The Outlast Trials Review: Bananas, Brutal, and Best With Friends
Outlast's co-op horror game throws you into six grisly trials where you can't fight back. It's tense, shocking, and a blast with friends, though it ends before you're ready.
Heads up before we start: The Outlast Trials is the most mature game we've ever covered. It's a gore-heavy horror game for adults, with mutilation, nudity, and some truly horrific environments. We'll keep this review family-friendly, but if you're sensitive to disturbing content, this one is not for you.
What It Is
The Outlast Trials is a multiplayer horror game set in the Cold War, where a shady corporation drafts you as a human guinea pig to test brainwashing and mind control. Your morals, endurance, and sanity are all on the table. Up to three players work through a series of trials, each with an objective to complete and plenty of people trying to kill you along the way. The best comparison we could find is a video game version of *Saw*: you're dropped into a test, and you finish it if you want to live.
None of us had played an Outlast game before this one, and gore usually isn't what scares us in a horror game. That turned out not to matter. The Trials keeps the series' willingness to go all the way, then adds a squad of friends.
Why We Keep Saying "Bananas"
When we tried to pin down this game's hook, we landed on one word: bananas. The objectives are the wildest part. The game hands you atrocities and dresses them up as heroic deeds, so you cleanse this, fix that, and cringe the whole way through. One minute you're pushing a prisoner in a wheelchair toward an execution room. Another time you're making drugs, poisoning them, and smuggling them across the border in ways we won't describe here. Even the tutorial left us stunned.
The surprise doesn't fade, either. Every trial tops the one before it.
As crazy as I thought the next section would be, they always outdid my anticipation.
How It Plays
The big rule is that you can't fight back. A thrown brick or glass bottle will stun an enemy for a second, and that's it. The rest of the time you're running, hiding, and sneaking, and that helplessness is exactly what makes it so tense. The killers are smart. If you duck into a room and vanish, they check under the bed, under the desk, and inside the lockers. Sometimes someone is already hiding in the spot you picked, and they'll leap out at you.
Sound matters too. Broken glass and hanging cans give you away, and the longer you take on a trial, the more bad guys show up. An ominous alarm sounds, a new enemy joins the level, and you realize you can't take your sweet time. Meanwhile you're working through puzzle-like objectives: finding keys (one was buried in a corpse), turning on generators, or following the right colored pipe through a maze while a decoy sends someone after you. If a teammate goes down, reviving them takes a long time and usually gets you spotted. Leading a killer away so a friend can finish the job is a highlight.
We got frustrated at times that we couldn't punch back, but it adds a huge amount to the dread. Letting us fight would have drained the suspense and panic out of every level.
Progression and Psychosis
After the first trial, you unlock gear and perks. Options include a stun grenade, a door barricade, and an area heal, plus perks that let you slide under obstacles or barge through doors. Everything sits on long cooldowns, but when you're out of heals, an upgrade feels like finding water in the desert. The drawback is timing. Big upgrades arrive late for a game this short, and by the time you have them you've nearly beaten everything.
The best system is psychosis. You have three sanity bars, and getting hit with psychosis gas (or opening the wrong cabinet) drains them. Lose enough and you start hallucinating. Then the Skinner Man shows up and hunts you. You can't hide from him, you can only run. It's great, and it's why we all jumped when we least expected it.
I'm still recovering from the trauma this game has inflicted on me.
The Look, the Sound, and the Hub
For a horror game, this thing looks fantastic. The sound is just as good, from footsteps on broken glass to your friends getting beaten up somewhere in the background. Between trials you return to a prison-like hub with a working chess table, an arm wrestling mini-game, a leaderboard, and a place to change your look. The arm wrestling is a timing game, and it got more competitive than it had any right to.
Length and What Holds It Back
There are six trials, and each takes roughly 45 minutes to an hour. The latest one, the drug-running trial, was added after launch, and the developers are still adding more. That fits what Josh called "live service with an end." But it's also where the game stumbles. The trials feel like separate missions rather than a connected story, and the ending is flat. A final trial remixes the earlier ones and then lets you "go free," but there's no real finale. All three of us finished and said, "That was a lot of fun. See you later." We wanted more levels, more bad guys, and a proper send-off.
Is It Scary?
Yes, though maybe not how you'd guess.
Blood and guts and gore don't scare me that much. It's the suspense horror, the calm silence before an exploding storm that gets me every time.
The game gets this right. Even with friends on the same call, it still manages to be scary.
When a multiplayer horror game still manages to be scary with your friends, that means it's doing it right.
The VGP Take
The Outlast Trials is not for everyone. It's for adults who want something extreme, and we'd only recommend it to players 18 and over. It's best with friends on a Discord call, screaming for help. Matchmaking will pair you with strangers, but we don't think it's the same without people you know. It's short, the story never really lands, and the upgrades come late. But it commits to the horror harder than almost any game we've played, and the trials are unforgettable. It's the kind of game we'll still be recommending a year from now to anyone who says they want something different.
If you love horror and have a couple of friends who can handle it, this is a wild ride. If you want a deep story or a long campaign, know what you're getting into first.