Look Outside review – catching up with the apocalypse

GameCentral takes a look back at some of the most interesting games of the year that it didn’t review the first time round, starting with a bizarre mix of survival horror and JRPG.

Whenever we get to the end of the year, and the new releases start to dry up, we try to loop back and take a look at what we might have missed, especially in preparation for our Top 20 of the year – which we always run over the Christmas break. Because The Game Awards were a week later than usual, we haven’t got as much time as normal, but we did want to make sure we covered this game in particular.

In theory, Look Outside is fairly easy to explain, although imagining a survival horror version of Japanese role-player EarthBound is not the easiest of mash-ups to get your head around. Cosmic horror is infamously difficult to portray, outside of the written word, but the inherent artificiality of video games means they’ve usually fared better than movies, from the peerless Bloodborne to the increasingly forgotten Sunless Sea.

Look Outside has a lot of superficial similarities with the plot of Bird Box but despite the chaos that ensues this is more classically Lovecraftian, in that the nature of the mysterious event is literally unknowable, rather than being straightforwardly evil. There’s even a couple of happy endings, comparatively speaking, to unlock – although don’t expect to see any of those in a hurry.

If you don’t know EarthBound (aka Mother 2) it’s a fairly standard Japanese role-player from the SNES era, made special by its atypical real-world setting, charming sense of humour, and superb music. Look Outside has a very different sort of atmosphere, but the top-down visuals and turn-based combat are very similar, although the latter was never very different from the role-playing norm at the time.

The plot of Look Outside starts with you waking up from sleep to be told by your neighbour, who is seen only as an eye peeking through a hole in the wall, that you should look outside. Do so and it’s instantly game over, as your mind and body are turned into scrambled eggs simply by looking out of the window.

Although the obvious strategy, on your second go, is to not look outside (which your neighbour later admits is what they actually meant to say) we would strongly advise playing the game on its lowest difficulty level, at least at first. The default isn’t impossibly hard but its frustrations, particularly in terms of saving, get in the way of enjoying the game to the full. Although in truth, neither mode is balanced well and there’s nasty difficulty spikes, and troughs, in both.

You live in a shabby four storey apartment block, where most of the inhabitants have already been turned into grotesque monsters or are in the process of transforming – although neither case automatically means they’re hostile and some can still be talked to. You also learn that your situation is not necessarily hopeless and that if you can last 15 days then the danger should pass, although naturally that’s easier said than done.

As well as being a horror game, Look Outside is also an actual survival game, in that lasting 15 days doesn’t just mean fighting grotesque monsters but scavenging for food and supplies as well. Eating, sleeping, and even showering are essential to maintaining your sanity and registering the passing of time (as is playing fake in-game video games). Meanwhile, other residents will often knock on the door and ask to chat or trade, creating a very unusual and unique atmosphere.

You can venture outside the apartment building but while discovering a new area will pass time it will also increase the danger level. This results in more earned experience points, which creates a neat risk versus reward conundrum, as you risk staying out as long as possible.

Believing it or not but we’re grossly underplaying just how strange Look Outside is, but that’s because we don’t want to spoil the best surprises. Suffice to say though that the dangers don’t just come from everyone turning into monsters, but that the whole fabric of reality is warping and changing in ways that are far beyond human comprehension.

The atmosphere and narrative of Look Outside are amazing but, much like EarthBound, the combat does lose its appeal quite early on. It’s fine, with plenty of different weapons and special attacks, but it’s still a fairly bog standard turn-based system. The only really unique element is how some creatures start off in the background and you only get to see what they really are when they lunge forward, revealing some enjoyably disgusting The Thing style designs.

On a technical level the game is very simple – it is, after all, the work or primarily just one person – but the chunky 2D graphics work perfectly to create an unsettling tone and to portray monstrosities that would be hard to stomach if they were rendered realistically. They’re impressively imaginative in their horribleness and yet they were all once human and in some cases can still be reasoned with.

Ultimately, Look Outside is a game about daring to trust other people and about doing anything other than sitting inside playing video games all day. It teaches you that strangers aren’t necessarily as scary as they first seem… even if sometimes they’re much worse – you’ve just got to learn to tell one situation from the other.

The difficulty level could’ve done with some fine tuning and the combat runs out of interesting ideas long before the rest of the game does, but given the shockingly low asking price there’s really no reason not to give this a try, especially as its low-tech nature means it’ll run on just about any PC ever (strangely there’s no word on a console version yet).

In a year that’s been full of great indie games this is another one to add to that list. Its influences may be obvious, but the game itself is like nothing else around and manages to be disturbing, funny, and strangely heart-warming, all at the same time. In Look Outside, you and the whole planet will probably end up suffering a terrible fate but, as is often the case, it’s the journey and not the destination that’s most important.

Formats: PC
Price: £8.99
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Developer: Francis Coulombe
Release Date: 21st March 2025
Age Rating: N/A

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