Immediately after acknowledging how the suffering of women is too often used as a tool to spur the actions of a man in a meta-contextual moment, the game never reflects any further on it. It’s sick.”Īnd in this moment, it seems like Outlast 2 is on the verge of a breakthrough of a real commentary on its own plot and structure. Blake witnesses the entire event, and when reviewing the film of the encounter comments that, “they always hurt women to punish the men… It’s cowardly. ![]() Even so, the cultists go on torturing the poor woman in a display of sheer, pointless sadism. They drag in his wife, strap her to a rack, and crack her bones to make him talk. After he endures being blinded and broken on the wheel, the cult plays their trump card. There is a scene where the cult has captured a wayward member and is torturing him for information. For a game eager to push (and break) the boundaries of good taste when it comes to gore, it flinches at the last moment when delivering its message. It’s a strong setup, but Outlast 2 never goes much further with it. These acts are all cast as different manifestations of the same kind of evil – only with one being the kind we recognize as clearly vile, and the other we’d rather turn a blind eye to or prefer to not mention. Allusions to domestic violence in the home, as well as within trusted institutions such as the Catholic church and its complicated and sad history of sexual abuse and cover-ups are carefully and deliberately made. It draws parallels between the obvious and shocking evil of the cult to the insidiousness of abuse in more familiar surrounding. Even the name “Temple’s Gate” is intentionally reminiscent of the “Heaven’s Gate” cult that ended in a mass suicide. The cult and its leader, Father Knoth, could easily be seen as a stand-in for David Koresh and his Branch Davidians, or any other doomsday cult. ![]() Wrapped in the trappings of the Southern Gothic and centering around an isolationist community held together by a cult of personality, the game is mostly focused on the destruction wrought by unquestioned authority and blind (or cowed) obedience. You’ll want to give the locals a wide berth. It’s a bad situation even before you encounter knife-wielding hicks, knee-high piles of child corpses, and scrawled notes rambling about the apocalypse and a monstrous sun creature “fucking the earth.” Yeah. ![]() Waking up in the wreckage, you’re separated from Lynn and are forced to explore the shanty huts and creepy chapels of the cult alone, relying on your camera’s night vision optics and directional microphone to navigate the dilapidated compound. Needless to say, things take a quick turn for the worst. While filming some establishing shots of the countryside and rural compound, the chopper you’re in goes down. While her story is unknown, the most promising explanation is that she was a runaway from Temple’s Gate, a reclusive religious community hidden in the mountains. You and your reporter wife, Lynn, are investigating the mysterious death of a pregnant 15 year old Jane Doe found wandering a desolate highway miles from civilization. Outlast 2 uses a similar setup to the original, casting you as a milquetoast videographer named Blake.
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