As if The Outlast Trials couldn't get any more deranged, the horror co-op game's big new update adds more tooth guns and lady who lives in the walls
Project Breach is out now
You know how it's hard to buy a gift for a girl who has everything? The Outlast Trials just got a fat winter update that adds an unexpected element to the demented co-op game that already includes a human flesh grinder, a sociopathic cop, and a guy whose skull looks like a meatball exploded in the microwave: hope.
"Project Breach marks a new beginning for The Outlast Trials," a press release says, "as one of the Murkoff Corporation’s captives, Amelia Collier, begins to fight back."
Collier is different from every other non-playable character The Outlast Trials has included since developer Red Barrels released the online multiplayer in 2023. Unlike its villains — whose faces are stretched with cracked skin, and whose souls are as infected as a popped pimple — owl-eyed Amelia wants to fight for her life with wisdom, not a tooth gun. But she's biding her time, apparently living inside the Trials' solid cement walls.
Which brings us back to the tooth gun. Project Breach gives Franco, the piggish mobster baby Red Barrels introduced earlier this year, a greasy new map and level for him to fire his favorite tooth-filled shotgun shells.
According to in-game text, the insidious researchers behind The Outlast Trials want to distract from Amelia's careful revolution by "exploring the psychosexual effects Franco has had on [player characters] by releasing him into a new story trial, 'Pleasure the Prosecutor.'" In this trial, which is set on the sleazy Downtown map, you'll have to watch as a team of mannequins give a guy a murder blowjob with their chainsaw mouths. Awesome.
Wash the taste of that scene down with a new player ability called the Jammer Rig, which strategically disables electronics. Fight brawn with, uh, brain, I guess.
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Ashley Bardhan is a critic from New York who covers gaming, culture, and other things people like. She previously wrote Inverse’s award-winning Inverse Daily newsletter. Then, as a Kotaku staff writer and Destructoid columnist, she covered horror and women in video games. Her arts writing has appeared in a myriad of other publications, including Pitchfork, Gawker, and Vulture.