Of all the ways The Outlast Trials could have been conceived,  I don’t think folks expected it to be as a coop-run-based meta-progression early access game.

I admit to some reservation when I learned this would be the case, as I feared that what made Outlast so scary would be lost in the ringing tinnitus in my ears left behind by my screaming friends as they ran for their lives, or the incurable cackling that would come when we ambush and inevitably outsmart the AI killers.

I can say that both of these instances were the case, and yet Outlast Trials subverted my expectations and, at least upon initial impressions, appears to be a thoughtful, smart, and scary take on coop horror with some room to grow.

Set during the Cold War, The Outlast Trials sees your anonymous protagonist abducted after perusing a job found on a flyer posted in a back alley. The shady organization is none other than our favorite Murkoff Corp, and we get to experience some of the events that lead up to our stay at Mount Massive in Outlast, and Temple Gate in Outlast 2.

This game revels in psychological conditioning and manipulation ala MK Ultra. You’re brought into a testing compound where you partake in “Trials” that work to systematically remove what it is that makes you a person. Murkoff is trying to wipe away the person within the body, leaving a blank slate for unrepentant violence and indulgences of one’s most basic urges. It’s an interesting premise, and Red Barrels leave enough unanswered to prod questions as to the bigger picture.

This is where the gameplay comes in. You and up to three others are sent into staged “Trials” with objectives like restarting generations, finding (yucky) keys, and pushing chair-bound victims to their gruesome deaths. All while avoiding marquee killers and generic villains armed with machetes or human-oriented hallucinogenic pesticides.

This is the bulk of the gameplay as you slowly navigate these environments with your team, scavenging around for health drinks and lockpicks, all whilst trying to outsmart and out-maneuver a suite of Murkoff-branded psychopaths. One thing that I noticed immediately is that the feel of Outlast is still well-intact. You move around with the same intentional care as previous Outlast protagonists, ducking low behind boxes or knifing through a door and slamming the deadbolt closed behind you before darting beneath a desk. The night vision is immediately recognizable, and the way you stealth around does not feel compromised or altered because of its coop nature.

There are still some good scares to be had here! An unexpected visit from a hand-puppet-wielding killer as you peer around a corner never fails to startle, and being forced with the choice to either break down a blocked door and alert the killer, or take the long way around leads to lots of tense moment-to-moment decision-making. Do I run back to help my friend skirt the killer?  Or do I focus on tracking down the key to progress?  Do I hoard the health drinks, or the batteries to recharge my night vision? There’s lots of good stuff here. Survival horror is always at its best when it asks something of the player, when there are consequences to your choices, and there are plenty of moment-to-moment choices in Outlast Trials that are bigger than just “Do I hide in the closet or under the bed?”

This is furthered by the Rig System. In Outlast Trials you’re equipped with customizable Rigs that allow you to further specialize into a role. You can play a healer with a rechargeable area-of-affect heal, or support with temporary X-ray vision to detect enemies or items, or even a more indirect-offense role by placing mines to stun enemies. These all of course come with stat upgrades and unlocks that modify your role in between matches, unlocked by currency earned based on performance in Trial.

You take this currency back to the Murkoff staging area, where you can customize your character and your room. What’s on offer here is…fine? Standard pants and shirts of varying colors and models,  and some changes to your night vision goggles all help to differentiate you from the other players running around the lobby and there is some depth to the carpets, wallpapers, and decor you litter about your personal sleeping quarters. It’s novel to run around the dorms and look through the window of other players’ rooms to see their digs. These unlocks are hidden until you reach the appropriate rank, so I wonder what long-term investment Red Barrels expects from players in the customization space.  There are some rare and expensive outfits to unlock but they’re so far all so garish and gimp-suit-esq I’m not sure what the draw is. So far, there are no microtransactions for cosmetics, but it seems reasonable to expect them upon full release.

At the time of writing, there are three main Trials in the game. A police station, a grizzly fun park, and an orphanage. The main Trials for each one are longer, curated affairs that can take over an hour to complete your first attempt. These environments are beautifully grotesque, with corpses and limbs in every single room, as if the gore was a design choice to layout in each room. Bodies hang from the rafters, heads float in toilets, and torsos lie around like throw pillows. Outlast knows what kind of horror it’s going for, and it revels in its gratuitous gore. There are a few who see this excess as a detriment to the game, it’s in bad taste or it’s overboard. I disagree. I respect just about any story that commits to its bit. Outlast wants to desensitize you to the gore, it wants to reduce people to their most primal forms, it wants to inundate you in depravity in the name of science–and it does all that.  It commits.

The environments themselves are wonderfully labyrinthine, with locked doors, breakable barricades, shutters that open up switchback shortcuts, and many, many hiding places. There are nooks and crannies with hidden items everywhere you look and just when I’m tucked into the deepest, darkest corner I always notice some gorey set dressing there, expectantly waiting for someone to spot it. There’s much joy to be found in finding yourself separated from your team, with the thumping footfalls of a killer somewhere nearby. My friend and I turned off all HUD elements while playing, and we often found ourselves calling out which horribly mutilated corpse we were hiding behind to locate one another. The level design is one of the highlights of the game so far.

These more intentional levels are followed up by challenge runs that modify things like objectives, map layout, enemy density, and traps. It’s an economical way to reuse maps and the alterations to the levels make for nice shake-ups, but this is where The Outlast Trials began to show the marks of its early access debut.

While the presentation is at the same high bar that Red Barrels has set for its full releases, there’s not enough depth to the game in its current form. There are only three main levels, and even within those levels, there’s not enough variation between runs to keep the game feeling fresh.

For example, the killers all behave in the same pursuing manner, the same gas pipes burst as you walk past, and the same shock traps litter the floor despite the modifiers to the runs. You quickly see all the tricks that The Outlast Trials has to offer in its current form. I hope to see more unique events, random surprises, killers, or alterations to runs to make them truly different from one another. It was a surprise a few hours in when I saw an otherwise unremarkable killer become outfitted with a rig and night vision just like me, which required I change up my tactics to survive when suddenly sitting in a dark corner wasn’t ineffective.  I’d have loved to see more twists like that, but as it stands the killers mostly function the same as one another, leading to some staleness.

We quickly learned the limitations of the killers, and there was little to no risk in one of us simply grabbing attention and running away while the others worked on the objective. The killers will only pursue so far and can easily be lost behind one or two slammed doors, allowing you to game the AI even more. Death is pretty infrequent, so the real risk is being pushed off the goal for a moment, rather than expending resources or risking a wipe.

This does not change as you progress in the Trials objective. Whether I’m on my first goal of sawing a man’s legs off, or my third goal of restarting the generators in the basement, there is virtually no escalation in terms of threats from the enemies. No new monsters join the fray, and those that wander the map only stay in their respective areas. The final task of calling back the shuttle out of the Trial sees all enemies on the map converging to stop you which is a great, tense, and seriously dangerous, but moments like that are few and far between.  I’d have loved to see more dynamic development in the Trials that forced your team to re-calibrate.

Outside of setting some very easy-to-avoid traps, the killers never try to outsmart you in any way. They’re content to simply patrol their zones and chase when they spot you. I’d love to see them close and lock doors you’ve opened, board up windows and close off hallways or something to throw a wrench in your plans and force you to change up your tactics. Hopefully, as The Outlast Trials develops, some revisions to the way in which the killers operate will be included.

Along with the depth of content being a drawback, the storytelling within the game is related to seemingly randomly placed notes you can find while in a Trial. Back in your shared community space, you can view them to uncover details as to the origins of Murkoff and the events that you experience in-game, but I would love to see some more direct narrative tied to the Trials as the game expands. I understand story taking a backseat is a conceit that comes with a game of this style, but I think it would go a long way in fleshing out the world you inhabit, and give some greater context to the viscera you’re sifting through.

Despite all the hallmarks of an Early Access title being on display, Outlast Trials proves a successful concept and a stable platform to launch from. One that sees you and your friends sneaking for your lives while working together to solve simple puzzles, evade killers, and escape. Time will tell if a coop Outlast game has legs to run with, but hopefully, Red Barrells fleshes out the depth of content while adding new surprises to keep the horror and tension high for long-term players.