In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2024, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We’ll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
As someone who is perpetually anxious about what might be lurking in the dark, or around a corner, or even in the comfort of my own home, The Outlast Trials isn’t a game you’d recommend I play. I jump at the slightest of noises and yelp as I do so, but that hasn’t stopped me from spending hours upon hours in the Murkov facility facing otherworldly horrors that would paralyse me in fear if I saw them in real life. I’ve even gone one step further and forced friends to embark on this twisted adventure with me, and my maniacal laughter has met their screams of terror across Discord. Until I’m the one being targeted, of course.
The trials you go through are nothing short of horrific. It took me an embarrassing amount of hours to make it through the first one, ‘Kill the Snitch’, which forces you to drag a person tied to a chair with a bag over their head through a police station. Along the way you have to rummage in the corpses of what I can only assume are prisoners or people who tried to complete the trial before you to find keys that unlock the doors blocking your progression. That alone is bad enough, but a series of monstrous mutants are unleashed while you’re running around trying to find a body marked with the same symbol as the key you need to find.
I swear, I spent more time hiding in bins than I did helping my team solve the puzzles to get through the trial. At one point, I’m convinced, the enemies had eyes exclusively for me. Every time I felt brave enough to sneak out of my hiding spot, I immediately got rushed by several mutants wielding a variety of weapons, who left me to bleed out and beg my teammates to come and bandage me up. This became a routine across all the trials we completed, but I found a lot of confidence in basically directing my teammates where I wanted them to go from the comfort of my hiding place, which probably wasn’t a positive for them but certainly was for me.
But it’s not just about the trials. These are what you’re tempted to jump straight into once you enter the facility, and they’re the thing you think about constantly when you’ve eventually shut the game down for the night. But the one thing that I love most about The Outlast Trials are the games around the lobby that give me some well-needed downtime after I’ve been petrified in the last run by the skinner man or, god forbid, Mother Gooseberry. There’s arm-wrestling, which is basically a test of your reaction time and I don’t quite understand how I keep winning, a good old-fashioned game of chess, or a game of Stroop which I quickly realised was my true calling.
Stroop puts you and a friend face to face in front of a mass of screens and presents the challenge of matching the colour being said over the loudspeaker with the colour on the screen in front of you. But to make it harder, the font colour of the words written in front of you is also different. It’s like a brain training exercise, and I spent a lot of time as a kid playing games like this, so it’s no wonder I walked in and wiped the floor with whoever was brave enough to take me on. I was no longer needed for trials, this minigame was where my skills shined.
Despite my fears about whatever we were coming up against, as someone who doesn’t play a lot of multiplayer games, finally having one which I feel constantly compelled to come back to is a wonderful change. Sure, I’ve had nightmares about puppets with drill-bit tongues, or being grabbed from a hiding spot and electrocuted before running for my life, but I do truly love the experience The Outlast Trials offers. As twisted as it is, I can’t imagine my drive to keep running each trial to get the best grade or beat it in record time will cease any time soon.
