Outlast

[Damascus Rose]

I'm sorry you didn't like it. The story is indeed utter garbage, the jumpscares are confusing and the puzzles suck. But you can't honestly say the game is "held in the same kind of setting" the entire time. The level design deserves quite a lot of applause in my opinion. The levels were very varied and all had their own aesthetic feel and overall I think they were amazingly well done. As always, I just do not understand how you could possibly be so frustrated by the enemies in this game. It really seems like you have zero patience for encounters in general by being so resentful towards them. What exactly isn't scary about the enemies? By the way, you are fooling yourself if you think Frictional's stories are any better. They are better games in almost every other respect for sure, but the writing in FG's games is nothing to write home about. Am I seriously the only one who found this game scary as hell? I just don't get it. Look anywhere else but these forums and you will find nothing but praise for its atmosphere and scariness.

To me it felt like it was held in a similar setting, probably because everything looked the exact same green colour when the light is on so I thought it was all the same. I don't know, it just felt like I was always in the same environment, asylum halls with the same locked doors everywhere. There were some environments that are good I agree with you, but I feel like it was too much of the same. I don't feel they differed enough. They were also painfully linear, making even Amnesia look like it wasn't that linear.

About the enemies, I will try to explain this as best I can. I just don't think they are very scary and there were way too many encounters, so they lost effect. The "Chris Walker" guy (what is up with that name? how do we even learn his name?) I feel was more comical than scary. His voice seems ridiculously fake to me and his heavy breathing is not threatening, just funny. And the other enemies with assorted weapons weren't scary either, they are just the patients you see everywhere turned hostile. These guys were always there when you're trying to complete a puzzle, and chase you until you hide away from them or get far enough away. Then they don't disappear. You go out from hiding and there they are, ready to chase you again. This just annoyed me greatly, having to go through these godawful 'puzzles' while getting chased around. And if you die, you get to go through it all again, whoopee. I guess a large factor is that they're very easy to run from, it's easy to dodge their attacks and get away, so they just end up being hindrances to your completion of the small sections. I always ran past them when I could so that I could get through it faster, and because hiding is boring and didn't seem to accomplish anything for me. There were moments when they surprised me, like when I run into an unexpected enemy in a hall and have to run away. But these moments are more intense than scary.

I will say though that the music did good things for atmosphere, it made moments pretty tense and unsettled me, even though it seemed to be used in inopportune times where nothing really happened.

About frictional stories, they are definitely better than Outlast. I felt that they were told well and the stories were pretty interesting.

Perhaps the reason people on this forum aren't scared by it is because they have their standards raised by Amnesia? I'm not sure though, because I think most Outlast players have also played amnesia. Also this game failed hard if it didn't manage to scare me very much. Not to say I didn't feel fear for most of it, I did, it was just at a very low level. I remember more fear in the beginning of bioshock than this, and also more fear in AMFP and I know that's a very unpopular opinion. Perhaps all the fear was covered up by the frustration.