In Rex Miller’s 1987 horror novel Slob, Chicago is under the blight of “Chaingang,” a 500-pound killer whose hunger for food and flesh is unequaled. Despite his appearance and more odorous stench, the walking death manages to maneuver with little detection due to what’s described as an uncanny charisma. He is effectively camouflaged. Such an unusual make of man, it turns out, is not born. Chaingang was designed by the Pentagon, part of a covert project to create an unstoppable murder machine to turn the tide in Vietnam. A Michael Myers for Uncle Sam.
The Outlast Trials is entirely consumed by this boomerang paradigm. In the co-op game, you and other lower rungs of society are subjected to mental conditioning tests. Solve puzzles, elude enemy detection and, occasionally, murder in unthinkable ways. A multiplayer prequel to Red Barrel’s hit 2013 survival horror Outlast in which a citizen journalist discovers a creepy mental asylum providing cover for a backfiring supersoldier program, Trials is set in the late ‘50s, an era defined by Cold War paranoia. The game is set in the bowels of The Murkoff Corporation, a research firm tasked with creating sleeper cells.
With seemingly no limit on financing or bodies, the company is pushing the outer limits of narcotics and mind control. An elevated MK Ultra, Murkoff isn’t just designing the drugs a Charles Manson type might trip on; it’s drafting blueprints for its own BTK. Along with two or three friends, your compatibility will be tested in controlled environments, slaughterhouses recreating places of commerce, faith, bread and circuses.
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