How, against all expectations, The Outlast Trials has made my very stressful summer a bit more manageable

My summer has been a bit miserable so far. Work is (somehow) good. Personal relationships are going well. But everything else has either kind of sucked or felt exhausting. In this situation, you’d think I’d be checking out something calm like Stardew Valley (yes, I’ve yet to touch it) outside of my work commitments. Think again: I started playing The Outlast Trials.

I can’t speak about its early access period nor the transition into 1.0 earlier this year, as I’ve just jumped into it this week for the first time. Part of me was curious about both the game and its seasonal model, but one funny thing about my brain is that it’s traditionally thrived in stressful games the more stressed I’ve been in real life. That’s how I now find myself looking around for keys inside rotting corpses and hiding in closets from grossly deformed freaks.

This might need a bit more background without getting into specifics (as this isn’t a blog post): Sometimes it’s hard to juggle a lot of stuff all at once, and chances are you either break down or become bitter. But you can also just keep plodding along, waiting for the storm to pass. As stated before, my life is good right now, but I’ve got that fatal weakness of worrying too much about those close to me. Also, experience has shown me bad stuff tends to come bundled together. So, yeah, you can guess how things have been recently. As a direct result, I’ve put too much weight on my figurative shoulders while, well, plodding along.

When it’s like 40º C outside on the regular (yay, southern Spain), walking it all off isn’t possible every day, and entertainment such as movies or TV may not be the right thing when your head won’t stop running in circles. Siesta isn’t the cure for everything either. So I turn to video games, as they’re a far more involved activity. I’ve been chipping away at Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, which is fantastic, but hitting more than a few frustrating walls hasn’t been the greatest feeling recently. I needed to let some steam out by playing something simpler yet frantic, but also new. Enter The Outlast Trials.

“This will go terribly,” I muttered to myself earlier this week as I went for my first online trial with a bunch of strangers. After all, playing survivors in Dead by Daylight is a rather awful experience if you don’t have a reliable group of friends. To my surprise, however, we managed to communicate just fine thanks to the solid ping system and a UI that feels both concise and informative. Since The Outlast Trials also appears to be built more as a true co-op experience rather than a competitive rush of the levels, it looks like the community is more on the friendly and helpful side. I wasn’t booted from the lobby despite my rookie mistakes, and running away from killers and into traps felt funnier than it should with randos.

Not as surprising was the fact I could channel all my stress into the game: When I’m on edge, I tend to be more aware of my surroundings, and that translates into video games. My best Quake games have happened under the effects of too much caffeine. This is similar. While I made many newbie mistakes, I was actually reacting quite fast to random events and complicated situations that otherwise would’ve sent me under the nearest table for a few seconds at least (which is my approach to single-player games that share this type of DNA). But not anymore. No jump scare fazed me, and I was willing to do ‘one more round’ instead of logging out and decompressing after like two trials gone wrong.

As for the game itself, I’ve found a lot to like in its blend of handcrafted scenarios full of grotesque elements and disturbing implications with a more traditional co-op horror experience. It just feels good and responsive, plus the ‘live service’ element seems to be well-adjusted and organic instead of overbearing, which is more than I can say about much of its competition. I’m not a massive Outlast fan, but Red Barrels sure knows how to make games that feel polished and tight.

Is the whole point of this article to say that you should play Saw-inspired horror games when you’re feeling down? Hell no. Different stuff fixes different folks. In fact, I don’t even know how I ended up choosing The Outlast Trials ‘to chill’ over much more logical picks or with these complicated feelings and contradictory ideas in my head, but I’m guessing that’s the beauty of video games that have an artistic intent behind them, even if it’s a fucked-up one.