Undertale + Lone Survivor + Fear & Hunger. Amazing RPG with a lot of truly unpredictable, grotesque and bizarre monents. Body horror elements are top notch, lore of the unknown cosmic horror is very intrieging.

I think, culturally, RPG Maker games have the reputation of being single-dev and highly conceptual projects that kind of have the gameplay as a secondary thing. Even in high effort and fleshed out games like Fear and Hunger, the actual gameplay isn't what kept fans around. It's why there are so many videos about RPG Maker games out there, but not as many active players: people come for the ideas and see the gameplay as secondary or not worthwhile.

I also think, separately but relatedly, indie horror games with fascinating concepts flourish online if they're vague or incomplete. Because, if you hear about a strange unexplained part of a story from a YouTuber or if you read it in a thread, your brain starts to piece it together in your own way. This counts as you "interacting" with the story and mentally bonding with it, even if you never played it but just kind of saw it as a movie. Think of stuff like FNaF and its ilk.

Why did I go into all that? Because I want you to believe me when I say that Look Outside is not like other girls.

Look Outside is a high-concept, single-dev RPG Maker game that not only did I really enjoy sitting down and playing, but I also found to be a complete experience. I genuinely would not have expected an RPG Maker game to be one of my favourites of all time from a gameplay standpoint, and yet it is!

The premise is that there is a cosmic horror freak outside that transforms people who look at it into body horror freaks. You are just some unemployed guy in an apartment building and you have roughly 2 weeks to survive indoors until the space fella goes away. With that premise being immediately set up, the gameplay takes over. You get to exploring and realise that exploration takes up time in the day, that materials you find in the hallways and bedrooms are needed for trading / hygiene / food / self defense, and that people of all shapes and kinds live in the building too. And to make it all worse, you can only save once you have explored a sufficient amount of new things. It is all about survival not just conceptually but also mechanically, while still being an RPG Maker game.

The combat is done, as you can guess, by interacting with threats in the overworld and then going into turn-based combat. I think this can put off some people (work on your attention span) but it doesn’t feel too simple. In the overworld, enemies move predictably but then randomly can freak out and start chasing you, which I found to be genuinely engaging since even one unplanned encounter can pwn you back to your last save. In combat, all your companions have unique moves and gimmicks, you can learn new moves by exploring and investing time, and you can find and use items to get out of emergency situations. The game loves throwing boss fights at you, so a good chunk of your total fights will be against something interesting.

I felt the difficulty was harsh but fair at the start, but then became pretty easy at the end once I had done a ton of things and minmaxed my characters. I think this is fair enough, as it feels good to be rewarded for exploring everything in a game about exploration. There is an additional difficulty mode you can try, which is harsh the entire way through from what I have seen.

Speaking of exploration, Look Outside has 152 achievements on Steam. Most of those achievements are tied to unique things you can and find at your own pace. 80% of it is optional, which is really cool to me. It feels like you’re just some guy in this bigger, living world that you can prod and probe at the risk of your own time and safety. Considering the entire game takes place in an apartment building, the developer really had to flesh out every room they could to get that feeling other games do by just letting you look out into a cityscape or a forest (remember, you can’t look outside).

Story-wise, the game delivers very well. The main theme, I think, is recovery. Some of the freaks you meet retain their sanity and just want to adapt to their new lives. Some can do it with your help, and some can't do it no matter how much you help. There are a lot of pleasant "indominable human spirit" storylines you can optionally go through, which I will every single time because that stuff ROCKS. My favourite storyline by far is the kids in the sewer.

The game kinda loses its horror tone around the middle as you involve yourselves in the lives of the other residents, which I found to be a reasonable progression and it didn't really bother me. It also does a horror story’s biggest sin: it explains everything at the end. Your mileage may vary, but I found the revelations to be faithful to the cosmic horror roots of the premise.

There are some things that I don't love, but they're just gameplay quirks. Weapons breaking due to random chance doesn't feel good since the ways to repair them are limited, and combat status conditions are not displayed in a nice way and don’t communicate information well. The "hygiene stats" your character has feel a bit too easy to manage. If you shower, brush your teeth, and eat once every 2 days or so, those hygiene stats become a complete non-issue. The way to fix this would just be to tweak some numerical thresholds behind the scenes. But this is somewhat addressed in the additional difficulty mode, so whatever I guess.

I have written too much but I genuinely feel like Look Outside was made in a lab to suit my tastes. A lot of exploration, a lot of survival, a lot of environmental stuff, a lot of challenging RPG bosses, a lot of micro-choices, a lot of quirky characters, a lot of body horror, a lot of cosmic horror, a lot of heart, and not a lot of money to buy. If the game sounds interesting, you would be betraying yourself to learn about it in any other way than playing it. This isn't Fear and Hunger or FNaF. This is actually good ;-)

This is one of those games that are remembered forever in online circles as amazing indie rpgs like Off, Hylics and Suits.