Outbreak: Endless Nightmares (PC)

Outbreak is an indie horror series that seemingly has a new title everytime I check our inbox. We covered one of the titles on PS4 and weren’t sold on the idea but The Endless Nightmare sounded enticing enough to bring us back. Is this a true house of horror? Read on to find out. 

Outbreak: Endless Nightmares aims to fuse the world of classic survival horror with the current buzzword of gaming “Roguelike”. Set in an abandoned hospital full of ghost apparitions throwing words like Nexus around it’s your job to find your way out of this constant loop of darkness and death using the trusty ol tank controls and a range of weapons. 

Graphically Endless Nightmares is a massive step up in some places from the last title we covered and massive credit to the one person developer has to be given. 

The hub level set within the hospital is beautifully atmospheric with lots of fog around, well worn walls and fantastic lighting to boot, this eases you back into the game after a rather rough opening screen where it throws tonnes of options at you and isn’t exactly the smoothest or pleasing to look at of UIs.

The enemies have the standard look of zombies as you would expect but curiously seem to fire out either intestines or giant worms anytime they are damaged, gun effects are well done as are explosions. 

The randomly generated areas where the combat, puzzle solving and general survival takes place do look rather cookie cutter and bland which creates an insane contrast with the Hospital hub. This is somewhat to be expected considering the randomly generated nature of the game but even then the scenery isn’t anything original or enticing which is a shame.

There isn’t too much about the audio I can comment on, the game isn’t voiced at any point and aside from the sound effects there is just standard ambient music, again it works to a point but helps add to the low budget feel of the title that quickly creeps in. 

Outbreak Endless Nightmares as mentioned previously is basically a randomly generated Resident Evil clone much like Vaccine, it aims to keep you on your toes but does this at odds with the survival horror elements. 

Tank controls are in and these take a while to get used to, sadly D-Pad isn’t an option so you need to attune to analogue stick. The camera is a little wild but can be changed in the opening menu to an over the shoulder look to make it a little more manageable.

You’ll find plenty of weapons and items to help you get through the generated sections of the game, using your weapon too much causes it to break so you need to make sure you have a healthy stock of weapons, ammo and healing items not only in your inventory but in your magic chest which can seemingly hold anything and teleports with you from instance to instance. 

The random nature of the game often comes off at its detriment, it has a tendency to spawn you on top of an enemy causing you to take needless damage. Random traps such as lazers and spikes are thrown in with wild abandonment and usually involve you having to switch your camera to actually see any of them. 

Your objective is to clear out the anomaly to earn points so you can get further into the hospital and hopefully the end of this nightmare, unfortunately the game presents most of its lore and reasoning via walls of text, no amount of additional playable characters is going to make me anymore interested in what’s going on and why sadly.

For those who are new to the series and do fancy a big ol’ lore dump, there is a section where you can find out what has happened in the series up to this point and all about its survivors. 

There is also co-op available in the game but as of writing I haven’t managed to try this feature out but considering the cramped hallways the game is set in I can only imagine it’s a nightmare in its self. 

The best roguelikes always offer something on death, usually a bit more story or a way to make your next run a little smoother, Endless Nightmares allows you to carry over your equipment and that’s about it sadly. Yes it may make your next run easier but when games like Hades have perfected the death loop it’s disheartening to see it here nonchalantly. 

I wanted to love Outbreak: Endless Nightmares, much like I wanted to love the last Outbreak title, I have such a soft spot for low budget horror games that I felt like this could be the title for me. In some ways I do like the game but there is so much currently that doesn’t work and it feels a little too busy in its U.I and loses its identity very quickly. 

The developer of Outbreak Endless Nightmares has said the game will be receiving alot of updates and extra content going forward so it has all the potential to be something good, unfortunately at the moment it doesn’t quite meet the mark and I can only recommend this to people who have exhausted all over survival horror options and find this on deep sale as a quick distraction. 

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Summary

A great idea but in its current state, not actually that fun 

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Straight from the streets of SouthTown, all Dunks Powah'd and ready to Bust A Wolf. Catch me on Twitch/YouTube.

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