What kind of person would you be in the face of a disaster that’s beyond explanation? Would you help distressed neighbors and open your home even to sketchy-looking strangers in the hope that there’s strength in numbers, or go it alone regardless of how heavily the odds are stacked against you? Would you still brush your teeth every day?
The horror in Francis Coulombe’s RPG Look Outside is all encompassing. There is the cosmic element: something incomprehensible is happening beyond the walls of your apartment building and it’s in your best interest to not even look outside, let alone go there. And as you quickly learn, anyone who has looked or been outside is transformed in unimaginable ways, making for some extreme (and extraordinarily creative) body horror. But in much of the game leading up to its multiple climactic endings, the unease also stems from how it makes you look inside — at the choices you’ve made and the person you’ve become in order to survive.
Despite trying to take an empathetic approach, I still found myself in situations that left my character (and me) wracked with guilt. There is a gnawing sense of doubt that grows over the course of the game, repeatedly making me question whether I’d, say, made a bad call and been too quick to kill that neighbor whose entire head is teeth, or if my hand was really forced into making a very upsetting sacrifice.
After a while, the most unnerving thing is looking in the mirror. And you have to do that a lot in this game, because hygiene affects your stats.
It all begins with your character, Sam (you can change the name, if you want), waking up after a strange dream with a strong urge to look outside. You are immediately given the choice between satisfying your curiosity and listening to your gut, and you’ll find yourself grappling with that dilemma time and time again.
At this point, you also meet Sybil, the mysterious next-door neighbor who only speaks to you through the wall, with one glaring eyeball peering out of a large crack. Sybil, whom it’s unclear if you should trust, tells you that everything will blow over in 15 days if you just wait it out. You need to scavenge for resources if you’re going to make it that long, though, and once you leave your apartment and get a chance to talk to some other neighbors, you may decide you want to take a more active role in getting to the bottom of the catastrophe.
Some neighbors, particularly a few robed amateur astronomers who appear to be in a cult, seem to know quite a bit about what’s going on, and it’s insinuated that doing tasks for them will help you figure out the how and why of the phenomena around you. Others are more focused on addressing their immediate needs and will try to rope you into their causes: locating missing people, picking up laundry, cleaning the messes left behind by eldritch horrors, etc. There’s a full on war happening somewhere in the building, which you can choose to play a part in if you’re so inclined. Your landlord will unsurprisingly still demand you pay him rent despite the circumstances.
If you choose to play in Normal mode, like I did, Sybil is your only save point, so you’ll have to return home regularly. Easy mode autosaves.
All interactions are turn-based, and as you explore the apartment building, you’ll run into tons of enemies and potential allies — but the line between the two isn’t always easy to distinguish. Sometimes you can only attack or try to escape, which answers the question for you, but other times, you have the opportunity to talk and ask questions. The turn-based nature allows you to take a moment and evaluate each new encounter, but there’s always an air of ambiguity about everyone’s trustworthiness. Even when you’re back at your apartment, where you can shower, rest, do some cooking and crafting, and play video games, people will come along and knock on your door, and you’ll have to make up your mind about whether you should let them in.
The thing is, surviving can be pretty difficult once you really get going if you’re on your own. Enemies will outnumber and overpower you. That’s where it becomes helpful to have a few allies. With as many as three other people in your party, the scale tips heavily in your favor. I took the trusting approach, for better or worse. This resulted in me having a pretty solid group of fighters on my side, but a pair of those same allies kicked me out of my own bedroom and complained about my cooking.
The creature designs come disgustingly, beautifully alive in the pixel art style. Body horror can be really hard to stomach, and something is often lost for me in the process of consuming it when it’s intended to seem realistic — either because I’m hiding behind my hands and only taking tiny peeks through my fingers, or because it ends up achieving the opposite effect and just looks ridiculous without meaning to. But Coulombe’s art equally embraces the horrifying and the absurd, and the effect of that balance is powerful.
Nothing was ever so disturbing that I couldn’t look straight at it, but there were certainly moments that gave me a genuine scare or made my skin crawl. Even the characters that aren’t being transformed, like the protagonist, look a little grotesque, which adds to how unsettling everything feels. But just when the dread would reach a fever pitch, something overtly silly would be thrown in almost as if to splash some cold water on the whole thing and say, yes this is the apocalypse but we’re still human, we still have a sense of humor.
So much of the joy of playing this game is discovering all the tricks it has up its sleeve, so I won’t get into any descriptions of bosses, puzzles or the building itself, other than to say that the latter has a whole House of Leaves thing going on that is unbelievably frustrating at times, but in a way that only adds to the brilliance of it all. There is no map to guide you, either. The soundtrack, composed by Eric Shumaker, keeps in perfect step with every emotion the environment evokes, and I could probably write an entire separate review about how good it is.
All of this builds up to an absolute cosmic gut-punch of an ending (or endings, there are several) that completely changed the way I felt about the game up until that point. In the end, it becomes something much, much bigger than it once seemed, and the feelings were almost overwhelming. I can’t stop thinking about it.
By now I’ve played Look Outside many hours beyond what a typical run would be, just picking apart every detail and turning over every stone to try and figure out all the secrets, reach all the conclusions. I have died in all sorts of strange ways, and lived to see wildly different fates pan out.
I went into this only with the expectation of cool art and a relatively unique approach to survival horror, and came away shook from what turned out to be one of the best cosmic horror games I’ve played in a while, maybe ever. Look Outside, published by Devolver Digital, is only available on Steam for now, but I sure hope it makes its way to other platforms soon so more people can experience it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/look-outside-is-an-unexpected-cosmic-horror-masterpiece-that-shook-me-to-the-core-171542211.html?src=rss
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