is it scary all the time? or is it most jump scary????

Most jump scary and you get chased around a lot, which is very suspenseful but not scary in my opinion.

You bet your bottom! Full of spooks, frights, and things that go bump in the night! I was so enthralled by the experience I just had to make a review right away, so that as many people as possible would know, the survival action horror experience that is: Outlast.

(Outlast Review by me)

Arguing about whether it is scary or not is missing the point. We judge all games mostly by the quality of the *gameplay*, and Outlast certainly delivers it in high quality in the survival horror genre. The horror elements are just window dressing really in a game like this. If it doesn't scare me, I don't hold it against the game designer if the gameplay is good. Then you have the question of what constitutes scary exactly. Some people think that unless the game makes you fall off your chair and cry mommy, it is not scary. But all I require is that the game creates the requisite amount of tension and anxiety for the *gameplay* to work -- doesn't have to be a lot, but just enough to work well with the gameplay. I enjoy Outlast mainly for the excellent level design that often requires you to move about in complete darkness and escape from unkillable enemies. And the various fright elements all set things up nicely for the gameplay. THAT IS ALL that is needed to have a great game. This is not a movie, and we should be a little more forgiving if a game is not scary enough (according to your subjective definition of what is scary) or the storytelling not good enough -- as long as the gameplay is good enough.

Still, Outlast uses the old cliche that once you hide in an air duct or a locker, you are home free. The only game I know that busts this cliche is Alien Isolation, where the enemy chases you inside an air duct and pulls you out of a locker.

I just played Outlast for the first time and so far I'm about 30 minutes in. I'm not seeing any great gameplay. It's mostly a glorified Walking Simulator with a very good visual presentation.

And the gameplay is made terrible by the awful checkpoint system. For example, I am stuck at a part that says my goal is to "start two gas pumps and the main breaker." I start one gas pump, and then an enemy kills me. Then I lose that progress and have to restart from the last checkpoint.

So I reload and the next time I somehow manage to start two gas pump, then the same enemy kills me again before I can find the breaker switch. Again, I lose all my progress and have to reload.

So I reload again, start one gas pump and the enemy kills me before I remember how to get to the second gas pump. Yet again, I lose all my progress and have to reload. This process is going to repeat many more times before I eventually figure out how to overcome this section.

Consequently, this an awful gameplay experience. I'm not dying because the enemy is smarter than me or because I did some stupid error. Rather, I am dying simply because I don't know where the "correct" pathways that I am forced to take are located, and I'd need to know that - with surgical precision - in order to survive.

In other words, Outlast is "on the rails" to an extremely gameplay-ruining extreme, which is compounded by the devs' abysmal decision not to allow the players to save their progress properly.

I'm tempted to go on youtube to watch a "Let's Play" just to figure out where I need to go in order that I stop having to repeat this aggravating gas pump puzzle. Of course, that would completely defeat the purpose of playing the game...but so does having to repeat the same exact section over and over and over again (which I wouldn't have to do if the game was well-designed in terms of gameplay). I totally agree with that. The best horror game ever IMO is Nocturne (1999) and it did exactly what you said. I was hoping Outlast would achieve a similar effect and it seemed like it might when I first started playing. But with Outlast, the novelty/illusion wore off for me real fast.

This is not a walking simulator at all. This is a game where *exploration* is part of the gameplay. A walking simulator is a game where the exploration has limited mechanics and purpose, but Outlast is not like that. The labyrinthine corridors and rooms, the obstacles, the frequent puzzle-solving, the inventory, the movement control, not to mention the ongoing storyline, etc., make this decidedly not a walking simulator. If you had solved that gas pump challenge I bet you probably would have agreed. Why do people always blame the game when they can't solve the puzzles?