The Outlast Trials

The Outlast Trials is a very good horror game with an argument attached, and the argument is now the bigger story.

Counting the hundred most-helpful English negatives: AI appears in 46 of them. By year that's one in 2023, one in 2024, 14 in 2025 and 30 in 2026. The people writing them are not passing visitors — their median playtime is 60.8 hours, and the highest-voted examples come from players with 92, 121, 125 and 178 hours.

What can be verified, and what can't

The store page carries a Steam AI Generated Content Disclosure. Here it is in full, as Red Barrels wrote it:

Throughout the development of our game, we may leverage AI-based tools to assist our team in content creation. Please rest assured that what you see in the game reflects the creativity and hard work of our team. Examples may include pictures and/or posters used in some of our environments.

That much is fact: the disclosure exists, and it names environmental pictures and posters.

Several high-voted reviews go further, alleging the studio denied using AI before Steam's disclosure rules obliged them to declare it. I can't verify that sequence — I have the current page, not its history, and I'm not going to assert what a developer said or when. What I can report is the substance players are reacting to, which the developer's own disclosure confirms.

The tone of the complaints is worth conveying accurately, because they aren't drive-by outrage. A 92-hour player, 849 votes: "I'm leaving this as a negative recommendation not because the game is bad, I actually adore this game… This game has a wonderfully creative team, in both art, and especially writing. It hurts me to see a team like [this]." A 178-hour player: "I love this game, it got me hooked straight away… But for a game with such great attention to detail, I'm extremely disappointed by the consistent use of AI art."

Whether that matters to you is a judgement I can't make on your behalf. What I can say is that it has become the single most common criticism of this game, that it's accelerating, and that it's coming from the people who've played it most. If it doesn't bother you, note that 94 of the last 100 English reviews are still positive — both things are true at once.

The game underneath

Excellent, and the reason those players have sixty hours.

Outlast's rule is that you cannot fight. You have a night-vision camera, a limited battery, and somewhere to hide. The Trials adds three other people to that, and the result is genuinely transformative: co-ordinating an objective while something enormous patrols between you produces both real fear and the specific comedy of four adults whispering contradictory instructions.

The sound work carries it — an 8.5 that's doing the heaviest lifting in the scoring. You navigate by audio, and the game knows exactly when to give you nothing at all.

It's also still being supported two years past 1.0, with seasonal content and a community that even critical reviewers describe as welcoming — a genuinely unusual note in co-op horror, and a contrast with Dead by Daylight's reputation.

The older criticisms, correctly dated

Nineteen of the hundred negatives predate the 5 March 2024 release, including four of the top ten by votes. The single most-upvoted negative, at 1,152 votes, is from May 2023 — Early Access — and is explicitly a critique of the solo experience for players expecting a single-player Outlast. That's a legitimate concern, and solo play is still the weaker mode, but a 2023 Early Access review sitting atop the negative column is describing a build that's had two years of work since.

The durable non-AI complaints are content and repetition, at 15 and 10 — once you've learned the trial pool, the modifiers extend difficulty rather than variety. And monetisation: eight cosmetic packs, of which the four I checked are NZ$28.99 each, sold alongside a NZ$56.99 game. That's a 5 for monetisation. Nobody has to buy them, but the pricing is steep enough to notice.

The verdict

The Outlast Trials earns a 7.5. As co-op horror it's an 8 and one of the few games to make a genre built on helplessness work with friends — I'd put it comfortably ahead of the friend-group horror crowd like REPO for atmosphere and craft.

It sits lower than its 93.9% badge for two reasons that a prospective buyer should weigh personally. Cosmetic packs at NZ$28.99 on a full-price game is aggressive. And its most engaged players are, in growing numbers, choosing to register a complaint about how some of its art was made — a complaint the developer's own store disclosure substantiates in outline.

If neither weighs on you, this is an easy recommendation with three friends. If either does, that's a reasonable place to land too, and the reviews will tell you you're not alone.