Your character Blake also has a very slippery grip on the present.
Outlast 2 length full#
The game appears to take place in the course of a single night - a night during which the moon passes through a full cycle and Lynn somehow carries her baby to term. The trouble with the moon's role as timepiece, however, is that time in Outlast 2 is all wrong. Presiding over all this and growing steadily bloodier of aspect as the finale approaches, the moon serves as campaign clock and body clock, reflecting the story's fixation with the flesh of suffering women. There's also a rival faction of Satan worshippers who are hell-bent on abducting Lynn to ensure that the Anti-Christ lives out a long and unholy life. The cult's leader Sullivan Knoth is convinced that Lynn's child is the Anti-Christ, having spent many years bedding his followers with the express purpose of spawning said Anti-Christ and murdering it in the cradle (a self-deluding sadist whose writings are awash with talk of the “girth” of god's message, Knoth doesn't have much truck with the idea of contraception). The game's plot sees your character's wife, Lynn, becoming miraculously pregnant as you flee a community of scabby, pseudo-Christian cultists, deep in the wilds of Arizona. Like many a horror game before it, it explores the uses and ever-so-many abuses of the female body, and in the process, it manages to put time through the wringer, too. Outlast 2 builds on this association in using the moon's behaviour to mark chapter transitions in a story about misogyny. More specifically, the moon is often associated with the timeframes of human reproduction: the length of a lunar cycle, 29.5 days, is roughly that of the menstrual cycle, though there is no direct relationship between the two any more than the angle of Saturn's rings determines the severity of erectile dysfunction. Its position and appearance are the basis for innumerable timekeeping and navigational systems, from Mayan calendars to the astronomical procedures still relied upon by present-day sailors. The moon has always played a role in how we tell time, of course. It's also something of a timekeeper, waning and waxing as the story proceeds towards a possibly Biblical, possibly scientific apocalypse. It's a wonderful ambient device in a game that is otherwise one gigantic charnelpile, a glowing cavemouth amid the clouds which ices the surfaces of barren lakes and raises the skeletons of farmyards from foetid darkness. There is little about Red Barrels' schlocky, prurient first-person horror outing that deserves real admiration, but you can't deny the power of its moon. What's your favourite moon in a game? The lipless satellite of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, perhaps? Overwatch's rather cosy lunar map? Somebody asked me this a few weeks ago - genuinely, we'd been talking about First Man - and to my surprise I found myself thinking of Outlast 2. Check back tomorrow, if we're still all here. RPS is having an Apocalypse Day! We're celebrating the end of the world and games about it.
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