst of the bible through some of the most shocking first-person scenes in games, period. Your vision flashes red with hard clank of a hammer coming down on metal, the sky is a dark shade of purple, and a man piggybacking on another man blathers on about how happy he is to see you. 

On that journey, you’ll need to sneak past roving packs of rural folks gone mad. Your camcorder is your only tool, used to see in the dark with its night vision mode and a microphone that detects sound wherever it’s pointed. Both functions drain your batteries and like healing bandages, they’re limited, but never so much that you’re left without enough supplies to outwit any pursuers. Even without wit, persistence does the trick, as frustrating as it can be. 

Immoral compass 

Early on, I wandered the same cornfield for 30 minutes, crawling the perimeter and making several suicide runs to scope out the buildings for an exit. The way out was a short sprint not far from where the sequence begins, a quick hop over a pile of wood pallets piled next to the fence. The area was a wild goose chase killbox, built only to confuse. It’s not an isolated issue either. While the original Outlast could depend on the hospital’s architectural pathways to direct the player, pulling off subtle signposting in an outdoor setting can’t be as obvious without compromising the feeling of being lost and helpless. Red Barrels’ commitment to building such a disorienting horror simulation is as admirable as it is annoying.

Such dedication can be worth it. Subtle lighting casts trees and figures like paper silhouettes against muted backdrops, and convincing effects like the camera’s depth of field and visual noise make the world look real at a glance. It’s stunning artistic and graphical work. And when you’re dashing through it, nearly out of battery while a ‘man’ screams biblical verse and shoots fiery crossbow bolts past your head it’s both thrilling and nauseating, all propped up by an incredible soundtrack.

But it’s a tower that topples often, leading to repeated attempts at trying to find a tiny hole in a huge fence, to figure out if the enemy can see me or not, or if I can grab a particular ledge to scramble away in time. There are even a few instances where enemies are set up to ambush and instantly kill you, totally deflating a close getaway. Without clear rules the illusion fades quickly, exposing the simple AI and restricted level design. The few times I happened to stumble the right way through a level, Outlast 2 felt like an audiovisual horror masterpiece. The motion capture, textures, and animation are never quite up to par with Resident Evil 7, but when everything meshes together, it hardly matters. Just don’t expect a smooth experience the whole way through. When it clicks though—those moments stick.

Long after the final minutes of Outlast 2, I felt queasy, uncertain that what I saw had actually happened. It’s one of the most bizarre ending sequences I’ve witnessed, tapping into a fear I’ve known since my first week at Sunday school. It's not a fear about being hunted, artistic viscera spills, or neatly arranged corpses on spikes (though there’s plenty of that stuff). It’s fear of the drastic measures people will take to ensure their salvation, the burden of guilt, and whether or not the big guy up top exists and gives a damn.

What I like most about Outlast 2 is that it doesn't just use its themes as set-dressing. The first Outlast had the same intense stealth sequences and chase scenes, but in the spooky asylum every Early Access game goes for. Outlast 2 takes you through dilapidating farms and flooded mines and old townships that all say something about the history of the people who lived there. It rains blood and spews locusts and sends twisted cultists after you through it all, just regular people wearing overalls and carrying bloody steak knives, moaning in apocalyptic overtones. There are monsters, sure, but Outlast 2's scariest moments come from its most familiar faces. 

Outlast 2, as we learned in March, will be out next week—April 25, to be precise. With the date slowly closing in, developer Red Barrels has released two separate trailers to celebrate the moment, one for the sequel, and one for the retail bundle coming on the same day, called Outlast Trinity. 

Outlast 2 is separate from, but very similar to, the original, with ill-tempered nasties chasing you around a dark, spooky farm, rather than a dark, spooky insane asylum, while you try to make your escape—and, in this case, locate your missing wife. Luckily, your video camera gives you a limited ability to see in the dark; unluckily, that means you'll occasionally have to lay eyes on the multitudinous horrors spread throughout the game world. Like, for instance, the pit of charred babies that Tim had to walk across last summer. (Which, for the record, he did not like.)   

The trailer above is for Outlast 2, while the one below is for Outlast Trinity. It's a disc-based package featuring Outlast, the Whistleblower DLC, and Outlast 2, which Red Barrels said in March would be released for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but not the PC. The press release put out right around the same time by distributor WBIE, however, says that it is coming to the PC—although a poke around retailers including Amazon, GameStop, and a few overseas sites uncovered no evidence of its existence alongside the console boxes. 

I've reached out to Red Barrels directly to try to clarify the situation, and will update if I receive a reply. In the meantime, I don't know, so here's the trailer.