In the horror RPG Look Outside, Francis Coulombe takes us on a grim journey through the gloomy floors of a demon-infested apartment building.
While high fantasy and sci-fi are usually the cosiest of RPG bedfellows, the horror genre has always been a good fit. These are life-or-death choices, fighting against insurmountable odds, and an excuse for gruesome beasts to be on display. Really, it only takes a few steps to jump from befriending Lalas to kicking nightmare babies.
It can also be a good way to an RPG with a restricted scope. In the case of Look Outside, a horror RPG from Devolver Digital and developer Francis Coulombe, the confines of a cursed apartment building offer colorful characters, important player choice, a doomy story, and lots of monsters. But instead of a globe-spanning/hopping saga, it makes 15 days in the empty darkness of a building feel as vast and intimidating as oceans.
Look Outside if You Dare
The hook of Look Outside is in the title. The tenants of an apartment building cannot look outside their windows lest they join the rest of the world in becoming grotesque monsters. For the player, window avoidance is only part of the remit. As a tenant in said building, you must also try to survive the chaos caused by this ungodly phenomenon.
How the player goes about surviving is somewhat up to them. The stern warning not to gaze upon the flesh-wrenching terrors outside can be ignored (with a predictably dire outcome), or they can sit it out in their apartment, ignoring infrequent knocks on the door, feeding off scraps of takeaway food, and playing video games to pass the time.
But while that’s a choice, it would deny you the rewarding discovery of more than 150 individual monster designs and sharp, funny writing.
Each day, you get time to explore if you wish, and in doing so, there’s the dangling bait of supplies, weapons, and new comrades in your fight against the turned residents. But these shiny baubles of hope are always shadowed by the looming threat of insane creatures out to murder you.
And what creatures they are. It could have been a straightforward choice to pepper in reskins of a few monster designs, but no, Coulombe has given us a generous, varied rogues gallery, complete with backstories that often connect to the protagonist’s relationship with the human origins of these beasts. They also tend to have interesting reasons for the particulars of their monstrous appearance. In one example, a bite from a girl infects her family with toothlike growths across their body, resulting in some stunningly gruesome sights.
These designs stand out thanks to the SNES-era style visuals. I’ve played plenty of indie games employing the PS1 aesthetic, but there’s something about the chunky sprites of the generation before that lend a manic quality to already wild-looking foes. They may just be largely static images in combat, but the dread atmosphere makes it easy to forget that.
Into the Unknown
Never knowing what’s around the next corner is a key reason Look Outside retains a sense of danger and tension throughout its 12-hour run. On Normal mode, saving is something you can only do in your own apartment, so the further you venture from its relative safety, the more daunting every dark corner becomes. Not to mention the building doesn’t always like to play ball and stay within its original blueprints.
Sooner or later, combat comes into play, and Look Outside employs turn-based tactics that might feel familiar to fans of Undertale or World of Horror. The weaponry on offer is rather makeshift, and distance between you and your foe plays a big part in battle, so preparation (as much as can be done when heading into the unknown) plays a big part in your excursions.
Stumbling into a fight you can’t win offers up a true survival wrinkle, as you cannot escape a fracas until a couple of turns have passed. So, what’s your strategy to stay alive for those turns? The panic and eventual euphoria of escaping with your life from a brawl with some terrible creature is bottled survival horror, and in terms of role-playing, your choices in these moments hold a lot of weight.
No doubt, Look Outside can be unforgiving and brutal to the player, but it’s done so with its story in mind. You should feel like every step is in defiance of certain death, and the horrors of his world are cruel and uncaring, so why should we get any special treatment? That doesn’t mean you’ll get on with Look Outside’s odious odyssey just because you appreciate that. It will, however, allow you to respect its choices.
Score 9/10
Developer: Francis Coulombe
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Reviewed on: PC
Look Outside is out now on PC via Steam.
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