Look Outside Review - Blackout Curtains Rule
In the end, I just let the world burn.
Or, at least, I let my little corner of it burn. And by burn, I mostly mean grown extra arms and teeth and eyes and tentacles. Probably some goop of some kind, too.
Could I have done more to prevent this? Probably. At least, I could have done more to try; I’m not completely sure as to how well such actions would have worked. It is to Look Outside’s eternal credit that the way things played out feels fueled by past possibilities, many of them influenced by my own gameplay progress and experiences.
And how patient I could be with chewing old gum.
Perhaps I should rewind a bit.
Pitched as survival horror infused with JRPG mechanics, Look Outside opens with the player character (Sam, by default) waking up in his bed; a normal beginning to a less-than-normal day. He quickly becomes acquainted with his next-door neighbour, visible as an eye peeking through a hole in the wall. This initial human contact swiftly becomes important as a save point where things are reminisced. It’s a clever little idea that could have benefited the game greatly were it more thorough.
Something is wrong with the world, and it isn’t much of a spoiler to say that if you let Sam look outside, his face pretty much melts off. Never mind. It’s a matter of seconds to start a new game and this time avoid things like windows while going about your day.
Herein lies a huge part of Look Outside’s appeal. After the aforementioned conversation establishes a set number of days – a kind of doomsday survival clock –, the early moments of gameplay are really about living; about trying to keep doing the living thing and not the dying thing. Daily activities matter: there’s a hygiene meter running beneath the more visible statistics, and so a shower with soap and hot water is important; Playing video games can relax you, even teach new skills; Cooking also has obvious benefits, although this is also where the survival horror aspects start to become unavoidable. Oh, and there’s a basic crafting system, because it may be illegal to release a game in the current decade without one.
Soap is a limited resource, and apparently Sam squeezes a shocking amount of paste from the tube when brushing his teeth. You’ll want to find more of both. Never mind that there’s only so much food in the fridge. Bunkering down for a couple of weeks simply isn’t a sustainable-seeming option, and so it quickly starts to feel essential that you explore and find out what has become of the other residents of Sam’s apartment.
Unsurprisingly, what has become of them is mostly the stuff of nightmares. Anyone who has seen the sky (I mean, who knows what’s out there? Astronomers just discovered an additional 128 moons orbiting Saturn earlier this very month) has mutated in myriad ways, and it’s largely kill or be killed. Or perhaps run away and slowly starve.
Played on the normal difficulty, wherein progress can only be saved in the confines of Sam’s own apartment, there is a certain stress that comes from early battles. This is compounded because the game can only be saved at the very end of a day, or after a certain amount of danger has been faced… and also because the more danger is faced between trips home, the more experience points will be rewarded. This matters because, true to that initial pitch, Look Outside is also a JRPG with character leveling.
Such risk-reward baiting succeeds in creating some pretty effective tension, especially since you need to explore rooms to loot other fridges, find fresh weaponry (being a horror game, weapon degradation feels somewhat fitting), and simply open up various means of exploring farther.
That said, it isn’t until you start to explore the other floors, meet the growing cast of characters and begin to form an actual party that everything really clicks. The cast is delightfully kooky, and it’s up to you as to if you want to be friendly or just lash out with violence. There is a very real sense that some decisions (often in dialogue, but also with regard to play mechanics) matter; at least to the elasticity of the story, and on occasion to the more final conclusion of it, too.
It’s a good thing that there are some others around. The combat system is, unsurprisingly, designed with a group in mind, and progress practically requires Sam not to go it alone, even if you may not find everyone to be the most charming person you’ve ever met. It took about three hours into my own play-though for Sam to meet someone willing to join his explorations, and from here things opened up.
The next six or seven hours were great. Truly strange, creative, creepy, offbeat stuff. While Sam lives in a modest three-story apartment building, when the world is going to hell and people are losing their grips on reality, the formation of the very walls themselves can feel capricious, as though they’re holding up a house of leaves. What initially seems a potentially claustrophobic setting gradually pulses and grows and becomes almost imposingly large.
The genres largely – if not quite completely – meld successfully together. Having a kind of JRPG with resource scarcity feels more novel than you might expect, and the world, characters and puzzles all come together to create something that can shrug off the occasional shortcoming through the simple power of being unique. Look Outside encourages players to stumble across its mysteries, wants them to solve them by themselves.
It is here, though, where the edges start to fray. It is fantastic that Look Outside trusts players to gradually feel out what’s going on, to explore at their own pace (the passage of time for each day is somewhat illusionary, with actions rather than time itself advancing the clock) and to not litter the map with checkpoint markers every time the slightest thing is learned about; it is far, far less fantastic that there isn’t a map at all, that Sam doesn’t keep any kind of journal. His neighbour will speculate about things encountered since the previous conversation, and he will sometimes reflect on certain things while in the shower. But heaven help you if you forget about or miss something beyond the scope of this. Did I mention that I wanted one of these things to be more thorough? It could have been game-changing for the latter half of the experience.
There is impressive creativity in how the apartment building opens up, how it is leveraged to become a larger game space, and efforts are made to create shortcuts back as more exploration is completed. But these efforts aren’t enough, and too much of the world can be confusing to navigate. Players are asked to hold a lot of game spaces in their minds, and many of these spaces are convoluted and lack sufficient unique identity.
A part of this is down to the art and mostly clever and limited use of colour. It’s ugly in a very intentional way. The not-quite-right overhead proportioning of the pixel art, to say nothing of things like character portraits, does a fantastic job of creating a sense of headache green, but it doesn’t help with visual landmarks and it isn’t even always clear that it’s even possible to enter a new area.
And so we get to where and why I just let the world burn. As I had Sam and co wander around this world, with no map to mark where an item I was looking for or simply missed the first time might be, with no checklist to help me consider my thoughts, the size that the game grew to become burdensome. Gradually, my party became overpowered as it walked to and fro, swapping in specific keys to try and solve puzzles that added up in my head, but didn’t seem to quite align with the exact solutions that the designers had in mind – the spectre of the worst of traditional adventure game design coming back to haunt me.
I just got tired of it all. I got tired of searching. Tired enough to just half-arse it at the end, to let the apocalypse happen.
Could I have stopped it? I certainly could have done more to increase the odds. Look Outside does a pretty good job of being vague about what may happen in any circumstance, of really putting the decisions with limited information into your hands. It does a lot of things very well, and some of its weaker elements are easily forgiven.
But – man! – that quality of life stuff. Shit like maps and objectives. Shit that makes slapping a score on this particular game so emblematic of the issues with scoring games at large when so many of them are, by definition, defined by the player’s experience. I can only go with my own experience. One that started out a bit alienating but intriguing gradually became great, then very slowly and very tediously fell flat on its face.
You may be different. Adjust accordingly for the post-review world where you can just google where the goddamn X is and what order you need to arrange Y in, I guess.
Look Outside was reviewed on PC with a code kindly supplied by the publisher.
