Though you'll endure a wide variety of environments, desecration follows you everywhere. In place of the first game's mental asylum, new protagonist Blake Langermann finds himself lost in the Arizona desert surrounded by religious zealots and fetid corpses. Its gameplay may stumble in certain ways, but you're always deeply, inescapably immersed in its atmosphere. Tension, really, is what Outlast 2 does best.

Not everyone you encounter tries to kill you. You never quite know when hell will break loose again, but you always know it's coming. The fact that the game excels at delivering sudden bursts of panic keeps your nerves on edge at all times. At least when you do stay on track, it's unbelievably intense and exhilarating. This was occasionally an issue in the first game as well, but you often had more freedom and could play more strategically-if you're trying to avoid one bad guy in a large area while sneaking from room to room to collect valve handles, you can decide, 'Okay, he'll see me when I dart across here, but I think I can make it back to this locker and hide before he catches me.' In Outlast 2, you generally just need to run from whatever's directly behind you and hope you figure out the one correct path as you go. At that point, the game stops being scary and simply becomes frustrating. It might be a tiny opening you have to crawl through or a bookcase you have to move, but you'll only have a few seconds to figure it out before your pursuers catch up and kill you, forcing you to replay most of the chase in order to return to the apparent dead end where you got stuck. Almost invariably, these chases are scripted, meaning you must get from point A to a specific point B as quickly as possible. To make matters worse, the game's most harrowing moments-those sequences where you're spotted by an enemy and must flee to safety-frequently devolve into trial-and-error tedium.

Outlast 2 review