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If you're going to copy a game, why not copy Amnesia: The Dark Descent? Frictional's 2010 reductionist horror classic practically reinvented the genre that went from eerily unnerving slow burns like Silent Hill and Resident Evil to dimly lit shooters with a bunch of gory monsters, like the later Resident Evils or the Dead Space series. Amnesia realised these games are a lot scarier when you can't fight back, yet aside from Slender and the upcoming Amnesia sequel, A Machine For Pigs, we haven't seen many games follow suit.The upcoming survival horror game Outlast continues this minimalist approach to terror, and if all it did was shamelessly rip off Frictional's flagship title, I would probably be okay with it. But the ex-Assassins Creed and Splinter Cell devs at developer Red Barrels don't want to simply be a me-too encore for that beloved series, and the new studio seeks to put its own spin on this Amnesia-eque brand of horror.
This doesn't come through in the demo, though. Standing in a curtained off both donning sound proof headphones at PAX East, I played through about 20 minutes of an early section of Outlast. Assuming the role of a reporter breaking into an asylum where something's gone horribly wrong feels very familiar after Frictional's classic. Instead of a Victorian manor you've got a modern day insane asylum, and instead of finding oil to illuminate your lantern you scrounge for batteries to power your camera's night vision mode, but it otherwise feels remarkably similar as you skulk through relatively linear corridors in first-person while terrifying shrieks serve as a constant reminder that danger lurks just around the corner.
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