The Outlast Trials Is an Exercise in Bad Taste and Good Politics

A Kotaku essay reads The Outlast Trials alongside Rex Miller's 1987 novel Slob and Tom O'Neill's 2019 book Chaos, framing the co-op game's Cold War-era Murkoff mind-control experiments as political allegory. It calls the game possibly the gnarliest ever made, with every environment saturated in blood. The piece also notes that its endings place players in the Congo, Cuba, China and Saigon, pointing toward a larger alternate history.