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.
