Look outside. Or don’t. I’m not your mother. It’s the first thing I did, though, and it burned my eyeballs right off and melted my face. That doesn’t tempt you, does it? Dying that way? There are so many ways to die.
Look Outside offers so much that way. You are the author of this horror-RPG experience and the choice is yours how you go about it. You have 15 days isolated in this hellscape of an apartment complex full of grotesque fallout from a cosmic event unleashed upon the world by the Hundred Gods.
Will you save the world, transform it, or end it? The choice is yours. You’re just a little guy in his apartment and don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to. You can be a shut-in, just play videogames inside, answer or not answer the door to strangers, talk to your neighbor who peers through a crack in the wall and keeps you company.
Or you can go explore the whole complex. Kill everyone. Save everyone. Team up with whoever you come across. Live altruistically or become the problem.
As RPG Maker models go, Look Outside separates itself in every core area that matters. It has nice custom pixel art drawn and animated by its developer Francis Coulombe, who has been called the Québécois Junji Ito. His art is singular, though, often created over Twitch streams, lifting the aesthetic beyond typified RPG Maker placeholders. The horrifying designs of each character and creature are the game’s calling card, each one so creative and inspired by horror iconography, gorgeous expressions of Lovecraftian pixel art.
What’s so moving about Look Outside is that it makes body horror in games more autonomous. We make choices which have drastic impacts on characters and the game state. What we do informs how we are perceived but also how we keep ourselves together, whether we fall into anxious insanity, or self-care our way through the apocalypse.
Immersion in games is often crafted by mechanical invention and here, the RPG framework is also novel. We can build a team of peculiar characters or go it alone, and can model our party based on the found weapons, gear, and learned special moves that come from leveling up.
The spaces of the game are also very interesting. Most RPG Maker games struggle with world bloat and design sprawl; the experiences of those spaces usually do not feel contained, and most often, each space is more like a check-mark, a place to go with something to do, rather than feeling like an inhabited world.
Look Outside, meanwhile, feels deeply lived-in. We understand the spaces based on the bizarre monsters we find in them and what has happened. Some of the rooms shift dramatically. Open up pathways to new spaces. Reveal more depending on how we approach them.
Throughout, there is this sense of great authorship, in league with some of the best expressive RPGs, like the games it has most in common with: EarthBound (1994) and Undertale (2015), experiential agency and clever design underwrite all the choices that make Look Outside an essential RPG and Survival Horror game. It feels as though the developer has recaptured the roots of horror and retroactively loaded the pre-PlayStation era of horror with more immersive mechanics. The result is a game you can play, and replay. You can look outside if you dare but there are just so many ways to die, what’s your hurry?
8/10
Reviewed on Steam Deck