Every moment of the game is heavily scripted, every challenge has a single solution, and there are no opportunities of any substance to deviate from what the game wants you to do. Where the first Outlast confined your unfortunate protagonist into hallways of a hellish mental asylum, this one drops our “hero” into what looks like an open wilderness in the backwaters of America, and initially this is an intriguing idea you'll wonder if you'll be able to explore around and approach the horrors that you know are ahead at your own time and on your own initiative, but it doesn’t take long for it to become obvious that this game’s every bit as linear as the first. There’s the perception, early on, that this is an exploration game. It’s a nasty, sadistic game that works really, really hard to do what it wants to do, but its utter artificiality as a result of it being a game, and not a book or film, eventually compromises everything that it looks to achieve. What we have here is a through-and-through attempt at the kind of revolutionary shock horror that made books such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Marquis De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom so effective, and were later brought to film via the work of people like Eli Roth in Hostel. Outlast 2 was coincidentally released at the same time as this article and proves the point perfectly. In it, he laid out some of the issues in the way that game creators often try to tell stories using similar narrative structures to what those in literature and film have traditionally done effectively arguing that games should stop trying to conform to the narrative structures of those other mediums, and should find their own identities. Games academic, Ian Bogost, recently wrote a piece that proved to be controversial.
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