The Outlast Trials

Critics call it middling, players call it a treat — who's right?

The most telling thing about this game is that its reception splits cleanly in two. On the critic side, OpenCritic's top-critic average sits at 72 in the "Fair" tier, and IGN handed it a 7; on the player side, 84,816 Steam reviews stack up to a 92% positive rate, parked firmly at "Very Positive." That gap — critics shrug, players rave — is itself the key to understanding the thing.

The cause isn't complicated: the fun leans heavily on co-op. Critic playthroughs are mostly solo or quick passes, and they struggle to reproduce the terrified, laughing, scheming atmosphere of a full four. Both sides are right; they're just reviewing two different games — solo, it's a decent-to-good pure scare; in a group, it's an unstoppable social-farce machine.

That mismatch in how it gets scored is common in co-op titles: a review has to land a number in limited time, while this kind of game's real charm needs time, familiar partners, and a few failures before it grows in. So when you read this one's score, don't fixate on the critic average — weigh the long-accumulated player word-of-mouth, because that's closer to what you'll actually get.

Who should buy it, who should steer clear

So whether to buy hinges on which camp you're in. The buy profile is sharp: you've got a regular co-op partner or two, and you want that terrified-yet-laughing, lean-on-each-other-while-occasionally-screwing-each-other high-pressure social horror. If that's you, it's well worth it. The skip profile is just as sharp: if you want a story-led, single-player immersion in one complete narrative, or you're chasing a vast content reserve good for hundreds of varied hours, or you simply want an action game where you can fight back and let off steam — it probably won't suit your taste. There's no strong throughline, the content's lean, and start to finish you can only run and hide, never strike.

One more group deserves a heads-up: if you don't have friends who can reliably squad up and you're stuck matchmaking with strangers, the experience takes a real hit — random teammates can flatten the difficulty into a cakewalk and dilute the fear, or drop mid-run and leave you stranded. So much of this game's pull is tied to those two words: familiar partners.

Its place, and the thing it won't hand over

Set back into the series and the market, this is Red Barrels' third Outlast game and the series' first multiplayer co-op horror — a deliberate change of shape. By report it was six years in development; they could have shipped a linear Outlast 3 faster, and chose multiplayer instead. That nerve makes it a real directional swing rather than a patched-together sequel.

Back to the question: will it be easily copied or replaced? My answer is no. Its strongest and least stealable move is turning "do I abandon my teammate" into a moral test, letting horror land — for once — through the cold calculations of co-op rather than jump scares. Dead by Daylight's adversarial contest can't conjure that same-boat pressure. So my verdict is clean: the quality is solid, buy it — provided you accept that its weight sits on atmosphere, co-op, and high-pressure survival, not a content explosion or story lead. Set the expectation right and the tension and chaos it gives you are very hard to find anywhere else. Round up some friends and suffer together. It's worth it.