The perfect survival horror (for me, anyway)

Video:

Look Outside first piqued my interest when I was browsing itch.io; in a few months the game came out on Steam. You know, I am always on the lookout for a survival horror game that will meet my VERY specific and outright silly criteria. I love getting spooked but not too spooked, so it can't be a first-person game or have jump scares (I hate jump scares!). I do not mind managing my inventory, but if I happen upon a quest item, like a key, and I don't have any space for it, and have to backtrack to my storage, it sends me into a rage. Resources could be scarce, but not too scarce so that I don't have to load my game an hour back because I unwisely spent my last bandage. I love horrors that are an insidious slow burn, that have a gripping story, and just the right amount of surprise.

Believe it or not, this is just the right type of game for such a picky horror player like me.

Look Outside is a survival horror RPG born from a game jam, like so many fine games are, developed by Francis Coulombe, a solo dev. You play as a man who lives in a perfectly ordinary apartment building. One day you wake up to the harrowing news: something has happened outside, and this something is turning people who look out the window into monsters of all shapes and sizes. You need to survive for 15 days until the event passes.

Before we dive into my impressions, I must say that I played the game on the easier difficulty, and for one reason only: being able to save my game at any point from the menu. On the normal difficulty you have to fill up your danger meter to a certain point by exploring new areas, and when you have it filled, you can go back to your apartment and speak to Sybil, your mysterious neighbor who keeps a blue eye on you through a crack in one of the walls. She will save your progress. I value my saving freedom too much; this option is just not for me. Otherwise, the easier difficulty slightly increases your stats, gives you a little more resources and makes some boss encounters less dangerous. I'd love for the saving feature to be its own thing, not included in a difficulty setting, but it is what it is. I still found the game pretty challenging at many points and had to run away from multiple bossfights because there was no way I could win those encounters with the resources I had :D

For the entirety of the apocalypse your apartment becomes your base of operation. It would be a lonely place at the very start, were it not for your neighbor Sybil, whose blue eye you can see in one of the two wall cracks: in you bedroom, and in your living room. Sybil lives alone, she is quite confused and terrified by all the news, but she finds comfort in talking to you and asking about your day every time you come home from your adventuring. She also saves your progress every time you talk to her. However, her role is not merely to be a save button for your playthrough: there's more to her than meets the eye. Her mental condition changes the further in you all are into the apocalypse, which is, honestly, understandable; sometimes she can't sleep and watches the hallway through the eyehole of her front door, and in the morning she'd tell you if she saw or heard something on your floor. You share whatever crazy stuff happens to you during the day, and she'd always comment on it. Sybil is a grounding presence in the insanity that is Look Outside, and it's always very uplifting to come back home from a long day of surviving and see her blue eye in the wall. It is equally terrifying to come home and realize that she is not there, and you have no means of contacting her, because she never opens her front door, even for you.

In your apartment you can do various things between your exploration sessions: for example, you can cook nourishing meals to replenish your health and stamina points that you can then spend on special actions in battle. Cooking new stuff improves your cooking ability. Where do you get the food, I hear you asking. It's not like deliveries are possible. Well... the people-mutating apocalypse is the perfect time to get to know your neighbors better and also clean the fridges of those who do not really need food anymore, for various reasons. So that it doesn't spoil, you know.

You can also play videogames, and not only does it pass time, but it also gives you experience and improves your stats. Upon completing a game, you gain a new ability that you can use in combat, and this must be my single most favorite thing in the entire game. There are so many game cartridges that you either already have, can find in other apartments or buy from merchants, that there is absolutely no way you can gain all the abilities in one playthrough. You cannot really know what ability each game will give you; you can gauge that a management game will likely give you something for the benefit of your party, rather than an offensive skill, but that's about it. All skills I gained through playing games I found to be extremely useful — which is a sentence true for both my real life and Look Outside.

Additionally, you can solve crosswords to pass time and gain temporary boosts to Calm and Morale. Your desk allows you to craft with ingredients you have at home or find in other places: by mixing cleaning supplies and other things you can get useful stuff like Herbicide or medicine. Of course, there's also a bathroom where you can brush your teeth twice a day and shower to keep your Hygiene stat in order. For these simple activities to be of benefit, you'll need Soap and Toothpaste, which you get about the same way you get your food.

All the characters in the game fall into three categories: humans who did not look outside and thus retained their sanity; humans who looked outside and mutated, losing their mind, and finally humans who looked outside, mutated but DIDN'T lose their mind or at least not completely (that's my favorite category). The wondrous thing about Look Outside is that it is a party-based RPG, and the party assembly process is just WILD. There are so many characters you can recruit, and many of them I did not even meet in my playthrough. One of the potential party members apparently knocked at my door but I didn't open; the next time he showed up I did open the door but he tried to eat me because by that time he had looked outside and turned into a giant centipede so I had to fight for my life. Maybe, the same happened to many other characters: I just refused to meet them, or the circumstances never brought us together, and thus they were never in my party. I know it might seem annoying, but I am honestly delighted. This speaks not only to the replayability of the game, but also to the crazy variety of party member combos you can get. The people I DID have in my party joined me under the most insane circumstances that just could NOT happen. My first party member tried to eat me, and I thought she was a boss. The game hadn't yet explained to me how to run away from a fight, so I clenched my fists and just brawled her. Turned out, she was a recruitable character, and we've been besties ever since! Nothing better to spice up your life than a party member who can eat you at any time if she so chooses. Another lady just knocked on my door late at night. Usually, the 'knock at the door' events happen in the evening when you come back from a long day, and they can resolve in a number of ways: you can just ignore the knock and not open the door, or you can ask the person on the other side who they are, and then decide if you want to open. It might be a merchant, a potential party member, a bossfight or just a one-off event like a wounded dude who'd buy bandages or other healing supplies from you. Because I was usually exhausted from my long day and my stats were low, I was always very careful about the door knocks, at least before dinner. As soon as I saw her, I was like, well, this is CLEARLY a bossfight. No, it's just the strongest damage dealer in my party who just showed up at my doorstep like a present. I won't even try to tell you how I got my third party member, you won't believe me anyway. It was just a chain of insane events that I hoped with all my heart would result in that character being recruitable at some point. Oh, and I also permanently lost my arm in the process. But that's okay.

Each party member has their own unique class and their own set of skills. It's not really a warrior-mage-thief-priest situation. For example, one of my party members is a Grinner: she has no special abilities in her human form, but if you let her turn into the mutated abomination, that's where all the fun starts. She has a whole bunch of skills, and they are pretty powerful, but she kind of gets hazy on who the enemies are and who the friends are, so she can attack anyone. Most of the time it's the enemies, but sometimes... If a character is knocked unconscious, it's a pretty big deal because you need to revive them with special items that are fairly difficult to come by, expensive to buy and just one of them can be used in the heat of battle, so I always used the Grinner very sparingly. Amazing power though! My other friend is a Stalker: most of her abilities are enabled by a slashing weapon, like a knife, so I always scavenged for those. She can stalk an enemy for one turn and then do increased damage or just go on a rampage slashing wildly at multiple enemies. As her bloodlust is sated, she gets another set of abilities. It's honestly incredible how many unique but well-balanced skills each character has. More powerful skills are more likely to take a toll on your weapons (makes sense), so you are always balancing your potential damage and your weapon durability, especially if it's a good or a special weapon. You can fight with anything in this game: knives and baseball bats, sure, but also mops, frying pans, glass bottles, anything you find in the apartment building. If it hurts — it can be a weapon. But don't worry: even if your favorite weapon breaks, there's nothing a roll of duct tape can't fix, at least once. The inventory is unlimited, which is splendid and makes the game 10 times more fun to play. I could never understand the tight limits many horror games put on their inventories; yes, it makes sense, but it adds exactly nothing of value to my personal experience except frustration so I am very happy when I find a game that gives me sizeable pockets.

The madness of the mysterious event has heavily impacted not only the people who witnessed it, but also the apartment building itself. Some floors are warped and are now a maze of doors and corridors. Some apartments froze on the inside, some are covered in flesh, others overgrew with lush vegetation. Space doesn't make a lot of sense anymore. Rodents and roaches establish societies. Cars in the underground parking lot move by themselves and spit out monsters. The world has truly gone insane, and you need to survive for 15 days in the apocalyptic madness of your own home, but what if you can solve this whole situation in the process?..

Look Outside does have a main quest that I won't spoil, and a few side quests that have to do with your neighbors and unfortunate situations they find themselves in. What the game does not have, is a journal or a quest log of any kind, so prepare to listen carefully and maybe even jot down some notes. Sometimes, when you shower or brush your teeth — and I love that the developer chose specifically these actions because it's so true to life — you will have something of an internal monologue remembering someone who asked you to do something, a detail of the main quest, or just reflecting on the events that occurred during the day. This is your only way to recall that there's a side quest pending.

Very often there are several ways you can go about completing a side quest, and some of them the game doesn't really tell you about, expecting you to rely on your own human logic. I found it fascinating that the game accommodates every single quest solving path, and in great detail too; not many games do that. So, every time, when presented with options like 'kill mutated neighbor' or 'just leave them to their misery', I thought, 'Is there anything else I can do that the game is not telling me? Would I try something else in real life?'. This approach works out more often than you'd think.

Look Outside looks terrifyingly gorgeous with its incredible pixel art and more monster designs that I could ever imagine. The sheer amount of artwork is staggering. When you start a fight, there's the creature's artwork in the distance, then another one up close, then they might split open to reveal their true form (in this phase at least); there are additional limbs and heads and weapons in all kinds of places. The creatures are not animated, but I think it only increases the impact. Together with unique sets of skills personalized to their particular mutations, every battle you fight is its own terrifying experience. You can get amazing variety in your nightmares after playing this game, and I'll leave it up to you to decide if it's a selling point or not.

What impressed me the most, however, is how well Look Outside is written. In general, my bar for game writing is very high, but to be honest, I do not usually expect much from a horror game. I always hope, in secret, but if it turns out that the horror game I'm playing is not exactly an outstanding literary work, it doesn't upset me all that much. Look Outside struck me as a very brutal but at the same time touching story about humans trying to make sense of the end of the world.

For example, you have a laptop in your apartment, and you can choose to read news or browse social media. In a few days you'll start reading about people looking outside and daring others to do so; the society splitting into more elite 'witnesses' and frowned upon 'cowards', which I felt was very accurate to how social media works in our day and age, unfortunately. Browsing social media also gives you anxiety.

Look Outside is full of small stories of people whose lives were torn apart by the mysterious event overnight. Someone was coming home from a late night shift. Someone opened the curtains in the morning to wake up their baby in a crib near the window. Someone was driving to work. People had plans, hopes, whole futures, just to find themselves hideously deformed, clinging to their last shreds of sanity. Some of them think it would've been better to lose their mind completely than to be stuck in this new form with their consciousness intact. As you traverse your apartment building, you see all sorts of people trying to adjust to the new apocalyptic reality, however long it might last. There are entrepreneurs who set up shops in their apartments with goods they looted, found or stole. Some of them go door to door bartering. Some barricade their doors and choose to starve in solitude rather than face whatever the world has turned into. There are so many human stories to be witness to: some heartbreaking, some hilarious, some — terrifying. My favorite one, and the one that for some reason has moved me the most, has to be the neighbors in the cafeteria. At one point, you get to the cafeteria to find that it's full of friendly monster neighbors who just chose to stick to their routines. There's a bunch of people having coffee, and when you talk to them, they tell you that they've been having coffee together for years in this cafeteria every morning, and it's not gonna change now. Yes, some of them don't have mouths anymore to enjoy said coffee, some have way too many, but it doesn't matter at all. It's tradition. Apocalypse or not, the morning cup of coffee is the pillar that holds everything together.

Look Outside is truly a highlight of my gaming year, and I highly recommend you give it a try. It feels truly boundless while being a fairly concise experience that will take you about 10 to 15 hours. I've played quite a few games in my life, and I feel like I generally know what to expect; what direction a game can go. Not here though. Every time I set out of my apartment, I could never know where the day would lead me. Sure, the floor exploration and later the main quest guided me, but otherwise anything could happen. A knock at the door — a bossfight? A companion? Who knows. Maybe I'll meet a new friend in the labyrinth that the first floor turned into; maybe I will get into a nightmare of one of my neighbors and won't know how to get out. Maybe I will be attacked by a walking furnace, or a giant spider will ask me to bring back all its spiderlings, or maybe I will find people hiding in the basement cooking soup from mutated mushrooms, and try to guess now which of these events actually happened. Look Outside is a great game to stream, if you do that, or to just play with someone else. Not because it's too scary to play alone, not at all, but... just to share the experience.

Funnily enough, my Look Outside playthrough coincided with me reading 'Wool', the first book in the post-apocalyptic science fiction trilogy 'Silo' by Hugh Howey. In the afterword, "A History of the Darkest Yarns", he is pondering why we as humans have been historically obsessed with the stories about the end of the world. In the past, we were afraid of the wilderness of the Earth, of the dark woods and vast oceans, while now, with our planet all mapped out, we tell stories of extraterrestrial threats or the Earth returning to the uncharted state of wilderness. I'll quote a passage here:

Our lives have always felt tenuous. We depend on each other and on our technology. But we also rely on our cleverness and guile. Disaster stories are horrors wherein we are separated from the former, but also fantasies where we are rescued by the latter. We wonder if we were left alone in the wilderness with nothing more than our courage and our imagination, would we survive?

As I am writing this, the game just got its 2.0 update, called 'Final Vision' that adds new areas, new decisions, new encounters and a whole new game mode. An exciting time to jump right it. 

Highlighting videogames made by small teams or solo developers continues to be one of the joys of my life, so I'll keep doing that. If you've played Look Outside, don't hesitate to share your experience in the comments below.

As usual, stay tuned here and on the Lair's YouTube channel not to miss out on anything.

Thank you very much for your time. Take care.