Review – Look Outside – Gamerview

Look Outside is the latest launch of Digital Return, a horror and RPG game that caught me totally by surprise. This is the Canadian debut indie, a freelancer specializing in Pixel Art and 2D animation that was encouraged to work on a small game of a game jam. And I’m forever grateful that this pearl falls into my lap, because look outside is a lot inspired by my favorite game of life :.

Francis had already worked in other games, such as. But own game, this is his first. In the plot, there is some bizarre outside and the protagonist, Sam, and other residents of a residential building try to survive the confinement and curiosity of looking out the window. In addition to this situation, we have horrendous creatures emerging through the corridors and apartments.

Curiosity to the skin

The story begins with Sam waking up after having strange dreams. By a hole in the wall of your room, a peek eye. It’s your neighbor, Sybil, with whom you have the first information about what is happening. It is necessary to survive for 15 days until all is over. And to maintain your sanity in order, you need to sleep when it is late at night and take care of your personal hygiene. In addition to the frequent chat, Sybil saves his progress. Now a curiosity: time works different in this game, because only new areas add up to the duration of exploration. When visiting these areas again, time is paused.

Sam’s apartment acts as a safe area, where you bring together supplies, make your own rango and play some games to relax your mind, earn experience points and learn new skills to use later in combat. Before long, people start knocking on the door. At first glance, seeing for the magical eye, everyone seems suspicious and with something threatening in their appearances. It is up to the player to choose what to do: ignore, talk or open the door. If the individual is dangerous or an ally, you can never know. It is very interesting this freedom that look outside gives to your decisions.

At first, I chose to spend a long time in the apartment, playing the 3 initial games (you can find others for the condominium) until you complete them, rising and learning a lot of things in the process. After ignoring about 5 people who knocked on the door, I decided to start helping everyone. Everything I did, including starting the exploration late and with higher level, was totally different from what my friends did. The replay factor of Outside Look is more than evident, with 8 different finals and a lot of allies to know and put on their party, each with its own characteristics.

The combat occurs in the first person, giving full prominence to the enemies he faces. You choose between attacking, defending, running away, using a special ability or an item of your inventory, seeing everything for simple animations on the screen. This is one of the classic elements of Earthbound, with text informing the damage, status caused and the like. But different from ShigeSato Itoi’s work, I found the sounds very poor in combat, without offering due weight to animations. And this is my only criticism of the game, which exudes qualities in its minimalism.

Isolate Party

His group is formed by Sam and 3 more allies, chosen when talking to them in his apartment. The goal is to explore to get more information about what is happening, as well as facing monsters of all type and size, level up and collect important items to survive 15 days of forced isolation. Along the way you will find NPCs that exchange items, open previously blocked passages and make decisions not always positive, such as being too friendly to those who should not and die for it.

Look Outside stands out for its pixel art look, with grotesque enemies and bosses, and especially for the effective soundtrack. The player feels uncomfortable and oppressed all the time, not knowing what to expect with each new area accessed. Other than that the vast majority of areas are very dark, limiting the player’s field of view during exploration. At all that everything seems dangerous to the extreme, the game lets you talk to an enemy and understand his point of view. In other words, forget this bid of right or wrong, of heroes and villains.

Playing on normal difficulty, it is worth mentioning that the Outside look offers a good challenge and duration that can vary a lot. You can finish in less than 8 hours, just as you can take 20 hours or more to complete it. It is easy to die in the fighting, including the arsenal breaking, or outside of it with the lack of resources while suffering from some status, such as bleeding. The game is full of amazing surprises and dialogues, so much so that after you start you no longer want to stop playing. Again of curiosity, sucking you to the unknown.

A pity Outside Outside does not offer PT-BR location. At least the game is very cheap, only $ 26.99 (at the time of this publication). If you enjoy old -fashioned horror and RPG, with shift fighting, you can certainly not lose this masterpiece of the indies.