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Outlast carries a camera into the dark on PS4
It's easy to see, right away, why Sony went after former Ubisoft developers Red Barrels to get their indie game, Outlast, on the PlayStation 4. Not only is the horror/exploration game atmospheric and frightening, but it's a great showcase for the hardware. In Outlast, you play a reporter who brings a video camera to an old abandoned asylum, in search of a story. The game is seen through your digital camera's lens, both as you wander through the empty hallways and when you flip on the terrifying black-and-white night vision filter. Through the eyes of that camera, the whole game looks like a recovered snuff film of sorts, where you serve as both cameraman and victim. The motion and style of the game are both realistic, and sometimes (or often, depending on your tolerance for such things) disturbingly so. The camera's digital artifacts and heads-up display help sell the excellent graphics, and the whole experience found my scaredy-cat brain constantly having to remind myself that what I was seeing wasn't real.%Gallery-191382%
What's in a Name: Red Barrels
David Chateauneuf and Philippe Morin are both ex-Ubisoft guys who always wanted to make a horror game but couldn't while employed by the French publisher. Now the two have struck out on their own to form Red Barrels, an independent studio currently working on the Unreal-powered Outlast. We asked them how they could possibly come up with such an original name as Red Barrels."Actually, coming up with the name was one of the hardest things. Doing the trailer was pretty easy and straightforward, but agreeing upon the name was harder than we expected. We had to do lists and votes and stuff like that. Eventually it just came down to what everybody was cool with. And also I guess we thought that it would give us an opportunity to do something cool visually. So it was basically going through a list, voting and what everyone felt comfortable with, we went with that."In response to that, I asked if Red Barrels was a democratic studio – a decision by committee kind of outfit."We have a pretty flat structure – I wouldn't say it's democratic, but pretty close to it." Outlast is launching sometime in 2013 on PC (Steam) through an agreement with Valve. Like this feature? Be sure to check out the What's in a Name Archives.
Outlast draws inspiration from Amnesia, blends stealth and horror
Red Barrels is an entirely new studio hard at work on its first game, Outlast. So far we've only seen a brief teaser, suggesting a spooky setting in a derelict asylum full of deranged individuals. Today we get an extended glimpse at Outlast courtesy of the video above.Outlast is a first-person horror game built in Unreal, with some survival-horror mixed in with exploratory elements, chase sequences and some action segments. When I asked Red Barrels co-founders Philippe Morin and David Chateauneuf for a bit more specificity, they told me that Outlast will focus on stealth – and that it is influenced in some part by Amnesia.
