You can hide under beds or in wardrobes, but there’re also oil drums, confessional booths, tall grass patches, small rivers, and cornfields which you can find a shred of refuge in. Even when the game becomes more enclosed towards the end, you’re still easy pickings for the murderous foes. With the environment being bigger, and with Blake being so exposed, you’re much more on edge knowing one of these freaks can attack from any direction. You have no way to fight against these religious fanatics, and your only option is to run and hide. From the very start you’re terrified, alone, and completely vulnerable to everything.

Outlast 2 delivers on survival horror in every sense. The more you play the game, the more these flashbacks become as terrifying as the occurrences in the main story thread, as the school you find yourself in goes full on Kubrick, and a deadly game of cat and mouse ensues. You’re also thrust into various flashbacks at a high school in the 90s, unclear how it relates to the main story until the end. Not only are you on your own, you’re at the mercy of an evil, murderous cult, the members of which have no quarrel with slicing your throat or stabbing you a hundred times over with a rusty knife. You play as Blake Langermann, a cameraman and investigative journalist who’s left alone following a helicopter crash that leaves you separated from your wife, Lynn. There is no asylum this time around, and the claustrophobic terror felt in the original has been expanded to the Arizona desert, as you investigate the disappearance of a missing pregnant woman. Why would anyone want to put themselves through this amount of stress and torture? For the game’s ten hour campaign, I’d seen so much gore, violence, and sexual depravity, along with suffering through countless chases and pitiless attacks that I kept wondering why anyone would choose to play this. With my nerves threadbare and my mind disturbed, I tried to formulate some thoughts on what I had just played, but all I could see was the horror of those final moments – those lasting images from the things I’d seen, and holy shit, did I feel affected.

As the credits rolled on Outlast 2, I was shaking.

Outlast 2 trailer