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Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Wed May 07, 2014 5:32 pm
by JPrice
Well hello hello you lovely people!
Just got done with that newest Outlast DLC and thought I'd give my impressions on here because why not hahaa

First question, hey did you like Outlast?
If you answered No then don't buy this DLC as it's pretty much exactly the same gameplay wise
If you answered Yes then do buy this DLC as it's pretty much exactly the same gameplay wise
That's the basic summary of things really, although that yes answer may depend really on how much you enjoyed the core Outlast experience hahaa

I will admit that I did enjoy Outlast myself personally. Yeah sure it wasn't the most subtle horror experience out there but it was an enjoyable game with fairly high production values. This DLC pretty much carries on in much of the same tradition as the previous game, although personally I did find the overall formula to be a little flimsy by the end.

The story itself is nothing all that special really, you play as the original Whistleblower that gives Miles Upshur that email within the opening (I honestly can't remember the guys name but it's not all that important anyway). However it doesn't go that well as you are caught and sentenced to be an inmate within the asylum forcefully as punishment. The story from there then takes place just as the asylum's going to shit and such, so you just have to try and find a way out in standard Outlast fashion. From there it just follows much the same groundwork as the original game with not all that much story but a set of colourful characters that pepper the experience.

The same applies really to the gameplay as nothing is changed. You still use a video camera, same battery mechanic and hiding system. Which is a shame in some respects as it would have been interesting to maybe have a stealth segment near the beginning where you have to sneak past personel without getting caught in order to find the initial evidence of wrong doing or whatever. Still the core Outlast experience here isn't bad, just comes across as rather safe. Like most enemies you can get away from fairly easily and by the end near the concluding chapters of the DLC, I was just thinking that it had kind of outstayed its welcome. With that said however I thought that on like literally the last enemy encounter that you have to sneak around so I wasn't far off guessing the end hahaa :D

I will say though that there seems to be a much larger emphasis on trying to shock the player. This is true of the two new enemies within the game, one being a cannibal and the other being a woman obsessed inmate that mutilates men in order to turn them into the perfect woman. Obviously the cannibal enemy speaks for itself as when you first meet him he's eating a corpse right in front of you. The more interesting of the two however is the woman obsessed man as there are some particularly graphic scenes involved with him, one of which I won't spoil but lets just say it'll make all you guys on here wince a little hahaa. I dunno how to feel about it really as it kinda comes off as a little cheap but it's still effective in some cases so it's not all that bad.

Big question though is, is this DLC scary?....Ehhhh kinda?
I can't really say that the original was hugely scary in hindsight all though it did have it's moments. Same deal with this DLC pretty much, with a majority of the horror coming, of course, from jump scares. Which is a shame because I feel like there's some wasted potential here to make the game great, rather than just good. When will those pesky devs learn that relying on jump scares doesn't equal effective horror? :evil: hahaa I kid I kid :)
Overall I would say that the horror is about on the same level as the original which was a good enough horror experience I feel! I will say however that the presentation is pretty much the same here as it was in the original game so it's a high quality production through and through. I think this was the main thing that kept me playing really, the atmosphere in the game can be really great sometimes. When you're walking through the asylum, it just feels empty and lifeless with some great effects that help emphasis this (Like lighting effects and dust wavering in the air from the nightvision). The nightvision still looks great and makes everything just feel a lot more claustrophobic and confined, so yeah good job Red Barrels! (Just a shame that you didn't put more emphasis on the atmosphere rather than the jumpscares :P hahaa)

Overall I'd say that if you liked Outlast a lot then its probably worth getting this as it's more of the same polished experience that you loved the first time around.
If you thought it was just OK then I'd look into it a little more or at least wait for it to become a little cheaper before diving in as you might end up disappointed by the lack of changes and variety
If you didn't like Outlast then this DLC won't really change your mind sadly!

So that's what I thought of Outlast's Whisteblower DLC, if any of you guys have played it then share your thoughts on here I suppose! Would be nice to see what others thought of it :)

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Wed May 07, 2014 5:44 pm
by RightClickSaveAs
Thanks for the info! I'd completely forgotten about this. I really liked Outlast, more than a lot of people I think, so I'll end up getting it at some point.

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Wed May 07, 2014 7:04 pm
by matt
Thanks for the write up! I didn't think Outlast was amazing, but I enjoyed it well enough (although I found several enemy encounters really frustrating).

I think you raise a lot of interesting points about gross out stuff and jump scares versus atmosphere. Since I too want forum bonus points I will quote Stephen King from Danse Macabre (which is a great read if you are interested in horror):
“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.”
The distinction between horror and terror is an interesting one (and has its own wikipedia page), but I think the video game equivalent is atmosphere/tension, jump scares, and then just gross out stuff.

To me, atmosphere/tension is the most important part of a game. Without that, I think jump scares aren't effective at all. I didn't enjoy the atmosphere in Daylight, so the jump scares didn't even really register. I do like jump scares when done well because I think they heighten the atmosphere. I think Fatal Frame has the best jump scares. They aren't essential though because if you look at Silent Hill, those games don't have very many.

It seems like Red Barrels hasn't quite nailed the atmosphere, so they are trying to nail the other two forms of horror. There's nothing wrong with that, and a lot of people really dig jump scares, and for whatever reason, gross out is entertaining. I must confess I saw every single Saw movie (but I didn't enjoy most of them), as well as both Human Centipedes, which were actually pretty boring.

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Thu May 08, 2014 5:13 am
by JPrice
Yeah I don't think they've fully nailed the atmosphere but there are instances where it does shine through!
But yeah it's not like there's a ton of gross out stuff in this DLC, just more so than was in the original game. I think it's good at doing what it does though, its just a shame that what it does isn't particularly engaging or a full use of the potential that is there.

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Thu May 08, 2014 1:55 pm
by Grabthehoopka
matt wrote:I will quote Stephen King from Danse Macabre
Yay! Bonus points for everyone! Man, I can't wait til you post the high scores!
matt wrote:I think the video game equivalent is atmosphere/tension, jump scares, and then just gross out stuff.
Actually, that is a really apt description. I believe he said (paraphrasing here) that horror is standing in a dark room and being grabbed by a monster, and terror is standing in a dark room and knowing that a monster is behind you, because you can hear it breathing and feel its hot breath on your neck, so you turn around and -- nothing's there. So, basically, yeah.

Silent Hill doesn't have very many jump scares, but I think the one with the locker room in the school is one of the best set-up and best executed jump scares in all of video games. And all with terrible PSX graphics.

Noah Antwiler said that jump scares are to the genre of horror as pies in the face are to the genre of comedy. You can't just sprinkle them into a piece of fiction, call it a genre piece, and call it a day, you have to work really hard, really, really hard to earn them or the audience is gonna roll their eyes.

The Silent Hill series, all three of them (cough cough), have some of the most stupidly simple, but effective and memorable jump scares that I've ever seen. There's the empty room in the hospital that if you walk far enough into, they play a loud glass breaking noise and -- that's it. Then there's that damn bathroom in Silent Hill 2 that if you investigate the bathroom stall and he says it's locked, they play that horrible sound of a woman screaming and falling down as you're walking away. And then there's that mannequin in Silent Hill 3 that screams and is decapitated when you walk in the next aisle over, and of course, the stupidest, most simplest, but still effective jump scare I've ever seen in a video game, there's that part where they just randomly play the sound of a jaguar roaring (or something) in that one part of the subway. And that's it. I could feel the developers watching me and snickering to each other after that one, trying to keep their voices down behind the two-way mirror. And, although it's not a jump scare, special mention goes to that bathroom in the otherworld school in Silent Hill 1 that has no music, and when you take a few steps in, you hear a kid quietly sobbing in one of the stalls for a few seconds. Profoundly creepy.

But I will agree that Fatal Frame probably earns their jump scares better than anyone. I mentioned before about how they foster a feeling that anything can happen at any time, and so even something as objectively hilarious as that one where the head comes bouncing down the stairs is fucking terrifying.
matt wrote:I must confess I saw every single Saw movie (but I didn't enjoy most of them), as well as both Human Centipedes, which were actually pretty boring.
I still hold that the first Saw movie is an amazing film that stand on its own, and I don't know if you've watched it recently, but it seems kind of quaint and adorable now, considering how the series ended up. James Wan is my current favorite horror director today, as he went on to do Insidious and The Conjuring, but apparently all of the explicitly gory stuff in Saw was added in after they finished shooting. He said that he left everything off-screen, but, watching the rough cut, felt like certain parts would be more effective if we saw the carnage, but he still wanted the scare to be mostly psychological. So, he added in that part where the girl is rummaging through the guy's intestines for the key, a shot of that one guy stepping on the shards of glass, and the few explicit shots we see of Cary Elwes sawing off his foot (oh, shit, spoilers, by the way), which, totaled up is only like 5-6 seconds of footage, but his reasoning was that as long as the camera didn't linger on it, and as long as you only saw a little bit of it, it would only fuel our imaginations even worse.
As for Human Centipede...I've only ever walked out of a couple of movies in my life, and that's one of them. As you may remember, I have a terrible, paralyzing fear of IVs, blood tests, and anything involving needles or tubes stuck up my arms, but that one part where the girl gets out of her hospital bed, runs away, and the IV rips out of her arm, I literally burst into tears and felt like I was going to faint. I sprint-walked the fuck right out of that theater, and spent the next 10 or 15 minutes in the lobby sobbing into my knees trying not to pass out. So, in a roundabout, dickish way, I guess you could say it was an effective horror movie, but overall, not a pleasant experience for me. I didn't have much of a desire to see the second one.

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Thu May 08, 2014 6:10 pm
by RightClickSaveAs
Saw was pretty good from what I remember! It was much more like the movie Seven than torture porn, which is what the series is kinda associated with at this point. I bailed on the series after the second one, I thought the premise of the 2nd one of the victims from the first movie becomes some kind of torture disciple of Jigsaw because *reasons* and carries on his work after he dies was kinda stupid, and I could see the series was going to start falling in love with all the overly elaborate traps and try to constantly top itself.

The Human Centipede is a weird one. I haven't seen the second but the first is really interesting, if you get past the crazy shock value of its premise. It's also pretty well filmed and acted, the guy who plays the doctor gives a performance that seems too generous for the subject matter. This movie just got so much attention, sort of like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre did when it came out and there were reports of people having heart attacks in the theaters or whatever, that I feel it got prejudged a lot. It's actually kind of restrained given what it's about, I don't remember a ton of explicitly gory scenes, it's more suggested.

Grabthehoopka I can empathize about certain things just getting to people though. I almost couldn't watch the Hara-Kiri remake (the original and this one are both fantastic movies) because there's a scene at the beginning where someone tries to disembowel themselves with a bamboo sword, and the update made it so much more real and gruesome than the black and white original from the 60s that I had a sort of panic attack the first time I watched that and didn't go back to the movie for a while. That scene just got to me in a way no movie has in a long time.

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Thu May 08, 2014 7:18 pm
by matt
The first saw was pretty good, but they got progressively worse.

Personally, I found the Human Centipede a bit slow. I actually thought it was more funny than scary where he's trying to coach his victims into acting like a human centipede. hahah To be fair to the prejudgers, I think they were trying to sell the movie based on the shock. I was at Fantastic Fest showing off Retro/Grade, and they had a "human centi-pig" where they put 3 pigs together ass to mouth. Not very tasteful, and honestly, it wasn't that tasty either. hahaha

While I haven't seen Hara-kiri, Takashii Miike's Ichi the Killer kind of made me squeamish maybe 10 years ago, but I think I've been thoroughly desensitized since. haha

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Fri May 09, 2014 5:30 pm
by RightClickSaveAs
That's a good point, the movie was really pushing itself as something extreme and crazy, it probably wouldn't have got much attention otherwise. My favorite of the promotional claims that it was "100% MEDICALLY ACCURATE" or something like that, hah.

It is a weirdly slow paced movie for sure. The funniest part for me was the guy who was the front of the centipede saying in subtitles something like "Oh no. I HAVE TO TAKE A SHIT".

Hara-Kiri (the new Takashi Miike one and the original of course) is great. Very depressing but great.

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Sat May 10, 2014 8:20 pm
by matt
"The 100% medically accurate" claim seemed really ridiculous. I think someone called the director on it, and he said the back 2 could survive if they were on IVs, which I guess makes sense but it seems like a bit of a cop out. hahah

I liked his "dreihund" (German for three dog). hahaha The real question is what the hell is Tom Six going to do for Human Centipede part 3. hahah

I added Hara-Kiri to my netflix queue. I look forward to it, although I haven't really been in the mood for depressing stuff as of late...

Re: Outlast: Whistleblower DLC impressions

Posted: Mon May 26, 2014 11:20 pm
by Harry Sunderland
I just recently got Outlast for $4.99 and enjoyed it decent enough. I'm wondering if I should spend nearly twice that for the DLC, or if I should just hope that gets super cheap someday. Do you guys think so?

My best friend and I watch the Human Centipede series, mainly just because it exists. One time we were driving home from a Weezer concert, and he made a comment so vile and disgusting that all five of us in the car agreed that this was the only time we could watch Human Centipede. So we promptly went to his house and watched it.

And then when it came out we watched the sequel. I'm excited for the third just because Mr. Six has said that the movie will have a strangely happy ending, and all three films will be connected like a centipede. What a dumb bastard.