Really had a blast playing this one. Keeps what is great about the first game and goes ball to the wall with everything. Insane gore, truly gnarly stuff I haven´t seen in other games. The setting is immaculate and probably my favorite thing about it. I really like the Asylum setting of the first one, but this back-country southern gothic with a side of religious fervor is more my speed, and it doesn’t have that dip into sci-fi that I felt derailed the third act of the original Outlast. The art design is excellent, and the levels manage to offer more variety of setting, all while walking that line between a feeling of openness and being lost and of being entombed with no way out.

In terms of narrative, I also enjoyed this one more. It´s more ambiguous and doesn’t offer many answers in the end. It’s still fairly tropey, but it offers enough new stuff so as to feel consistently fresh and surprising. There’s also the novelty of having a sort of dual narrative that I loved. There are some clear Silent Hill influences, especially in that school-centric side story. It’s commentary on religion is fairly surface level, but I felt that it dared to go deeper than most games of the type are willing to go.

I still love the use of the camera in these games. The night vision gives it a particular aesthetic that has become iconic in gaming by now. In terms of gameplay it’s clearly less janky and more polished than the first Outlast, though it felt a bit more railroad-y. I tended to get lost way less, which I liked but I can see others disliking this direction. I’m sure that in harder difficulties stealth is more required and death comes more often, but playing in normal felt scary and tense enough.