Here's our first real look at Cold War horror game The Outlast Trials

The Outlast Trials was shown off more than a year ago at 2020's PC Gaming Show, but we didn't get to learn much at the time. It's a co-op horror game from the developers of Outlast and Outlast 2, set during the Cold War and involving some pretty unpleasant-looking mind control. During today's Gamescom Opening Night Live we finally got to see The Outlast Trials in action.

The trailer above shows some snippets of gameplay, but much of it is an in-engine tour of some of the creepy locales and creepier enemies you'll be dealing with in The Outlast Trials. At least you'll be dealing with those horrors with friends. Test subjects have to stick together, right?

While The Outlast Trials never had a specific release date, it was originally expected to be out in 2021. That's not been pushed to next year: it'll be out sometime in 2022.

The Outlast Trials does have a Steam page, but it's pretty thin right now; expect to learn more about it closer to release next year.

Wes Fenlon
Senior Editor

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.


When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).