Makers of Outlast tease their next game

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Is it Outlast 3? Or something else?

The intriguing image above was posted by developer Red Barrels very appropriately on Halloween, with a promise to reveal more soon. Red Barrels is the developer of first-person horror games Outlast and Outlast 2, but this tease doesn't necessarily mean we're about to get an official announcement about Outlast 3.

Messaging about Red Barrels' next game has been mixed. Back in 2017, Red Barrels said on Facebook "We will, at some point, make an Outlast 3" but in the same post stated it was working on something else. "It won’t be a sequel to Outlast or Outlast 2, but it will be a distinct experience set in the Outlast universe." And in 2018, developer Phillipe Morin of Red Barrels said that Outlast 3 itself would be "a departure" from the first two games in the series. 

So this definitely could be Outlast 3, but in a way that doesn't really feel like a sequel. Or it could be something that's not a sequel but is still related to the world of the original games. Huh.

The image might give us a few clues. There's a tag around the wrist of the lower arm that reads "MK-329 and then three more digits I can't quite make out. 800? And if you want to take the image extremely literally, you could speculate that the two clasped hands might hint at a co-op horror experience. And since the Outlast games revolve around the MKUltra experiments, it's safe to reason the tag is connected somehow. Whatever this is, a spin-off or sequel, we're curious. Outlast 2 was pretty damn good. 

Intriguing! Hopefully the "soon" in "Announcement coming soon" will be of the 'very soon' variety rather than the 'later-soon' ilk.

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.