Look Outside - Review
A strange neighbour, horrors beyond comprehension. Giant rats, eyeballs and greater space entities. The only thing you need to do? Look Outside. Or maybe don’t, who knows what could happen? Can you really trust that person next door?
Look Outside is a survival horror RPG that feels like a revival of the popular RPG maker style horror games of yesteryear. A bizarre almost Lovecraftian aesthetic to the game makes every action, every choice and every room you enter feel like a descent further into madness. But beneath the surface of the gory aesthetic and unsettling world does Look Outside offer enough to keep you safely indoors, or will it have you wanting to touch grass?
The simple answer is, yes, Look Outside is going to be one that keeps you indoors wanting to delve deeper into the bizarre, twisted narrative. The narrative is the best part of what Look Outside has to offer. From what started as a simple game jam project that continued to receive love from the single developer, has turned into a well fleshed out and interesting journey into a surreal world filled with cosmic danger and bizarre distorted reality. You as a seemingly boring, every day man living alone in an apartment are thrust into this bizarre world and feel compelled to experience everything that is happening. To follow the blood trail down the hallway, into another apartment, rush into the bathroom and talk to a neighbour you can’t quite remember who comes at you with a bloody knife.
Or maybe you don’t. There is a simple beauty in the game giving you a fifteen-day time-limit. You get to choose how you progress, and what you want to do with your limited resource: time. Every time you enter a new area for the first time, or take a shower, play some video games, you advance the clock for the day. Certain events will only occur after a certain number of days have passed, meaning that you can’t actively experience the entire game without progressing through the days. On top of the fact that just isn’t enough time in the day to get through the entire game in one shot, but don’t let that ticking clock make you panic.
No, but actively lazing about in your apartment playing video games, or God forbid solving crossword puzzles, you will get to experience visitors to the door. These little encounters may actually have been one of the best parts of the game. From strange people like Dan, or the Video Game Collection master. To helpful NPCs like the Gun Merchant or the Sports Nut, you can get access to unique items or even party members to make getting through the horrors that exist beyond your apartment door just that little bit more tolerable. The random events that can occur when you are ‘wasting’ time, add a sense of life to the game, and reminds you that other people are existing in this same horrific space as you.
The combat aspect of the game is where the survival part of the survival horror comes into play. You’ll be managing your resources to have enough healing items, scrounging for melee weapons to ensure you’ve always got a surplus for when they randomly break (which happens a lot), and ammo for the guns (or you somehow glitch yourself to have infinite ammo). The combat is fine for the most part. The abilities never felt particularly impactful, but they do have their place in harder boss fights with the occasional helpful damage over time effect, or a slightly higher damage roll. Combat is middling, but the design of the enemies and the bosses in particular are really well done and sufficiently horrifying. People with arms replaced with rows upon rows of teeth, a crazy man who knifes his own stomach open to reveal a giant eyeball. A grotesque giant rat that wears a crown. That one may just be uncomfortable for me.
Sound design is surprisingly really well done too. You go from creaky and eerie hallways to eye-piercing screeching and white noise when you enter a room with a giant eyeball. Or my favourite switch up, horrifying background noise to upbeat and happy shop music with a gun-toting but surprisingly well-adjusted shopkeeper called Eugene. The sound of the weapons is a little same same which is somewhat disappointing because having a bigger difference between a mop or a knife swing would be good, but not entirely necessary. The grosser monsters that fall apart as tumour creatures or spawn eyeballs do have gross mushy sounds and that really lends to overall feeling that is being conveyed throughout the game.
I mentioned that the narrative is the best part of the game, and that goes even more so for the overall story. There is no long-winded and drawn-out explanations about why this is all happening. It just is, and you just need to deal with that. Be it with talking with your neighbour who is little more than a giant eyeball living your walls (or maybe not? Who knows). Fighting your way through the mutated persons of the apartment building and finding four depictions of the visitor to give to a bunch of robe wearer cult members to help contact it. Or you could just Look Outside and give up before it all becomes too much. The story is beautiful in its simplicity and the way it is told through the environments themselves. The small stories within the building add to the greater overall one and allow you to experience what is happening without being bludgeoned by its. Its truly impressive that detail that has gone into what was once a quick game jam idea.
Look Outside isn’t going to change the industry, but that doesn’t mean its not worth playing. It is fun, it is uncomfortable, and it is a great experience overall. The stories are interesting, the sound design is pretty bang on for the aesthetic of the game, and the characters themselves all feel unique and distinct, with their own lives that are happening. The ability to approach and access the game as you see fit gives the ticking clock feeling a sense of intrigue. The game feels almost like a love letter to a genre of game that once had the gaming community in a chokehold, and I would love to see more interesting little journeys like this one brought back into the forefront.
The Score
9.0
Review code provided by Devolver Digital
The Pros
Great aesthetic design
Fantastic sound design
Interesting and deep cast of characters
The Cons
Weapon breaking is a boring mechanic
Combat overall feels middling
The ticking clock isn’t actually all that stressful
