In Rex Miller’s 1987 horror novel Slob, Chicago is under the blight of “Chaingang,” a 500-pound killer whose hunger for food and flesh is unequaled. Despite his appearance and more odorous stench, the walking death manages to maneuver with little detection due to what’s described as an uncanny charisma. He is effectively camouflaged. Such an unusual make of man, it turns out, is not born. Chaingang was designed by the Pentagon, part of a covert project to create an unstoppable murder machine to turn the tide in Vietnam. A Michael Myers for Uncle Sam.
Then he came home. They always do.
The Outlast Trials is entirely consumed by this boomerang paradigm. In the co-op game, you and other lower rungs of society are subjected to mental conditioning tests. Solve puzzles, elude enemy detection and, occasionally, murder in unthinkable ways. A multiplayer prequel to Red Barrel’s hit 2013 survival horror Outlast in which a citizen journalist discovers a creepy mental asylum providing cover for a backfiring supersoldier program, Trials is set in the late ‘50s, an era defined by Cold War paranoia. The game is set in the bowels of The Murkoff Corporation, a research firm tasked with creating sleeper cells.
With seemingly no limit on financing or bodies, the company is pushing the outer limits of narcotics and mind control. An elevated MK Ultra, Murkoff isn’t just designing the drugs a Charles Manson type might trip on; it’s drafting blueprints for its own BTK. Along with two or three friends, your compatibility will be tested in controlled environments, slaughterhouses recreating places of commerce, faith, bread and circuses. You will be asked to commit horrors. If you abstain, those horrors will be committed on you.
Recommended to me by author Grady Hendrix, Slob was published in the late ‘80s but soaked in the remnants of ’60s counterculture, a lurid paperback made layered by its government paranoia. Tales of supersoldier programs are not unique. Half of all genre fiction seems to be about them and about half of those posit these programs as a bad thing. What makes it more interesting is that it has the clarity to paint the bigger picture, the fortitude to name the national projects that such mad science benefits, on whose behalf, and at what cost. It’s those key similarities that made me feel like Trials is influenced by Miller’s admittedly obscure work, and that make me far more confident the game took beats from the more popular, non-fiction 2019 tome Chaos by Tom O’Neill with Dan Piepenbring, which attempts to chronicle how many of these programs were real all along.
There is not a subtle bone in The Outlast Trials’ body. Each environment is saturated with blood. Where the heaps of mannequin parts end and the mountains of eviscerated limbs begin is indistinguishable. It is, quite possibly, the gnarliest game ever made, a truly inspired feat in an experience that may lead to heated debates over which “execution” is the most depraved. Due to their pacing and agonizing presentation, tarring, feathering and castrating a man dressed like Donald Duck can be as stomach-turning as pulverizing a judge’s ankle bones with gavels. One trial implies that you, yes you, created the AIDS virus.
As you complete each trial, you must outmaneuver previous failed experiments whose augmentations, disfigurements, and madness make them incompatible with field work. You’re also being pursued by the “prime assets,” singular all-star murderers whose reputation and charisma caught the attention of the Murkoff Corporation. This includes an oedipal Miami gangster, a leather cop with a lightning fetish, and conjoined twins who, despite their impossible disfigurements, converse like guests on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. They’re the Village People from hell. They are not just your enemies. They are enemies of life. Of dignity. Civil rights. Labor movements. Democracy. They are totems of empire enlisted on behalf of Murkoff, who are working on behalf of western interests.
In one of the game’s endings, you awaken in the Congo at the far end of a firing line, sitting on your knees. Your interrogators demand to know the significance of a string of words, unknowingly speaking out your trigger phase. When you come to a second time, bodies have piled up and your thumbs are submerged in a man’s eye sockets. Previous endings follow a similar structure. You awaken in a Cuban hotel room, caked in blood. You come to in China, having freshly produced sexual blackmail. In the Saigon ending, you’re behind the wheel of a car, barreling past a checkpoint with a bomb strapped to your chest, mirroring real embassy bombings throughout the early ’50s. How this prequel will ultimately tie in with the incidents at Mount Massive Asylum feels less significant than how it will tie in with a larger alternative history. If I’m allowed to trust my gut, I can think of one especially prominent political assassination that the game might be building up to.
This doesn’t make the connective tissue to the other Outlasts insignificant, but the greater weight is less on the details than the inevitable arc. The Outlast Trials is about a weapons factory. Vampires and werewolves made on assembly lines and shipped overseas to violate political movements the powers that be deem inconvenient. To uphold American might. But inevitably, the violence returns. It returns to Mount Massive. It returns in lost boys and biker gangs. In summers of serial killers. In political assassinations carried out by individuals with holistically unplaceable values. It comes from an indifference to life, echoed from the top, festering all the way down. From the promise of stability being replaced with casino games. It is honed violence, intentionally manufactured for one purpose, but spilling over into one’s backyard. It is a political project, but one that can only imagine itself on one end of the knife. And once it’s loose, look out behind you.
