Becoming a Critic

Outlast

So in the hour I spent watching someone else play this game, because there is so much wrong with it, I refuse to play. Allow me to go in detail about these key points in which made this, a bad game. I apologize in advance for those who found this a good game. I have this set up to go over each of the topics from my second blog about the elements of games. This is how I will break it down plus I need to say some things about graphics after. Alright, here we go..

Player

To start, this character you play really shouldn't have forgotten their inhaler, they have such a hard time breathing this whole game. Aside from that annoyance in your ear every two seconds, the design for the player is very primitive. There is no back story or really any game story describing the character. It's a single player game which right there is a big turn off for most people since they want to play games with friends. I can see how this can be played with friends, you have one person walk through the game while everyone watches since realistically the only gameplay feature is jump scares. The designers might have set the player up like this to make it more relative to the people playing and more immersive.  

Objective

The player's objective is a linear progression and very poorly marked during my experience with the game. When I watched the hour of gameplay, the goals were as followed: explore asylum, access security room, escape asylum, turn power back on, turn on gas pumps and breaker, and then at this point I wasn't sure what the next goal was. So there was a total of three objective types: Escape, Exploration, and Solution. Not very fun when there isn't many objective types such as GTA5 where they incorporate many objective types. The designer should have added at least construction to this horror game like Dead Rising has.  

Procedure

So basically for the procedure of this game, you can't fight back, all you can do is run and hide. I can't say much about the controls and how they feel since I didn't actually play the game myself but from what I saw it looked like they were pretty generic. Throughout the game there is minimal interaction between anything other than the environment. If the designer's were going to do that, they should have made it more like Assassin's Creed, where the environment is a challenge. Instead they just had tables you can hurdle, doors you can interact with, and tight vertical spaces to squeeze through.

Rules

With the rules in this game, you had to follow the instructions provided at the bottom of the screen to win the game. While doing this you need to avoid hostile NPC's. However, they don't make it clear which NPC's are hostile or neutral in the game. This was quite frustrating in some parts since you would be under the impression you can't get through a section of the level because of what looks to be a group of hostile NPC's who are just hanging out watching snow on the TV. There were also batteries in the game you needed if you didn't want to play the game with your monitor on full brightness.

Resources

Moving from rules, the only resource you had, aside from the tolerance level of a god to play this game, was the batteries. You had additional pickups like security key cards and such but they weren't really a resource you collected for supplies to aid you in the continuation of the game. I think they added batteries for the video camera, rather than just always having battery, was to add an additional level of fear. Fortunately when I watched the game it seemed there was an abundance of full AA batteries just laying around this nut house. I'm pleased the designers did that or else I probably couldn't handle an hour of watching a black screen.

Conflict

The conflict in this game was minimal. There was no conflict for the first 35 minutes of gameplay. Then there was finally one guy who shows up when you're in the security room. Later there is one guy who wants you dead down in the basement where the power is. It was almost as boring as Slenderman. When there was conflict, the game had you running from it and hiding in a locker or under a bed. Even if you caught you simply got a slap on the wrists and then you're free to continue wondering this asylum. The designers made the game too easy with a very shallow learning curve. This causes the game to be very boring, even if the purpose of the game is to be scary. Gears of War 1 was a scary game with a great learning curve, conflict, etc.

Boundaries

These limits in this game very extremely limiting. There was not very much play space in this asylum. This can come from poor design of the level. There were even boundaries for visibility which is no fun. However, they designed it like this for the player to build anxiety and a level of fear while playing this game.

Outcome

There is so much uncertainty in this game it drove me crazy just watching. Why it drove me crazy? Because it was for what I needed to do! It wasn't for when they were going to try and jump scare me. In fact, it was quite the opposite! You'd see a door with a trail of blood going into it, door slightly open, the level is designed so it's the only way you can go, so if I was playing, I would just sit there and go, "NOPE! not going in there, too spooky." and uninstall the game. When I completed objectives for the game I felt little satisfaction.

In conclusion, the design of the game could have had some more time put into it for certain aspects where they were weak, such as conflict, and outcome. They really need to add more interactions with the hostile NPC's. The game's design would also be improved if the objectives were more clear and the jump scares were less obvious.