Nothing Else Does What The Outlast Trials Does
Outlast Trials Review
What makes a good co-operative game?
Long ago, co-op experiences were tacked on modes in single player games aimed at giving your younger sibling something to do while you had control of the console. These modes were often worse, stripped, limited versions of the premier experience.
I distinctly remember playing Ratchet Deadlocked for the PS2 which was one of the first games in the series to support a fully co-operative story mode.
Anyone who grew up in the days of plugged in controllers can tell you how limiting co-op experiences were.
Firstly your game, which normally had a full square video output window, had to be split in twain. Rendering the camera space to a mere tiny rectangle either horizontally or vertically.
Not only was this frustrating, but also headache inducing. My brother and I literally scooting closer to the TV to parse the preposterously portioned screen partitions.
Screen size was not the only problem co-op faced.
In this version of Ratchet Deadlocked our characters are bound together by a literal sensor beam. Should either one of us stray too far from the other a timer is triggered. This timer counts down and upon hitting zero it causes the device binding us to explode and the mission to restart.
This is both an extremely frustrating limitation, and a harsh punishment for something so arbitrary. Of course with hindsight I know now that the game was under intense technical hardware limitations.
Think about how tough it is for the PS2 to render anything on screen. Think about the intense hardware limitations developers had to work with in the late PS2 era.
By the end of the PS2 era developers had become masters of their craft. Literal magicians of optimization able to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the ancient hardware they were forced to work under. Now imagine having to render the same scene twice, or worse. Having to render two scenes at the same time.
I bring this up to show how far games really have come. When this game came out I remember it being the pinnacle of co-op. My brother and I were so excited to be able to experience the campaign together that the frustrations were merely that. Never bad enough to stop us from playing.
The other reason I bring this up is because Ratchet Deadlocked is either directly or indirectly where outlast trials derives a lot of it’s co-op DNA from.
For its time it had a lot of shockingly progressive elements that continue to persist in games even today.
For one it had ratchet return to a hub where you bought upgrades that made future missions easier.
It had all of its story missions selectable and replayable from a menu to allow for grinding if a new mission was too hard.
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It contained harder challenge versions of missions for additional achievement content.
This is not the first game to contain all these elements. The first and biggest game that comes to mind is Diablo. But what’s unique is that Ratchet Deadlocked takes this formula and does it in a 3rd person story action framework.
I’m not trying to skip over any game intentionally. I believe a lot of these games were made during the PS2 era. The next notable game that I want to mention is Left 4 Dead.
This series followed up on the co-op replayable story formula without the major meta-progression elements. Plus it being from the legendary game developer Valve makes it one of the most widely played series. The story the game follows is not the most in depth story, but it did a lot for the time.
Left 4 Dead would spawn it’s own wave of spin offs like Warhammer Vermintide, and Back 4 Blood but even this genre is niche compared to genre titans like Team Deathmatch shooters and Battle Royales.
These days games tend to lean farther away from the left 4 dead style though where players play through strictly linear story experiences and more into more repeatable sandbox environments like those of Monster Hunter, Warframe, and Helldivers 2.
Which is why I have been truly amazed with what Outlast Trials attempted to do. To which I would say they’ve succeeded near flawlessly.
So what does Outlast Trials do? Outlast Trials is a multiplayer co-op horror game where you and up to four other friends play through any number of things that could be considered story missions in other horror games. The maps and the story events are all fixed and are usually a lot of fun to play through for the first time.
The truly remarkable catch is that the puzzles, the traps, and the amount of mission objectives are procedural and based on player count and difficulty. You can load into a mission hundreds of times and get a generally unique experience every time.
I would know because I replayed each mission for at least 50 hours on launch in order to max out a character in the meta-progression.
This mission randomization, plus the fully built out story missions, plus the meta-progression revolving around cosmetics and player buffs creates an experience that is unlike any other co-op experience out there.
If you haven’t played it I recommend you give it a shot!
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