I was initially a bit hesitant to play Look Outside. Seeing a 16-bit horror game set in an apartment building immediately reminded me of Lone Survivor, which everyone assured me was absolutely terrifying, but I never understood why. And games like Corpse Party certainly didn’t inspire a ton of confidence for horror games made in RPG Maker—and before you bring up Fear and Hunger, that’s scary for different reasons.
But I have never been so happy to be so wrong. Almost immediately, Look Outside hits you with a bizarre, unnerving atmosphere that consistently ramps up the tension and constantly presents you with unimaginable horror, both physical and esoteric. I honestly didn’t think it would be possible, but this top-down 16-bit horror RPG legitimately jump-scared me at least five times, and all of them were earned.
Look Outside presents its premise simply but devilishly wrapped in existential dread. A strange cosmic phenomenon suddenly appears in the sky, and anyone who looks at it is twisted into a horrific monster—sometimes devoid of thought, sometimes not. The player must survive for 15 days in their apartment, which seems to be just as twisted as the inhabitants within and maybe get some answers about what is actually going on.
“Look Outside hits you with a bizarre, unnerving atmosphere that consistently ramps up the tension and constantly presents you with unimaginable horror, both physical and esoteric.”
Like some of the best horror games, it constantly keeps you at arm’s length as to the hows and the whys of the plot, but at the same time, it’s not trying to focus its attention on it. The entire game feels like a collection of smaller stories as you explore the apartment and see the myriad ways this cataclysmic event has warped the people around you. It evokes ideas from Silent Hill, the works of David Lynch and probably most directly, Junji Ito’s Hellstar Remina.
The gameplay is fairly standard for a survival horror game, but Look Outside finds an interesting way to mix things up. Since players are expected to survive for 15 days, this means finding a way to pass the time. They can do this in small ways, like playing video games in their room, but the main way to do this is to venture out into the apartment. Look Outside implements a unique system where time only passes when you explore new areas, so you’re incentivized—or pushed somewhat against your will—to dive deeper and deeper into the madness.
And Look Outside is even more clever about forcing players out of the apartment. Players need to manage both their hunger and their hygiene, but both food and soap or toothpaste are in limited supply. Being hungry causes you to lose your max health while being smelly makes it easier for the horrors to detect you, so there are tangible benefits to staying full and clean. But this means putting yourself in danger’s way.
But Look Outside does find a way to balance this, as players are also given a Danger Meter, where the longer they stay out and increase the meter, the more experience points they’re rewarded with when they return home. Of course, players can earn EXP and increase their levels by fighting monsters, but since this is a survival horror game, this is where players may feel the most helpless.
“Look Outside constantly finds ways to amplify the horror and give players a feeling of helplessness.”
Despite combat playing by turn-based RPG rules, Look Outside constantly finds ways to amplify the horror and give players a feeling of helplessness. For starters, almost every weapon can break and is made more vulnerable by special attacks—so the thing that is supposed to give you an edge in battle can actively hurt you in the long run.
But the best thing I can say about Look Outside is that it is SCARY. I mean, genuinely scary in every conceivable way. From its horrific, twisted aberrations—made even more grotesque by the 16-bit aesthetic—to its deeply disturbing ambiance to its overarching narrative. One particularly harrowing moment found me in a room where I could hear the distant sound of a screaming baby mixed with a ghostly wailing.
LOOK OUTSIDE SPOILERS AHEAD
The story of this room was a teething baby had looked outside and began mutating into a toothy monster. Every member of her family she bit grew twisted appendages made of rows of teeth. At one point, if you manage to find a small army figure, you can play with a tooth child who is rooted to the floor but still lucid enough to play, but while you do, it’s slowly losing whatever consciousness it has left.
If you stay in the room long enough, the giant deformed monstrosity that was once this baby girl crawls from the darkness to try to grab you, which serves as a pretty intense boss fight but was a genuine jump scare in its own right. Look Outside is comprised of moments like these that are both horrific and tragic—which makes them weigh on you even more.
But Look Outside does what very few horror games I’ve played recently are capable of doing, and it stays with you. It gets under your skin and forces you to make decisions that leave a deeply bad feeling in the pit of your stomach. Personally, it genuinely caused me to have a deep existential fear at the very idea of not being able to look at the sky. There’s a strange meta-theme to it where, much like the terrible sky, despite the horror, you feel compelled to push forward to see what new horror is waiting for you in the dark and how, like the twisted mutations of flesh, everything will unfold.
And Look Outside’s visuals REALLY highlight what RPG Maker is capable of. Not only do all the monster designs look appropriately horrifying, but the game does a lot with semi-dynamic lighting—changing your field of vision if you step in or out of light sources and changing landscapes from a dilapidated apartment complex to eldritch horror scapes in a single frame. Even battles take place in these incredibly eerie Earthbound-esque liminal spaces that make them feel legitimately like nightmares instead of battles.
Not only that, the game utilizes an interesting mechanic similar to Resident Evil: Gaiden, where some enemies start in the distance and get closer with each turn. This allows characters to start off somewhat obscured, only to reveal themselves as grotesque horrors up close. And since the battle screen doubles as a dialogue screen, this can be used to great effect for some pretty well-earned jump scares.
And the audio amplifies this effect to an incredible degree. The music can range from an offputting, almost 80’s horror-movie-style synth to the deeply disturbing sounds of crying babies, guttural gurgling, or the sounds of constricted lungs gasping desperately at breath. Also, while I suspect that it might be an audio glitch, some monster sounds—namely that guttural gurgling—carry over into battles, and even though it might not be intentional, it makes things so much more terrifying.
Although it’s not a completely seamless experience, for starters, some of the interface is a bit obtuse. Certain status effect symbols aren’t clearly communicated, requiring you to guess a little bit as to which items can cure them. Also, there are certain stats like Morale, Calm, Stress, and even the aforementioned Hunger and Hygiene that aren’t listed in the Status screen, so despite being given updates on their changes, there’s no way to see where they are.
“I never want to play Look Outside ever again, and I mean that as the highest compliment.”
Also, the game isn’t with a few visual hiccups. Sometimes, when a room is meant to loop, your party will default to a single position, giving away the loop. Not only that, some enemy models can get stuck after they’ve revealed themselves and if you return to an area after dying they’ll be in their reveal position—this was the case with the aforementioned teeth family.
Also, this might be getting into spoiler territory, but I kind of wish there was either more or less of a punishment for looking outside. Throughout the entirety of the game, you’re constantly being tempted with the prospect of looking outside. There are windows everywhere, and so much of the mystery around what is actually outside spans between the horrible and the profound.
But then you do, and it’s just an instant game over as your character’s face is sucked out of the window. I couldn’t help but feel like if they had a Lavos moment from Chrono Trigger where maybe looking outside caused a premature final boss fight, or maybe it affected your character in different ways depending on when you looked, it might’ve made it a much more interesting, and possibly terrifying prospect.
However, these minor gripes do nothing to detract from the horror. I genuinely don’t think I’ve been this affected by a horror game since P.T., and that is an exceptionally high bar to clear. Now, I never want to play Look Outside ever again, and I mean that as the highest compliment.