"The first thing that got us debating was the necrophiliac scene in the first Outlast. We had a lot of conversations about do we do it? Are we going too far with this? And how does it make sense in this environment? That was a heated conversation."
There are many scenes from Outlast that are burned into my memory, The Groom's sequence in Outlast's Whistleblower DLC, the finger amputation from the first game, or perhaps it was landing on a bunch of baby bones in Outlast 2. There's quite a lot to pick from over two games, a DLC, and the live service The Outlast Trials. But if Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels, had to pick the scene that made the team really stop and think about whether this was ok he'd go back to the first game.
For those who don't remember, or perhaps have never played the game, or maybe just wiped the encounter from your memory, as the protagonist Miles Upshur is navigating the abandoned Mount Massive Asylum he stumbles across an inmate engaging in necrophilia. It's a pretty startling moment, and was actually the last thing I thought I'd come across, even in an Outlast game. But that was the whole point of that scene.
"We felt like we needed something that's going to make people think that anything can happen in this game," Morin explains. "Then J.T. Petty, [lead writer for Outlast] came up with this whole dialogue of switching things around, having the [necrophiliac] say to you, 'You like to watch? You're fucked up!' So that was a really nice spin because it turned things around. Because obviously, yes, the player is making the choice to watch. So yeah, I mean that's probably the very first sequence that got a bit [heated]."
The only other time Morin can recall where the team spent so long debating whether or not to include a scene actually happened more recently, in The Outlast Trials. Specifically, the decision to include child mannequins instead of animated children in trials like Grind the Bad Apples or Punish the Miscreants.
Morin explains how the team questioned "what to do with the kids? Do we make them mannequins, or do we have actual characters? At the end of the day it's a bunch of polygons moving. But you know, in the player's mind, it's not the same thing. That was probably where we found our limit. Like, no, let's stick with mannequin kids, and not go too far with that."
This was undoubtedly the right decision. There's plenty of extreme moments in The Outlast Trials with objectives like Pervert the Futterman or Despoil the Auction, the gore and horror already present is more than enough to make players feel uneasy as is—trust me.
But as it is with most games, the best decisions tend to be made by the people who know the series best; its devs. "The team is always the first to react to some of these ideas," Morin says. "So sometimes if people feel like it's alright, let's keep pushing in that direction until like maybe the reaction becomes a little too strong.
"I remember discussing at some point when we went from 20 people to 30-40 people, because most people on the team were not with us for Outlast or Outlast 2, so we had to have a little chat about what kind of conversations are necessary to create this kind of content?
"And sometimes, yes, it might start with a very juvenile, gratuitous idea, but then you have to let it evolve, and be willing to talk around it to come up with an approach that feels scary and satisfying. You gotta be able to have those conversations. We often joke about that at Red Barrels. There are many conversations that would take you to an HR office in other studios, but here it's just part of our daily routine."
