In love with: Look Outside

Look Outside is a very unusual type of game. Horror theme in roleplaying games is quite common and some of the most famous examples of the genre and its many subgenres are horror themed. But going beyond just the theme, building mechanics to evoke fear and tension? That’s far less typical. Think of Sweet Home, a Capcom action adventure RPG that is also often considered to be the very first survival horror. A game that is far more of an action adventure than an RPG, basically. Not many games attempt that. From Software experimented with it a bit. There’s the Shadow Hearts precursor Koudelka, of course. Parasite Eve 1 and especially 2. Recently, there has been a resurgence of these types of games, often built with RPG Maker. But they often focus on things that are either too action adventure and barely RPG at all, or vice versa. And those that do focus on being role-playing games often take their main inspiration from titles like Lisa: The Painful or Fear & Hunger, focusing on delivering the brutally hard difficulty, rather than some fun experience.

Now, Look Outside isn’t easy either and I could see influences of Lisa or Fear & Hunger in it. In fact I have played the game on the easier difficulty after attempting to complete it on the normal one first, but I’ll delve into it later. But that’s not the focus nor the selling point of the game. Instead, this game brings the experience that a lot of immersive sims and open world RPGs strive to have – building a personal story in a strange world. And it does it with a lot of style, variety, surreal creativity and fantastic tunes.

As you might’ve guessed, clearly defining Look Outside, putting the exact genre terminology on it, is a bit complicated. For all intents and purposes, it is a role playing game and it was build using the RPG Maker, so you will be recognizing a lot of very typical elements for RPGs (or jRPGs in particular). But then, there’s the non-linearity of story and mechanics, many action adventure elements and exploration that are very reminiscent of classic survival horror, odd survival game elements… It’s nuts. Though the game’s premise is extremely simple – something happened outside of your apartment building and merely taking a look out of the window will change you in ways that human mind cannot comprehend. Whatever eldritch apocalypse is happening outside, inside the building those who were affected and those who stay unaffected are simply trying to figure out what to do next. Sometimes, those who were affected turned into, essentially, mindless monsters. Sometimes those, who didn’t take a look, are weirder and more dangerous than those who did. In 15 days something will happen and the game will end, so it’s entirely up to you to decide what to do with the time that you have. You can to investigate the situation and other people’s problems, or you can just stay indoors and play videogames. The only thing that is for sure – known too much might be worse than knowing nothing.

Despite what wacky and bizarre events follow this extremely dramatic setup, the game never downplays how horrid the catastrophe is and how nothing will ever be the same. Yet, the visuals and the writing take the stories in ways that are extremely colourful and even darkly humorous, as if you’re going on a fairy tale adventure, not a dive into eldritch horrors. This reminded me a lot of the classic Coktel Vision titles like Gobliiins or The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble, where dramatic plots and situations also were combined with surreal and humorous presentation. Look Outside also has some of the best music in 2025, so even if you’re somehow not interested to play the game in the end, do yourself a favour and at least listen to the soundtrack.

Mechanically, this is a classic Dragon Quest style turn base party based combat game for the most part, so a lot of the basics are easy to understand. But the game does have a few curious changes and additions to the formula. All of the enemies are visible on the screen and you have the option to escape almost all encounters, with the chance to escape increasing the longer you are in the fight, which turns the exploration into something closer to a classic survival horror, rather than an RPG. In many dialogues with NPCs you have the option to initiate the battle as well. Leveling up the characters is important, especially for some of the party members, but equipment tends to play a far bigger role in combat, at least in comparison to a typical RPG or even Sweet Home. The only thing that you cannot do, if you want to get most of the endings in the game, is be entirely pacifist and avoid encounters. Though, if you wish to stay at home and wait it out, that is also an option.

The time limit isn’t just a gimmick, but for most first playthroughs it will probably not become too much of a stressful mechanic. Time only advances when you enter new rooms or perform certain actions, so re-exploring already visited locations will not affect the time limit at all. However, that is also a bit of a double-edged sword, as on normal difficulty you can only save at home and only if you’ve advanced time by a certain chunk since the last save. The game also has some events happen during certain days and if you’re spending time at home (cooking or playing games, for example), you also get special semi-randomized events when someone knocks at your door.

Though this aspect of randomness can become a bit frustrating. For example, having any companions in this game makes encounters far easier. Yet, some of the very helpful companions may only appear via the random events at home. The game has a relatively solid pace for when you can acquire companions and how, but most of the early chances can be permanently blocked depending on your actions too. So having a potentially powerful ally or a helpful merchant appear as a completely random event may make someone’s playthrough more frustrating due to bad luck, not due to how they played the game. The weapons break with usage and that is also a chance – using skills increases this chance, but there’s no way to decrease it. Sure, this leads to interesting emergent situations when a weapon breaks on you at an inopportune time and you have to adapt. But this might also lead to a situation where something random like this happens and you die and lose a lot of progress and it’s not fun or challenging whatsoever.

But it’s time to speak of the difficulty, I did start the game on normal difficulty and played it like that for for about 4 hours. The issue that I’ve encountered with the game, and I fear that this might be me misreading the intended way of playing and approaching the game as an RPG, where you’d want to clean out the rooms, was not with any kind of consistent high difficulty. Rather, what I’ve often encountered were situations where I could go through an entire new mini-segment of the game with almost no issues, only to then encounter the boss-like enemy who would wipe the floor with me before I could even do anything. Which, because you can’t save all the time on that difficulty, lost me about 20 minutes of playing the last time I tried it, before switching to an easier difficulty. Now, yes, I could escape and I feel like that is the intended idea when you encounter tougher boss-like entities. Or at least try, since in some cases trying to escape would’ve been too late. But the problem with that is that if you’ve started to invest resources in the fight, like throwable items or healing items, if you escape you don’t get them back, while the enemies seem to go back to full health. So, just be aware that this isn’t the game that expects you to kill everything the first time you encounter it and running away is very often expected.

Completely objectively, the real issues with Look Outside are bugs and technical issues. A lot of really big problems have been fixed since the release, but some still crop up. The audio balancing in general is quite terrible and no matter what your settings are, some parts will be obnoxiously loud while everything else is much quieter. Since this is a pre-rendered visuals RPG Maker game, it is designed around the 4:3 resolution (I cropped the screenshots since in full screen it adds black borders) and that always means that in the future running and viewing the game “as intended” might become a problem. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like we have found a good way to have 2D visuals that could scale to higher resolutions the same way 3D geometry can…

Either way, any issues this game has do not make Look Outside any less important and awesome. It is one of the most unique, stylish, inventive and fun games I’ve played in the past few decades and there’s really nothing quite like that. So, listen to its soundtrack, play the game and you’ll see how special it is.