Idle Thoughts

Monsters are people too, you know (★★★★☆)

There are a lot of RPG Maker-type RPGs out there. I suppose it’s an easier point of entry for anyone that wants to make their own game. Many of these are completely earnest Fantasy-Hero-With-A-Sword-Meets-Girl-With-A-Mysterious-Pendant RPGs. No thanks. That story has been done to death. Even if I wanted to hear it again, I’d go with something that has more pizzazz. Heck, even when the big companies decide to go retro, they at least use an isometric soft-focus diorama effect. Wisely, most of the successful RPG Maker types of games go for a “wacky” tone like Earthbound or a horror tone like the original Sweet Home. Look Outside is part of the horror branch of the family… but it is also pretty wacky. Hmm.

Anyway, if more RPG Maker games are as good as Look Outside I should probably pay more attention.

The title speaks for itself. Most players’ first reaction is probably to look outside their bedroom window, just for the heck of it. Instant Game Over. (According to Steam, only 75% of players looked outside. I’m a bit disappointed it’s not higher. Are you guys chicken? C’mon, how bad could it be?)

So yeah, the whole point of the game is not to do what the title says, unlike, say, Kill Bill or Don’t Starve. Cute.

Your goal is to survive 15 days in your apartment building without looking outside (no peeking). What you get is a lightly open-ended RPG with multiple endings. It’s kind of like Silent Hill 4 meets Fear & Hunger.

Wait, why can’t you look outside? Because anyone that looks outside is instantly turned into, well… something weird. It depends, but you can expect extra eyes, fleshy appendages and teeth, lots of teeth. Start from The Thing and let your imagination run wild. It’s rarely pretty.

Technically, you can beat the game by staying in your apartment and pass the time by playing video games. As anyone who lived through Covid can attest, staying at home playing video games is a perfectly valid way to face the apocalypse. It’s almost heroic, you could say.

But where’s the fun in that? The real game is out there.

As I said, it’s an open-ended RPG, so you can do anything you want. It’s not quite open-world. At best, it’s open-building. You mostly unlock access to the floors in a linear fashion, but many rooms are completely optional. Well, technically, they’re all optional. Other than that, you can explore on your own and witness all the weird and gross stuff happening in your building. Interestingly enough, you’re pretty much allowed to attack anyone on sight, human or not, hostile or not, important NPC or not. The game will carry on regardless, but you can obviously lock yourself out of important events.

There is a main quest of sorts. It requires you to indirectly gather information about whatever is out there. The rub is that even oblique methods of witnessing what’s outside are immensely dangerous (there are a lot of instant-death choices in the game). In fact, the only thing you know about the main antagonist of the game is that you can’t know anything about it. The game does give the “antagonist” a name, sort of, which kind of robs it of some of its mystery. Oh well. Still, the antagonist of Look Outside is one of the more original “villains” of any RPG ever. It is Lovecraftian in the true sense of the word: unknowable and unfathomably powerful, yet seemingly arbitrary. The term “evil” doesn’t even apply to it. It doesn’t cackle while burning down your hometown, gloat about its dastardly plan for the eight magic stones or give you a tortured explanation as to why he needs to destroy the world in order to save it. Whatever it does, it seems to be doing for no particular reason, good or bad. For anyone that knows their Lovecraft, that’s exactly what makes this kind of entity so terrifying.

As good as the concept of the game is, deep down, Look Outside is a pretty standard SNES-era RPG. The combat system is quite plain. Before you get your first new party member, you’re mostly stuck trading blows with a single enemy. It’s like being back to Dragon Warrior in 1989. Once you get some party members (they’re not that easy to find, mind you), things pick up a little. Each party member has a bit of a theme where their abilities are a reflection of who (or what) they are, but it’s not that much. You yourself gain new abilities by beating video games inside your apartment. Cute, but it’s a pretty time-consuming way to obtain what’s often an underwhelming skill. There are also a lot of battle items and other knickknacks to try to keep combat interesting, but there’s only so much you can do within the framework of an old-school JRPG.

Even if the combat is plain, visually, no corners were cut when it comes to your enemies. Almost every single enemy has its own unique sprite. In fact, most of them have names like Vincent or Jeanne. They may be monsters, but they are also people. But they’re also monsters, weird, gross monsters. The dev is extremely creative… in that worrying sort of way.

The save system is… strict. On normal, you can only save in your apartment, and only after exploring a set number of rooms. On the one hand, it ensures that every new interaction is tense. On the other, this means you’ll end up replaying the same battle and events because it’s hard to gauge how deadly enemies are, because of an instant-death decision, or just because you want to know what happens if you make a different choice.

Now, that being said, Look Outside’s true strengths are its quest design and its NPCs.

You know what a typical Soulslike quest is, right? A character mumbles about needing something; you give it to them and just after that they succumb to corruption or some such and they drop dead. Or they immediately become hostile and you make them dead. The end. 10/10 Dark Souls quest design.

Look Outside is exactly like this… except the good part of the quest starts after characters become corrupted. You just cannot predict how these quests end. It’s wild. If there’s a single reason to play Look Outside, it’s to see where some of these quests go.

Without going too much into spoilers, I can give the example of Frederic the painter. He made copies of himself that have all come alive. Your main goal is to obtain one of his paintings, so you can just find it and leave. However, the copies want each other dead. Obviously, you can figure out which is the real Frederic and save him. Then again… maybe you want to side with one of the copies? Most of them offer you some kind of reward, so you can just min-max the quest according to the reward you want. This totally underplays how varied the Frederics are. Which one should live? It’s like Sophie’s choice with tentacle monsters. Only one is directly hostile. One gives free healing, no questions asked. One tries to trick you into doing its bidding. One is perfectly friendly, but cannot control himself and constantly deals damage by biting you if you try to talk to it. One is passive and wants to be put out of its misery. My favorite is the one that offers a half-assed attempt to convince you that yes, Frederics have hundreds of wriggly purple legs. After that fails, it points out to you that if you kill all the others, they’ll be the real Frederic by default, so… pretty please? How can you say no to such earnest enthusiasm? Most RPGs don’t have the NPC variety that this single quest has.

Look Outside is a masterclass in how to design NPCs. Not every random RPG shopkeeper needs to have a backstory or weird interactions, but if you want to see how to make truly ambiguous NPCs, Look Outside has you covered. Just try to guess who is a playable character, a vendor or an optional superboss. The furnace? The vending machine? The thing that looks like the ghost from Spirited Away? A random insect? A living mass of telescopes? A famished silverfish man? A baby rat thing? Many events or interactions are not signposted at all. You just have to keep an open mind about what a character’s intentions truly are. By the way, for a game about tentacled monstrosities, it’s surprising how many times “give a hug” is offered as an option. The result is predictable… or not. Sometimes a little bit of compassion goes a long way.

To reiterate, Look Outside is a powerful, unique game in that most of its monsters are dangerous, but paradoxically, it doesn’t mean they aren’t also friendly or useful. In most horror games, you just whack to death anything that looks a little bit weird and move on. Here, well, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. So what if they’re a mass of tentacles with teeth? No one can help the way they are, right?