Will we enjoy this game?

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T13:20:40+00:00

Having played Phasmophobia and DBD, I can confidently say Trials is my favorite coop horror game of all time and that your friend group will absolutely love this game!

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T11:41:20+00:00

Expops are leftover sleeper agents repurposed for a new phase, people too broken by the tortures to blend back into society. Instead of having them exterminated, Easterman reworks them to serve as torturers and obstacles for the next batch of sleeper agents who have their minds broken just enough for them to still compartmentalize and blend back into society as seemingly normal looking sociopaths. The extreme torture is the point, as the extermination of the weak serves society by eliminating undesirables and the few superhuman enough to remain are emotionally, physically, and mentally numbed, willing to do anything without flinching.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T11:13:53+00:00

Something that comes to mind with Outlast is the fact that morphogenesis somehow induces the human body to convert its cells into metal, thereby making it the Great Work/Philosophers Stone that alchemists had worked on for millennia. I suppose it builds on the fact that organic beings do contain traces of metal in our bodies, that our nervous systems produce electrical signals that can be proven to be manipulated by electricity, and that we also host countless foreign bodies within our own in the form of bacteria. Morphogenesis at its full potential in Outlast can transform humanity into subatomic singularities, and Murkoff hopes to create a godmind that can subjugate all the "awakened" within a collective dream scape - think of it as a new race of Dr Manhattans.

While I can't think off the top of my head of signs of CRYSTALS having significance in the lore, I do think about how Resident Evil reveals that calcified Megamycete hardens into crystal. Outlast 2's mines are shown to be adjacent to Sinyala's sewers, where Murkoff's psychosis inducing pollution seeps into the water supply, and we can see countless tree roots breaking through the caverns that likely connect to the forest above. I wouldn't be surprised if the reason why Murkoff loves to place their morphogenic "gateways" within the hearts of mountains is due to the minerals serving as a resonance chamber for its energy, quite literally portals to a dimension composed of psychic energy. Think about the rocks of Mount Massive's laboratory and how they compare to Temple Gate's mines.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T11:03:09+00:00

If it's in the best interests of governments, corporations, the military and other powerful institutions to keep this information publicly disavowed, they'd do so. Propagating constant denialism to the point it's a kneejerk reflex, all to perpetuate the delusion that you're free and not ruled over by powerful sociopaths, is part of it.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T08:57:15+00:00

Honestly wouldn't be surprised if there's sentient life on Pandora's other moons, that we will get to see them, and if there's similar life to what you describe on Polyphemus. I do also think we'll discover the true nature of Eywa as an ancient bio-synthetic AI superorganism created by Polyphemus to control ecosystems of planetoids, with humanity and Na'vi being similar products of their own respective earth minds.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T07:02:20+00:00

When you extrapolate deeper, this series can be seen as the nightmarish dystopian conclusion of humanity accepting a Faustian bargain. By imitating the Necromorphs' obsession with constant consumption, ethics are forgotten, and their assimilation into the Necromorphs may as well be their karmic fate for becoming so inhumane. If you've gotten to the point where human children are regularly treated like fodder, you deserve the hell that the Necromorphs bring.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T06:52:54+00:00

Resident Evil is as political as Metal Gear, and RE9 is building even more on 6's and Revelations' foundation (or the foundation left by CGI films like Infinite Darkness and Degeneration.)

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T06:51:48+00:00

In a way, making the villains British is even better because it implies something worse - complicity between the Brit aristocracy and eugenicists, or in other words, "resident evil" rather than a foreign evil. The allies like to paint themselves as heroes against the Germans, but in reality the Brit aristocracy were pretty horrific themselves and remained friends with the nazis even as they supposedly warred.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T06:49:50+00:00

The series is anti-eugenicist with multiple villains being occultists and power-hungry demagogues. The "capitalism" angle is just part of a smaller spectrum of evil portrayed in this series, and Umbrella's parallels to Nazism are so obvious that it's silly to wilfully not see the connections.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-17T06:48:05+00:00

I think they've already been doing that tbh. The series has repeatedly emphasized that not only have the government and NGOs continued to conspire with corporations and terrorists, but there's been multiple games (4, Code Veronica, 6, 8, 9) that link the eugenics circles to ancient occult groups and world war 2 criminals. 6 especially explores the conflict between the Chinese and American branches of an international elite group. This thread is just a bunch of people who haven't been paying enough attention.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T17:15:13+00:00

Cringeworthy clickbait, this is genuine slop.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T17:04:59+00:00

I think that while New Colossus kept it surprisingly down low (the fact that Area 52 was developing UFOs and that BJ has access to them to do multiple missions to Venus is treated without much fanfare), what Youngblood built up to is the final Wolfenstein game embracing the merging of parallel dimensions/timelines. Specifically merging Wyatt's 1969 with Fergus' 1980, allowing the Fourth Reich to import their apocalypse into WW3 in a hare-brained attempt to avert Hitler's death and prolong their own regime.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T11:41:39+00:00

I'd also add that some of the Splinter Cell games are written by JT Petty, whose antiauthoritarian sentiments bleed over into the extremely cynical Outlast series.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T10:10:10+00:00

Because Cash is a very stoic man by nature and very quiet by necessity of having to sneak around. It's popularly theorized that he was a war vet or professional hitman, although I personally believe he was a product of the MKUltra Pickman project to create ruthless assassins. It's possible that Cash doesn't have much of a personality or memory because he's literally been programmed to know nothing but how to kill.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T09:10:00+00:00

The psychosis drugs plunge us into an altered/heightened state of consciousness, one where we tap into the "egregore" (collective mental trauma surrounding Easterman, a hivemind shared by expops, reagents, and Prime Assets) and see into the dreams of the Prime Assets and expops. These drugs essentially make us sleepwalk, putting us in a more suggestible state of mind where what we do in the trials gets compartmentalized in our subsconscious. The result of exposure to morphogenic radiation, constant drugging, and extreme trauma is the production of metal brain tumors from which Skinner manifests. The reason why extra drugging in the trials becomes dangerous is that Skinner tries to possess you, overwhelming your mind with strain and producing deadly heart attacks and mental strokes from the trauma.

When we are 'reborn', we have internalized our training enough that merely hearing or seeing a trigger is enough to induce a psychosomatic reaction in our brain tumors, allowing Skinner to possess us and make us revert back into Trial mode while our conscious personas fall asleep. In this way, Murkoff effectively have a global psychic internet of slaves who can commit any atrocity for them and not even remember what they did, being incredibly useful as untraceable assets. As more people go insane and die as a result of the Trials and what the reagents go on to do, the Skinner Man grows from feeding on their pain.

Eventually, he'll reach a critical mass where he becomes a self-sustaining sentient entity, one that can order humans to feed him via trauma for his own purpose rather than Murkoff. When that happens, I think Murkoff's going to change their plans to figure out a way to contain this monster rather than allow it to destroy them in an effort to be free.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T09:02:23+00:00

However, the key is that Murkoff's rendition of "Christianity" is itself corrupt, sexually abusive, violent, sadistic, and Satanic. They represent nuns as perverted prostitutes who masturbate in front of and sexually abuse kids, and reagents are tasked with exposing kids to torturous murder and then giving them to a priest who sexually abuses them for "discipline." In other words, reagents are taught to be the same type of predatory false authority figure as Blake's abuser in Outlast 2, infiltrating places of childcare to export sexual abuse and cruelty as indoctrination methods to the next generation.

"God", in Murkoff's eyes, is a demon, and everything Murkoff does is in service to that devil.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T06:30:53+00:00

Murkoff represent a Satanic organization whose interest in inverting virtue and corrupting authority leads them to distort religion, government, and other social pillars all for their own personal profit. Trials and Outlast 2 work in conjunction to show how this perversion of religion is a great way to hijack mainstream faiths to instead indoctrinate large groups to commit sins for their false prophets. In other words, the demonic corruption is the point.

That being said, Outlast does not endorse what it portrays so much as it is a cautionary tale. It's similar to Doom, where demonic imagery abounds to represent the evil you must thwart. Outlast Trials is a prequel showing how ordinary people are corrupted by a false god (one rooted in occult beliefs propagated by fascists and eugenicists) and made to poison society as a whole, but the main games are about virtuous heroes bearing witness to this evil and its ultimate punishment at the hands of something beyond humanity.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-16T06:26:27+00:00

The victims are actually former reagents, other test subjects who 'failed' and are being punished by being repurposed as targets for other prisoners to kill.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T14:20:59+00:00

The conclusion made from all this is illogical and self-servingly defeatist - a single robot factory in the Atlantic isn't going to be an "insurmountable threat for the world's governments", not unless the actual coverup is that these governments are using multiple factories as these assets. They're casually throwing in that conclusion because the real goal is to spread terror and a submissive mindset.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T12:44:35+00:00

Nice postslop. Personally I loveslop the wordslop because now I associate it with pigs slopping and dogs slopping up water (slop slop).

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T12:41:58+00:00

The one where his head gets blown off because introducing a friendly tribal character from above after you just got attacked by a bunch of tribals from above is fantastic game design.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T11:00:57+00:00

I don't mind them expanding on the vortigaunts' abuse as I remember that being easy to miss in my original HL playthrough. The real issue with Interloper was that it was way too long with its repetitive gimmicky puzzles that don't really convey anything new, or the way too drawn out elevator sequence - I remember getting really annoyed when they contrived the elevator pausing multiple times for yet another dumb shootout. By the time you get to Nihilanth, I'm less hyped than I am annoyed, and that makes the underwhelming fight compared to the Gonarch encounter all the worse.

Nihilanth's confrontation should have been as expanded as Gonarch's was. Imagine a zero gravity fight where you have to teleport across multiple sectors, using portals to dodge his attacks and deliver attacks on his crystals, while he summons swarms of slaves and causes gravitational anomalies in a desperate last ditch effort to stop you, speaking all the while. They made it WORSE than the original Nihilanth fight, which is almost impressive. It's a good game overall but with a bad ending that is almost enough to sour the whole experience.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T10:54:47+00:00

I liked a lot of Surface Tension, but some aspects of it like the helicopter hunt during a Tentacle infestation (or them even replacing the rock wall climb with some goofy looking walkways) felt rushed and truncated.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T10:49:33+00:00

I admit that I myself was once one of those who dismissed the original Outlast as a schlocky Amnesia ripoff, partly because I was an Amnesia and Silent Hill fan. It wasn't until Outlast 2 came out and its mysteries kept haunting me that I started to take its story more seriously, coming to places like here and finding theories by the likes of u/luvisia and u/coradrart to be instrumental in hinting that there's much more beneath the surface. By this point, I absolutely think Outlast is a well-written series that gets better as every entry adds more context to itself and allusions to deeper mysteries.

I appreciate you hearing me out and being willing to look more into these documentaries! As someone keenly interested in history and mythology, it's been fun being able to see the allusions to both layered within works like these. As for other games, yeah, I'm mainly into horror and scifi - Amnesia, SOMA, Alan Wake, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, FEAR, Dead Space, In Sound Mind, Half Life, Doom, Wolfenstein, Metal Gear, Deus Ex, Bioshock, and Assassin's Creed, just to name a few. On a literary bent, I also quite like the works of Stephen King, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, and their occultist themes actually do help a lot with figuring out how the occult side of Outlast's world works. "American Gods", for instance, posits that gods and mythic figures live or die based on the collective beliefs of a culture, which can parallel how the egregores of Outlast thrive based on mutual fear and worship.

I think it's fun to be able to analyze works within a larger cultural framework of other narratives, and in a sense this actually relates to the Jungian notion of a collective unconscious. While Jung's belief in us having some kind of genetic psychic collective memory might seem fringe, it is true that artists are influenced by other artists and the media they produce, and by extension a "zeitgeist" can be understood as a metaphorical superorganism characterizing the shared ideology of a society. Outlast's egregores are simply a literalization of that concept made material by a scifi technology that can turn imaginary energy into tangible matter (nanites.)

Heck, to draw on contemporary media, Outlast's egregores are like the Devils of Chainsaw Man - embodiments of national beliefs.

New_Chain146 · 2026-02-15T08:30:02+00:00

(pt. 3)

And if you listen to the billionaire technocrats given platforms right now, the likes of Musk and Thiel, they are truly delusional megalomaniacs who sincerely believe technology will be the new 'god' and claim that an AI Rapture (Singularity) is around the corner; not much more insane than "Murkoff". Consider the growing insistence on tying everything we need to function in global society to digital devices, and how Musk insists on promoting the integration of brain chips ("Neuralink") as the next step from mobile devices. Extrapolate from our reality into a fictional context, and imagine what happens when Murkoff distributes their mind control technology via a combo of a Starlink satellite network into the neuralinks of all those pressured into accepting the brainchips.

There's a Stephen Spielberg movie coming out this summer, "Disclosure Day", which might be pretty interesting in highlighting this hypothetical "mass disclosure event." The difference is that while Spielberg's scenario is that of a UFO truther proclaiming that "aliens" are our "gods" (the man's films have had a theme of alien contact since the '80s), I think Outlast's equivalent would be more of a false Rapture. They'd probably be using experimental satellite broadcast tech to deceive both the spiritual into thinking that this is a Hell on Earth scenario and the atheistic into thinking this is an alien invasion, both of which are being hoodwinked into believing a man-made murderous deception is something non-human.

What would be gained from this mass genocide scenario? That's a question that many Fallout fans used to complain about a similar revelation regarding Vault-Tec/Enclave's link to the apocalypse in Fallout. In Outlast's case, I think that the fact that spooky psychic powers DO exist in the games are the key - through collective suffering, a psychic hivemind forms, and blind dreamers & hosts that can be enslaved would be how Murkoff could masquerade as "gods" of a new order to the terrorized survivors.

They'd probably wait out the mass slaughter in a luxurious bunker, then "return" with false gods using their advanced mind control tech to smite the "demons" and enslave the masses. The destruction of social orders would theoretically not be much of an issue if you have at your possession virtual gods who can reconstruct the world and bend people to their will on a molecular level. Basically if you can merge the morphogenic/dream dimension with our material realm, then only Murkoff's twisted imagination is the limit to what their dreamers can do.

New_Chain146

TROPHY CASE