Let's play Family Feud.
Poll 100 people on the scariest game they've ever played. What's on the board? Surely a Silent Hill, and a Resident Evil, too. Alien Isolation seems likely. One of the Fatal Frames has a good shot. Those who know ball may call out a deeper cut like Siren, Sylvio, or Visage. One name I'm certain makes it on the board--to the tune of my family cheering me on with "Good answer! Good answer!"--is Outlast.
The horror game from Montreal-based indie studio Red Barrels was released in 2013 as the debut effort from what was then a 10-person team. The studio was founded by developers with an origin story we hear about a lot in the games industry: They left roles at big-budget studios like Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Naughty Dog to pursue something they could call their own.
On an hour-long call with Red Barrels' Phillipe Morin, he told me how he and his co-founders, David Chateauneuf and Hugo Dallaire, established Red Barrels as a fully independent game studio and built what has become a tentpole horror series.
Content warning: This article contains descriptions of extreme violence.
"After our project got canceled at EA, we were having a hard time picking up on where we would want to go, what we would want to do," Morin said. "And so I think that's when we realized that we were pretty much all at the same place career-wise [and felt] it was time we try to make a project of our own."
Morin said the burgeoning team didn't know what its first game would be, but they landed on a horror game because that's what they were passionate about, with a distinct style to stand out: first-person, defenseless in nature--players could only run and hide from enemies, not fight back--with what would become the game's signature night-vision lens coloring the terror lurking around every corner.
"David was a huge horror fan, and I knew I would have a good time working on such a game. And Hugo came up with the idea behind the night vision and the visual style, mostly after watching the Rubber Johnny video."
He explained that he and Chateauneuf tried to convince Ubisoft to let them make a horror game back in 2008 while they were still working there, but the developer-publisher wasn't interested, which Morin cited as "mostly a financial thing."
You might not remember, especially in today's much more horror-obsessed climate, but during that period--call it 2006 to 2012 or so--horror games had mostly gone dormant. There were a few exceptions, but most of them were moving the genre in an action direction, like Dead Space and Resident Evil 5, unless you were playing under-the-radar PC gems like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Penumbra: Overture. Horror games weren't in, or so publishers that primarily dealt with AAA games believed, so they weren't looking to invest in them.
The co-founders figured Frictional Games' success with Amnesia proved there actually was a viable market for horror games, and they were grateful that the genre didn't become oversaturated in the first few years after Amnesia, leaving an opening for them. Morin recalled how quickly their expectations unraveled.
"We thought at first that we'd come up with the pitch within three or four months and shop it around to a few publishers, and we'd find out pretty quickly if it works or not," he said.
Instead, it took 18 months of meetings.
Partners were hard to come by; publishers were still obsessed with mobile games, a refrain I've heard often from developers who worked in that era. Morin remembered potential partners telling him that they'd "rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games than $500,000 in [Outlast]." Ultimately, the Canada Media Fund (CMF), a publicly funded investment program meant to support homegrown media projects across Canada, helped bring Outlast to fruition. But a million dollars from the CMF wouldn't be enough.
Morin told me the group put forward an additional $360,000 from their own savings accounts and credit cards, and leveraged their home mortgages to see the project through to the end.
"Everything was pretty much on the line," he reminisced. "Of course, it meant working very long, long hours. We were in a sprint to release the game before running out of money."
Morin remembered potential partners telling him that they'd "rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games than $500,000 in [Outlast]."
No publisher materialized, but the work continued, and eventually the team felt it could get the game to the finish line without an outside publisher, so Red Barrels did exactly that, though Morin admitted the team had no experience with that side of making video games.
"We were experienced game developers," Morin explained, "but we didn't know much about that side--publishing and marketing and sales and all that. So we had to learn on the fly."
A familiar name would come to Red Barrels' aid: Amnesia. Some folks at Red Barrels sat in on a conference talk by Frictional Games co-founder Thomas Grip, who said Frictional sold 400,000 copies of Amnesia: The Dark Descent in its first year on Steam. Red Barrels adopted that same total as its goal for Outlast, but after a promising launch window in early September 2013, sales slowed, suggesting they weren't on pace to hit it.
Morin reached out to Grip, who generously walked him through the ebb and flow of Steam sales.
"He explained to us the dynamic of Steam, and when you do promotion, it spikes back up, [then] goes back down, and basically your sales curve becomes like a roller coaster."
The game's first discount event, timed for Halloween that year, proved Grip correct, though Morin also recounted the boon of being featured on Conan O'Brien's Clueless Gamer segment.
"He played a bunch of horror games for Halloween, and his most positive comments were for Outlast, so that probably didn't hurt."
Five months after launching the game, Outlast had hit its year-one goal of 400,000 copies sold. They weren't all sold at full price, but it was enough for the whole team to enjoy "pretty significant bonuses," Morin said.
Around the same time, Outlast was ported to PlayStation 4 and included in its popular PlayStation Plus subscription at launch, which gave its brand another big boost. Without a gaming PC, and having eagerly awaited the game's console port after seeing it at Penny Arcade Expo in Boston a year earlier, I bought a PS4 just to play it myself. I joked with Morin that even though Sony didn't want to publish Outlast, he still made them at least a couple hundred bucks.
In the summer that followed, its Whistleblower DLC and subsequent Xbox launch kept it in the horror spotlight. It was still an era of few horror games, though there were signs of an upswing, with games like Alien Isolation, The Evil Within, and Hideo Kojima's PT--a free and immediately viral teaser for his eventually canceled Silent Hill project--all releasing before the year ended.
Even mobile games, once a roadblock for Outlast securing funding, were joining the horror trend, with Five Nights at Freddy's debuting that same year and becoming a streaming hit. Luckily for Red Barrels, Outlast had established what Morin called a "solid fanbase" by then, which the studio took as a sign that a sequel was in order.
But playing Outlast, or working on it, isn't for everyone. Not nearly. Even for players who consider themselves horror enthusiasts, the games are intense not only because players have no way to fight back against enemies, nor just because it's quite happy to leave you stranded in total darkness without any more camera batteries to power your light source, but also because of how far they go in their depictions of violence.
This is a series that asks its players to saw off the legs of a naked man hung on a crucifix; to inject a victim with a cocktail of STDs using a torture rack of syringes; to direct animatronics to drill into a man's penis and then decapitate him. Just typing out a few of the series' many nauseatingly graphic moments of unparalleled violence makes me a bit uncomfortable to admit I like these games.
Talking with Morin, I was finally able to ask something that was on my mind for years: Was Outlast, in its over-the-top depictions of violence, gore, and nudity--which, like horror itself, was much rarer in games back then--a reaction to the so-called "torture porn" trend in horror movies of the time, such as Saw, Martyrs, and Hostel? He told me it actually wasn't so calculated. Perhaps concerningly, it was simply a "personal preference."
"We didn't start like, 'Oh, we've got to make the goriest game out there.' It was just, 'We're making a horror game, so obviously we'll make it gory.' I remember even the scriptwriter early on was saying, 'There's never too much blood.'"
You can dig up some obscure titles on Steam or Itch.io that rival Outlast in how far a game pushes that proverbial envelope, but among mainstream successes, I haven't found anything that goes as far. I find it so far beyond the lengths other horror games go to that this relationship between tremendous success and unflinching gore is what inspired me to reach out to Red Barrels for this interview in the first place.
This degree of violence should mean Outlast is forever niche, or so I'd think, but it's been one of its biggest selling points, helping it become a household name among horror fans. Is that a sign of an increasingly depraved society? I don't think so. To me, it's just horror games catching up to horror movies in what people are willing to depict on screen.
"So we just started pushing and pushing and pushing, and you know, I remember there was a playtest, and somebody, after a couple of hours, basically ran out of the studio to go cry outside," Morin recalled, saying that she never came back. And she wasn't the only one.
"When we do job interviews, we always make sure that people are fully aware of the kind of content we create and the kind of conversations needed to create that content," Morin continued. "Again, people have to be comfortable with that because obviously you hear stuff in the studio that [if] you said the same thing in a different studio, you'd end up in a meeting with HR. We had one case of somebody who started working for us on Monday, and on Thursday they resigned because even though they knew about the gore and the violence, they had a blind spot for other things, more so about religion, and they were not comfortable with that, so they had to resign. So obviously it happens, but we try in our hiring process to make sure everybody knows what it takes to create these kinds of games."
Though the series has never shied away from incorporating religious iconography in its grisly scenes, Morin's anecdote most likely referred to Outlast 2, the 2017 sequel that again raised the profile of Red Barrels, which doubled in size to 20 people for the project. Like in the first game, players take on the role of a journalist following a tip that lands them in a nightmare. This time, it's a cult deep in the Arizona desert, telling a story inspired by the Jonestown Massacre.
Outlast 2 pushed the envelope so far that it actually had to scale it back a bit to avoid a ban in Australia for two scenes in particular. Later, when Red Barrels released a new difficulty in a patch, it re-added those scenes, though only to what is now considered the unrated PC version.
To date, very few games have ever scared me as much--I can count those that have on one hand, in fact. I told Morin that Outlast 2 was one of the hardest review assignments of my career, because I needed to finish before the embargo, but the game had tormented me. I often had to psyche myself up to play it.
This degree of violence should mean Outlast is forever niche, or so I'd think, but it's been one of its biggest selling points, helping it become a household name among horror fans.
Talking to him, I realized what I loved about Outlast 2 is what made it the most divisive game in the series. In Outlast, you're stuck in a cramped asylum, often with narrow corridors boxing you in. That can certainly be scary, and it was for me, too. But for Outlast 2, Red Barrels expanded its environments, often setting them outdoors in wide cornfields and other rural scenes. It sometimes made me less confident I was going the right way, which filled me with dread that I was needlessly spending extra time while a fanatic with a scythe hunted me, but Morin remarked that some players don't feel as stressed "if there is no roof."
Given how the team made ends meet without a publisher for the first game, by the time the second game was coming together, Red Barrels felt confident it could do it all alone again. And it did, but the game's launch wasn't as strong as the team had hoped. Morin said that was partly because of the physical edition of the series, Outlast Trinity, which bundled Outlast, its Whistleblower DLC, and Outlast 2 on disc.
"To this day, I'm still not sure [whether the physical edition] added sales, or did we just kind of cannibalize our digital sales and then get less money from it? Because obviously we get less money from a retail sale than digital," he said, adding that the Trinity edition was "too much stuff to handle" for Red Barrels at that time. It was another lesson one might learn when you're building a studio on the go.
Morin also found it frustrating because the first game shipped with an experience that was too easy, leading the team to add more difficulty options in post-launch patches to appease players who wanted a rougher go with it. But players said that Outlast 2 was too difficult at launch, which is a much harder fix. If a game is too hard, you lose the casual player base. They tend not to come back because they didn't care about the game as much as the hardcore fanbase--you've already scared them off. Meanwhile, players who want a greater challenge will more reliably return if a studio turns the dial that way, according to Morin.
"I make it sound like one was a success and the other one was a failure, which is not the case at all," Morin said. "Both games were pretty profitable, but it's just--I think at this point, we're able to acknowledge that there were a couple of things we could have done differently [with Outlast 2], and they would have affected the result in a significant way."
By the end of 2017, Red Barrels confirmed it wanted to do Outlast 3 eventually but noted that it had shifted focus to a new project. That would become Red Barrels' biggest project ever--in both scope and success: The Outlast Trials. Playable solo but intended as a co-op game for up to four players, The Outlast Trials was a reaction to the way many players were already playing Outlast, Morin explained.
"We knew that there were a lot of people playing the [earlier] games, but within a group. So people would watch it as they would watch a horror movie while somebody was playing, and then if that person died, then they'd give the controller to somebody else, and we were like, 'What if we can create that kind of experience, but everybody has a controller?'"
It would be six years between that seed of an idea and the early-access launch of The Outlast Trials in 2023, which Morin remembers as "a f**king long time" during which the team grew to 45 people and made "a shit-ton of prototypes." After four years, Red Barrels thought it had landed on something "shippable," Morin said, but a playtest went poorly and tanked enthusiasm.
The problem, he said, was the Red Barrels team "went too far trying to make [The Outlast Trials] systemic, random, and trying to reach our ultimate goal of infinite replayability. We needed to come back to something that maybe added less replayability, but definitely felt more like Outlast."
The team eventually found that formula and debuted it on Steam as an early-access game in 2023. In 2024, the 1.0 version arrived, along with its console release. Since then, it's received several major updates that have added features like a character prestige system, several more maps and abilities, an in-game shop, seasonal battle passes, and new villains, though none more memorable than the unnerving Mother Gooseberry who first greets players in the game's tutorial.
For the most part, I've felt Red Barrels has done a good job implementing live-service elements, even as the live-service landscape changed drastically between 2017 and 2024. However, some players have been disappointed with Red Barrels' use of generative AI for certain in-game elements, including posters players can unlock for their customizable Sleep Rooms, which they return to between rounds. I asked them about that, and they pointed me to their Steam disclosure regarding generative AI use.
As much as I enjoy Trials and still play it, I lost interest in completing its battle passes when I realized some rewards were made that way, though there are signs the team is in the process of replacing those assets with new ones that seem to be made by humans, even if it seems--to me anyway--the team doesn't want to celebrate that pivot for fear of creating a Streisand Effect-like reaction to the earlier use of those tools.
Early on, Morin explained, the team hadn't intended to create an Outlast live-service game. At first, they were focused on making an Outlast game people wanted to play with friends. Today, it's the best-selling and most-played Outlast game in the series, with nearly 19 million lifetime players, including those who jumped in during the game's stint as a PS Plus offering. Though the co-op nature of Trials gave the series a major overhaul, Morin said it's been a huge success because, at its heart, it's still Outlast.
"We've seen a lot of [live-service] games coming up, and they all try to beat Fortnite. They come up with all these different ways of getting revenue, but they don't focus enough on the main reason that people come back to your game in the first place: because the core loop is fun, and they enjoy the universe, and they want to spend more time in it. It's like opening up a restaurant and focusing too much on the wine selection--but the food has to be good first. Once you have people coming for the food, then you can maybe hope to sell them $200 bottles of wine."
Recently, The Outlast Trials quadrupled its personal-best Steam concurrent-player record, exceeding 120,000 players thanks to a hefty Steam discount, players' desire for scary games to play around Halloween, and a surge in China specifically. Outlast Trials' Season 7 is ongoing, with the annual Halloween event, Geister, set to begin before the month is through. Many live-service games seem intent on going forever, but that wasn't Red Barrels' original vision for Trials. I asked Morin if he now sees Outlast Trials as a forever kind of game.
"I think we're just scratching the surface. We'll stop making content when the players tell us to stop making content," he said.
Collectively, the Outlast series has attracted more than 60 million players. I asked the co-founder whether that type of success, with Trials in particular, makes getting back to Outlast 3 easier, because the team is buoyed by the live-service game, or more difficult, because it would draw resources away from what is already very successful to instead take a risk on what would presumably be another single-player game.
"Previously, we said that Outlast 3--we wanted to make it at some point. I don't think we've announced anything more official than that." Not wanting to overshare, he motioned to Red Barrels' marketing director, Marie-Joelle Paquin, who was listening in on the call. "I don't know, MJ, how far you want me to go."
"I think you've gone far enough for now," she replied. I couldn't help but laugh, having seen this kind of exchange so many times in this job.
Morin chuckled too, saying, "Sorry, Mark. I tried."
Fifteen years ago, Red Barrels couldn't find one company willing to publish Outlast. Today, the series is part of a distinct chapter in horror game history. Just as Silent Hill and Resident Evil inspired so many games that look and play like them, Outlast helped usher in a wave of horror games where players must run from relentless monsters, unable to fight back. Though Red Barrels doesn't claim to have invented this formula, it painted that burgeoning trend with its signature hues of blood-red gore and night-vision-tinted depravity.
There's renewed passion for horror, Morin said, even as so much else across the industry seems uncertain. The day before he and I spoke, another developer told him it seemed like the only studios in Montreal doing well were those making horror games: Red Barrels and Dead by Daylight's Behaviour Interactive. The genre's resurgence over the last several years has surely created more opportunities for studios to find publishers, opportunities that didn't exist when Outlast was incubating. But today, Morin is grateful things worked out the way they did because it's allowed Red Barrels to stay indie all this time.
"We've been working like this for 15 years. It would be hard to switch now," he told me, crediting the Outlast community for showing up in such huge numbers for the especially twisted horror series. "It's pretty funny and satisfying at the same time--that, considering the kind of content we put in our games, we've got such a nice bunch of people as a fanbase," even if, he joked, "some of them are maybe a little more f**ked up" than what Red Barrels has created.
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