I like to manifest Halloween year-round, what with my favourite pastimes being horror games, movies, and books—oh, and Dressmaker currently. So when Halloween actually falls upon me I like to make it something special—crack out the real horrifying stuff that'll hit even harder. One series that's always on my list is Outlast thanks to its next-level gore and perfect scares, plus if I want to drag my friends into a shared nightmare there's The Outlast Trials for all to enjoy.
"Halloween has always been—even going back to the first Outlast—one of our biggest months, and it definitely kickstarts the biggest part of the year, which is October, November, and the holidays," Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin tells me. "Those are usually the best months of the year in terms of sales. We don't control what other studios do, obviously, but we act as if Halloween is ours."
This year Red Barrels decided to celebrate the spooky season with a huge sale to encourage new players to enter the Sinyala Facility and give The Outlast Trials a try over the spookiest month of the year. And it worked, way beyond what they'd hoped for: The game's concurrent player count on Steam ended up capping out at 147,955 players, a hugely impressive feat for a horror game that's over three years.
"We knew with that 90% sale we'd get a lot of new players, but we didn't expect that many," Morin says. "That first week of October was pretty insane. Every day I was waking up checking the numbers, thinking okay, that's probably going to be the top, and then it's gonna start to go down, but every day it kept going higher and higher.
"Obviously after the sale it trickled down a little bit, but hopefully it's gonna stabilise at a much higher level than what we had before. But yeah, it's pretty satisfying to see that after being out for more than three years, the game still finds a new audience. And it's very satisfying to watch all these people play the game and suffer."
That they will. The Outlast Trials is still the scariest multiplayer horror game there is. Usually adding other players to a horror game will dampen the experience, whether that be because it becomes simply too funny to jump at or things just aren't as scary when you have your friends by your side. And while I've certainly laughed in The Outlast Trials it's usually a frantic nervous laugh that's triggered when I see some naked goliath barrelling towards an unsuspecting teammate.
But experiencing collective trauma with your friends isn't the only reason to play The Outlast Trials over Halloween: there's also a new event. The whole gist of The Outlast Trials is that you and your mates are stuck in a Murkoff testing facility, the Sinyala Facility, where everyone is forced to undergo weird and painful experiments. The goal, naturally, is escape, which is usually impossible—but right now, in this new event, it's actually attainable.
"There's the escape going on," Morin explains. "So for the first time in like a year, I think, there is a way to escape the facility—we made a communal event. People had to help out our character Amelia make the escape happen, and that's happened. I think on Sunday night they completed the task, and so since Sunday night, players have been able to escape. So now's the time because it's not going to last forever. Murkoff is always watching."
