Play Even Outlast 2’s occasional puzzles, the most traditional staple in the survival horror genre, feel vital to your progress rather than busywork to keep you occupied. Batteries for your camera – Outlast 2’s most vital resource – are few and far enough between to be believable, but not to a crippling extent, as I was only without a handful of times. Bloody handprints indicate that someone has crawled up a ledge before you, for example, but you have to look hard to spot them. Overall, traditional video game elements in Outlast 2 have been kept to a minimum, which kindles the minute-to-minute sense that you’re surviving by your own scared wits with little to help you along the way.

Here, fires, dim lamp-posts, and flickering fluorescent bulbs mark the way, but never obviously enough to dim your panic. You’re armed only with your camcorder’s battery-reliant night vision mode to make your way through the omnipresent darkness, and because you spend most of your time being chased at a clip you have to rely on the most basic of visual signals to stay on the right path. Much of this comes down to Outlast 2’s use of lighting. Developer Red Barrels has created a world where linearity exists but is deceptive, where each escape feels skin-of-your-teeth frantic thanks to smart world building. I felt constantly disorientated while blindly running to a half-glimpsed place of safety, and while this might look like bad game design on paper, it’s effective in practice when the goal is to create a sense of desperation. With multiple labyrinthian structures and outdoor environments like tall grass and rivers to hide in, it’s easier to simply run from enemies, but it’s also harder to see them coming. Play It’s a lot more open than the original, which adds to an authentic horror experience. Outlast 2 is deep South horror, but without the trappings of domesticity we saw in Resident Evil 7 Supai is untamed cornfields, dilapidated shacks, and – go figure – gory remnants of unspeakable religious rites.

The ending, however, stayed with me for days.Outlast 2 benefits from ditching the somewhat tired mental asylum setting of the original and travelling the less-trodden road of the Sonoran Desert, where protagonist Blake Langermann is searching for his wife Lynn after crash landing in the cult-ridden Supai region during an investigative journalism assignment. While it suffers from a couple of pacing problems and some finicky navigation issues, its careful - and sadistic - manipulation of my fight-or-flight reflex had me experiencing an overwhelming sense of dread throughout, which abated only once the credits were rolling. Not for the faint of heart, Outlast 2’s relentless scares, unforgiving monsters, and provocative meditations on faith are an anxiety-inducing but cathartic horror experience.

Outlast 2 game reviews