#AND THIS WASN'T EVEN THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE GAME!!! THIS WAS JUST WHAT VAL WAS DEALING WITH!!

[frenchy-and-the-sea]

Hi, I'm back with a longer version of this because the sheer improbability of how it worked out is still making my brain do splits. so if you wanna know more about my big buff fighty girl and one of the many insane things that happened last night, READ ON.

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SO, early on in the campaign, Val got possessed. It was from a spirit that was doing the whole seeking vengeance thing and, through a few mishaps, accidentally turned it around on us. Val happened to fail the save and was unceremoniously shoved into the back of her own consciousness to just sit and watch her body (which was EASILY one of the heavier damage dealers at the time) absolutely tear into all of her friends. It left some noticeably deep issues with her, mostly in the form of being possessed/losing control. (Which. She already had issues with, so that's fun.) Genuinely, she almost left the party that night, it was so bad. But she didn't, and they carried on.

Flash forward to last night.

We are fighting the dad of one of our monks, who in a fit of wizard hubris, grafted the partially broken soul of a god to himself in order to "preserve" it and keep its memories intact. This by itself isn't inherently evil, but he's CLEARLY enjoying this whole situation of power/command too much, and our monk is grappling with the fact that his dad ditched him as a child/ruined his hometown/fucked up his memory just to become a spirit vessel without a single ounce of noticeable regret, and he is! understandably upset! So, after navigating some very deadly places in the astral sea and getting fucked up on the way in, we finally launch what is probably the most frustrating uphill fight we've ever had. The whole arena was massive and made of small floating chunks of earth that we had to navigate, and our antagonist had ways to jump around that made him just impossible to pin down. He was a high level wizard who was throwing out things like reverse gravity, and he was stealing good luck from us to keep us from landing anything on him, and he had a small army of mobs that were chasing us too, and it was just. Jesus. It was a hard fight.

So finally, our casters/very clever monks have worn him down to under half health, and this guy is floating next to one single chunk of rock in the middle of a void, trying to push the struggling soul of the god-being he's attached to back into place, and Val is FINALLY able to clamber over and land a few solid hits with her sword (aka the natural predator of hubris wizards.) But we've encountered these god-things before, you see, and Val has a lot of sympathy for them, so she's addressing the struggling soul of this one as she fights, telling it that they can help, that they've done it before, and trying to impress her memories of the prior help they've given on it. I was thinking it was just going to help break them apart more, that we could get our god-friend to fight a little harder on our behalf. Instead, this haggard spirit looks up from where it is still sort of fused to the figure of our monk's dad, and it reaches out for her.

Recall now the scenario from earlier in the campaign. This is, no shit, directly the same set-up that Val was in when she was possessed - the frenzied spirit, the hard battle, the hand reaching out. And in that moment, she knew two things. One: this thing was scared and confused, and there was a strong likelihood that if she took that outstretched hand, it was going to possess her. And then, two: that they were just going to have to sort her out later, because anything was better than what it was dealing with right now. She couldn't leave a bid for help unanswered. She couldn't refuse a hand held out for aid.

AND THEN. AND THEN, Y'ALL. THAT BEING DID SOMETHING THAT MY BRAIN IS GONNA LIVE WITH FOREVER. It DIDN'T possess Val. It came over to her, yes, but it was just looking for something to be whole again, and it ASKED PERMISSION to search her memory to find it. She already knew what it was and directed it to it, ofc, but the important thing is that it ASKED and WAITED. THE NARRATIVE SAW HER TAKE ON THAT FEAR FOR THE SAKE OF SOMEONE ELSE, AND IT REWARDED HER WITH RESPECTED BOUNDARIES. FUCK. I LOVE D&D SO MUCH.

The fact that the fates aligned that the spiritual being that was (sort of) possessing our antagonist reached out to Val for help (whose deepest fear is losing control to something/someone else) is already so good, but the fact that they did it with a gesture of an open hand, which is something she CANNOT ignore, is making my whole brain spin.

[dreamhot]

the only redeeming quality of outlast 2 to me is that some of the imagery is genuinely the best out of the whole series like they really went off on the symbolism, even if the rest of the game handled the themes/plot terribly, and packed way too much shit in it while also not really saying anything of substance about anything it included for the sake of shock value like at least outlast really got you with the walrider reveal and the whole murkoff thing, meanwhile outlast 2 made the really strange choice to hide the ties to murkoff in this easy to miss area like god the game this could've been

YEAH YEAH PRECISELY like . the bit about the reference to murkoff being hidden in such a ridiculous place is one of the more frustrating aspects to me because that connection, however subtle, is what ties this all together. you see the seeds for outlast 2 being planted in whistleblower, and it would've been far more satisfying to see them come to fruition in a way that you couldn't so easily skip past (especially because the end of the game makes even less sense without that context)

outlast and whistleblower did more to highlight that the Big Bad of the game wasn't the patients - it was the murkoff corporation for exploiting the mentally ill for their capitalist gains. the sequel, on the other hand, leaves the player to assume that the source of the malice is either pure religious zealotry or a hills have eyes-esque implication of rampant sickness and inbreeding. ofc the church (in a broader sense) in outlast 2 seems to be in a similar position as murkoff as far as being the Big Bad to be critiqued (both cos of knoth's gospel and the priest in the flashbacks), but it's still mostly subsidiary to murkoff's influence, so ... ? we're left to wonder if we're supposed to be blaming murkoff or dangerous religious dogma

on a technical level - the school sections were WAY too drawn out and just kinda ... scary for the sake of being scary (there's a really good video essay on this topic on youtube). also ... i hate whatever was going on with val. that was certainly . a choice. not to mention outlast 2 is a lot worse for misogynist violence which, while not necessarily out of line with the themes being discussed, can feel uncomfortable when it's not exactly needed to tell this sort of narrative. there are other horror themes we could be using rather than exploiting the already vulnerable (such as the victims of cults, not to mention that the first game still isn't innocent of using unsavoury tropes by having an asylum as the stage for the horror)

i think the sequel could have done more to be like its predecessor as far as framing an institution as the villainous party, rather than individuals. this could be well done through the use of religious cults, and i do believe that's what it was trying to do, but it's less sympathetic to those affected than it could have been. it just ... barely has a story. it's shocking and gory for the sake of being uncomfortable and frightening, but there's no substance beyond that. i cared about miles and waylon far more than i ever did blake, and they didn't even TALK. we could've had so much more ...