Outlast Trials earns its pre-game trigger warning within the first five minutes when a pair of boxy night vision goggles is pried off a dismembered corpse and screwed into your skull with an auger drill. You've been swept off the street to take part in the Murkoff Coporation's "Trials", an experimental group therapy program that targets those on the edge of society with something to hide that sees you and three other patients attempt to survive expansive Saw movie-esque puzzles. Outlast Trials' singleplayer introduction truly horrifies, but that terror quickly bleeds away in co-op, where I found the tension too often interrupted by janky key-collecting puzzles or frustrating, one-dimensional encounters with brutish psychopaths.
This brand of psychiatric violence really cut through to me in a way that stands very much apart from other horror games.
