THE OUTLAST TRIALS

Smirking, sinister and sadistic, Red Barrels' gruesome multiplayer experiment became its biggest hit

- By Ed Smith

By the time Outlast 2 was finished and shipped, everybody at Red Barrels was tired. It wasn't just the climactic few months of crunch that had sapped their energies. With the original Outlast, the Whistleblower DLC and now the full sequel behind them, the entire studio – in the words of co-founder and game designer Philippe Morin – was feeling “fed up and uninspired”, and even considered ditching the horror genre completely. But although they craved fresh artistic inspiration, the Red Barrels team, wholly independent and self-funded, also had to mitigate risk; the studio was still only six years old at this point, and straying beyond the established Outlast brand could have doomed the whole operation. Exhausted and struggling to settle on one, suitable idea, everybody took the summer off. It was only when the Red Barrels team returned to the office, just before Christmas 2017, that the vision for the studio's next game fully materialised. Given the successes of The Forest, Hunt: Showdown and Dead By Daylight, the immediate future of horror games seemed rooted in multiplayer. So, imagine the asylum from the first Outlast, but instead of one person trying to get out alive, there are four.

It was a bankable idea, “far enough from what we had done before,” Morin explains, “but still leveraging the IP.” However, Red Barrels didn't want just to copy Dead By Daylight. On the contrary, when the team first sat down to begin concepting what would become The Outlast Trials, it paid little attention to any would-be contemporaries, and focused instead on how to make a multiplayer game that felt authentic to the already-defined experience of the singleplayer games.

In terms of pacing and level building, that presented a challenge. With the original