Outlast – coming soon, but not thanks to the big publishers

Will indie developers be the saviours of survivor horror? One reader thinks so, as he looks forward to Outlast and Among The Sleep.

Every so often I do enjoy a good survival horror game and like some gamers Silent Hill 2 is the game I put upon a pedestal, and the measuring stick that is used to beat other games to death with.

Now I’m going to try an avoid talking about Resident Evil 5 or 6 as you really can’t call them survival horror games, as they are more like action adventure games. What I will say is I did enjoy Resident Evil 1 to 4.



But a couple of months ago a friend mentioned to me about a nice little indie game called Amnesia: The Dark Descent and suggested I buy it on Steam and play it with the lights off and headphones on like a survival horror game should be played.


When he told me about it I was dubious at first as it had been such a long time since I had played a decent survival horror game that I thought the genre was dead.

About ten minutes into the game and I could already feel the hairs on my neck standing on end and I was happy about this (well partly, another part of me was waiting in anticipation to be attacked by something and the rest was really hating my mate for suggesting this game).

I will be honest about it; I haven’t completed it yet as I lost my laptop that I was playing it on and my other laptop just about runs Final Fantasy VII without any problems. I think my gameplay time was only about two hours and I was really impressed and a little on the edge at the same time. Now when I finally get round to finishing off my gaming PC Amnesia will be one of the first games I play again.

Looking at the future I can see two more indie survival horror games coming out that have grabbed my attention, one of them being Among The Sleep, which I believe an Alpha version has been released on their Kickstarter funding page (trust me I’m very tempted to back this project).

The other game is Outlast, which was shown at E3. Now going by the gameplay demo that was shown at E3 it looks very good and even made me jump at one point, so I will be buying that when it comes out.

It seems to me these indie companies have found the formula on how to make a good survival horror game. But can one of the big companies show us that they haven’t forgotten how to make a truly gritty and suspense filled survival horror game?

For this I am looking at Bethesda future release The Evil Within. Going by what gameplay I’ve seen from the E3 demos it does look promising. But I have been disappointed by the big companies before.



I will admit I haven’t been disappointed by Bethesda yet, I mean they did take a couple of weeks of my life away with Skyrim. Let’s hope they can scare the life out of me this time.

By reader Anthony Graham

The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

You can submit your own 500 to 600-word reader feature at any time, which if used will be published in the next appropriate weekend slot. As always, email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk.