Outlast 2 Adds Story Mode, New Content

Outlast 2 didn’t make nearly as many waves as the first one, because it was frankly silly, and because it was so brutally difficult any tension or fear you might have felt would quickly be replaced with frustration as you got brutally gored by angry cultists for the billionth time in a row. I’ve commented on that particular problem in the past, and the good news is that Red Barrel seems to agree with me and has released several patches easing up on the difficulty in the subsequent months. But their biggest change had yet to come, and now Red Barrel is announcing that their game now has a brand-new mode for people who aren’t interested in watching the loading screen over and over: story mode.

Unlike the story mode that SOMA had, which completely removed the enemies, this story mode just makes things significantly easier, which features fewer enemies who move slower, deal less damage, and have a harder time detecting you. The pace has also been eased, allowing players more freedom to explore instead of rushing blindly from checkpoint to checkpoint.

But that’s not the only big change they’re adding. They’re also using this patch to “reinsert some of the things we had to remove from the original game to get a M rating”. Which means that they’re putting some content back into the game that would cause it, upon re-evaluation, to get an AO rating, which is typically the kiss of death for games. I have… a lot of mixed feelings on this. It feels unethical to remove content for a certain rating, only to add it again digitally at a later date to get around the ratings board. But at the same time, the game already has a pit of dead, charred babies, and it’s hard to imagine what else they would add that could be worse than that.

But hey, we’ll have to see, won’t we?