Undertale + Lone Survivor + Fear & Hunger. Amazing RPG with a lot of truly unpredictable, grotesque and bizarre monents. Body horror elements are top notch, lore of the unknown cosmic horror is very intrieging.

I think, culturally, RPG Maker games have the reputation of being single-dev and highly conceptual projects that kind of have the gameplay as a secondary thing. Even in high effort and fleshed out games like Fear and Hunger, the actual gameplay isn't what kept fans around. It's why there are so many videos about RPG Maker games out there, but not as many active players: people come for the ideas and see the gameplay as secondary or not worthwhile.

I also think, separately but relatedly, indie horror games with fascinating concepts flourish online if they're vague or incomplete. Because, if you hear about a strange unexplained part of a story from a YouTuber or if you read it in a thread, your brain starts to piece it together in your own way. This counts as you "interacting" with the story and mentally bonding with it, even if you never played it but just kind of saw it as a movie. Think of stuff like FNaF and its ilk.

Why did I go into all that? Because I want you to believe me when I say that Look Outside is not like other girls.

Look Outside is a high-concept, single-dev RPG Maker game that not only did I really enjoy sitting down and playing, but I also found to be a complete experience. I genuinely would not have expected an RPG Maker game to be one of my favourites of all time from a gameplay standpoint, and yet it is!

The premise is that there is a cosmic horror freak outside that transforms people who look at it into body horror freaks. You are just some unemployed guy in an apartment building and you have roughly 2 weeks to survive indoors until the space fella goes away. With that premise being immediately set up, the gameplay takes over. You get to exploring and realise that exploration takes up time in the day, that materials you find in the hallways and bedrooms are needed for trading / hygiene / food / self defense, and that people of all shapes and kinds live in the building too. And to make it all worse, you can only save once you have explored a sufficient amount of new things. It is all about survival not just conceptually but also mechanically, while still being an RPG Maker game.

The combat is done, as you can guess, by interacting with threats in the overworld and then going into turn-based combat. I think this can put off some people (work on your attention span) but it doesn’t feel too simple. In the overworld, enemies move predictably but then randomly can freak out and start chasing you, which I found to be genuinely engaging since even one unplanned encounter can pwn you back to your last save. In combat, all your companions have unique moves and gimmicks, you can learn new moves by exploring and investing time, and you can find and use items to get out of emergency situations. The game loves throwing boss fights at you, so a good chunk of your total fights will be against something interesting.

I felt the difficulty was harsh but fair at the start, but then became pretty easy at the end once I had done a ton of things and minmaxed my characters. I think this is fair enough, as it feels good to be rewarded for exploring everything in a game about exploration. There is an additional difficulty mode you can try, which is harsh the entire way through from what I have seen.

Speaking of exploration, Look Outside has 152 achievements on Steam. Most of those achievements are tied to unique things you can and find at your own pace. 80% of it is optional, which is really cool to me. It feels like you’re just some guy in this bigger, living world that you can prod and probe at the risk of your own time and safety. Considering the entire game takes place in an apartment building, the developer really had to flesh out every room they could to get that feeling other games do by just letting you look out into a cityscape or a forest (remember, you can’t look outside).

Story-wise, the game delivers very well. The main theme, I think, is recovery. Some of the freaks you meet retain their sanity and just want to adapt to their new lives. Some can do it with your help, and some can't do it no matter how much you help. There are a lot of pleasant "indominable human spirit" storylines you can optionally go through, which I will every single time because that stuff ROCKS. My favourite storyline by far is the kids in the sewer.

The game kinda loses its horror tone around the middle as you involve yourselves in the lives of the other residents, which I found to be a reasonable progression and it didn't really bother me. It also does a horror story’s biggest sin: it explains everything at the end. Your mileage may vary, but I found the revelations to be faithful to the cosmic horror roots of the premise.

There are some things that I don't love, but they're just gameplay quirks. Weapons breaking due to random chance doesn't feel good since the ways to repair them are limited, and combat status conditions are not displayed in a nice way and don’t communicate information well. The "hygiene stats" your character has feel a bit too easy to manage. If you shower, brush your teeth, and eat once every 2 days or so, those hygiene stats become a complete non-issue. The way to fix this would just be to tweak some numerical thresholds behind the scenes. But this is somewhat addressed in the additional difficulty mode, so whatever I guess.

I have written too much but I genuinely feel like Look Outside was made in a lab to suit my tastes. A lot of exploration, a lot of survival, a lot of environmental stuff, a lot of challenging RPG bosses, a lot of micro-choices, a lot of quirky characters, a lot of body horror, a lot of cosmic horror, a lot of heart, and not a lot of money to buy. If the game sounds interesting, you would be betraying yourself to learn about it in any other way than playing it. This isn't Fear and Hunger or FNaF. This is actually good ;-)

【剧透警告】 从1.7版本开始玩，通关了大部分结局，我给这个游戏的评价是：震撼。随着结局的深入，我能感受到作者对于这个Look Outside世界的刻画逐渐深刻：在完美仪式见证的visitor的星系级别的宏大以及人类的渺小；在合一结局中感受探寻世界真相的耐人寻味之感与知道真相后的恍然、超出预期的震撼；在誓言结局中享受乱世中美好到不真切的温馨；最后，在最荒谬、最富有童话色彩的真结局中体验一把“他们喊着羁绊啊友情啊就冲上来了“的治愈与化险为夷的快乐，最后感慨一句”友情多么美好啊“。117个小时（有近乎一半时间在查单词意思），这个游戏的价值已远超单纯的42块钱。这个游戏带来的是不断摸索，一个单词一个单词地搜索（对提升英语成绩很有助），一本能让人欲罢不能的英语作业。说回游戏本身，它令人着迷的不仅是出彩的结局设置，还是游戏中每一个有血有肉的角色设定（超绝战神兼神人Sam除外）：从乔尔到欧内斯特，从蟑螂到自己的鼠宝（毕竟是胳膊换来的），从画家到海洋房的夏沫，还有几位可敬的天文学家。它们无不在充分展示世界的可怖与其中的温馨。尤其是在收集到全部队友后，每次回家，那句“Home Sweet Home”的真实意义都会在每一个玩过这个游戏的人心中留下对家的爱。当然，这个游戏的震撼不仅仅拘泥于人物与结局，还在作者近乎无敌的克苏鲁画风与其所表现的怪诞、离奇。每一个敌人的立绘都不相同，让打开这个游戏的每个人都知道——这就是克苏鲁，这就是艺术。有人可能会嘲笑这个游戏粗糙的画质与RPG Maker引擎的落后，但我想说，正是Look Outside的简陋画质，决定了只有它能是Look Outside。最后，感谢作者澎湃（应该可以这么用吧）的想象力。玩完这款游戏，不禁让我幻想着：会不会在几千年后的某一天，真的有“visitor”到来。那时候恳请大家不要向外看！！！

最后的最后，可能是我有些过分激动，这篇评测可能有些地方有夸大或轻微不实的情况，请以自己的游戏经验为主，不要盲目跟风。