The first two Outlast games revolved around the unfolding story of an investigative journalist uncovering a dark mystery, but in this Cold War-era prequel, you play as a prisoner vying for your life in a Squid Game-like race for survival across several titular trials. Thus, Trials is potentially the next great co-op horror survival game. I had an extremely tense experience playing the tutorial and the first level on an ultrawide monitor in a dark room, but if you don’t want to go it alone, you can now bring up to three friends with you in a series first. The dastardly experiments continue in The Outlast Trials, a first-person horror survival sim that – and I’m putting this lightly – finds all the best ways to unsettle you.

No, this is the unmasked stench of death at the hands of the nefarious Murkoff Corporation – which fans of the Outlast series may remember as the same entity that thoroughly mismanaged Outlast 1’s Mount Massive Asylum and erected Outlast 2’s creepy radio towers. Something’s in the air lately, and it clearly isn’t love.

Outlast trials levels