Drop Dead Studios has released the sixth installment in their survival horror series Outbreak. Unlike previous entries in the series Outbreak: Endless Nightmares treads new ground, attempting to combine its classic survival horror mechanics with roguelike elements. The game is available on PS4, PS5, X-Box One, X-Box Series X/S, PC, and Switch (which is where I played the game.)
PLOT
Outbreak: Endless Nightmares picks up immediately after the events of Outbreak: The Nightmare Chronicles, following the previous game’s protagonist Lydia, as she meets up with a group of other survivors. These survivors are gathered in a dilapidated building that seems to be a strange combination of school and hospital. This building serves as a hub from which the survivors can enter various locations via a magical piano, unlocking new locations by collecting coins. These other locations seem to be hallucinations rather than actual locations, explaining the constant death and rebirth of the game’s characters.
The game’s story is told through occasional text crawls and a multitude of collectible documents. Because the documents are randomized the story is told sporadically and in a literal random order, which makes following it a herculean task.
GAMEPLAY
Like previous entries Outbreak: Endless Nightmares draws heavily from early Resident Evil games. You can swap between fixed angle, first-person, and third-person perspectives on the fly, though it always uses tank controls. The game consists of making runs through procedurally generated levels full of zombies and increasingly difficult special infected creatures. The main goal of these runs is to collect coins to unlock new levels. Every few rooms players are given a choice: head back to the hub and end the run or press onwards and risk losing your coins.
As you progress through runs you will gain experience to level up and unlock characters with different abilities. You’ll also collect weapons, ammo, and other gear to help in future runs. These become increasingly important as there is a weapon durability system that makes any given weapon weaker every time it’s repaired.
PROS
Outbreak: Endless Nightmares is an ambitious venture for solo dev Drop Dead Studios. While previous entries in the series have simply tried to recreate classic Resident Evil mechanics, Endless Nightmares attempts to take those mechanics and apply them to a new genre. The game also features split-screen co-op, a welcome addition to this sort of game.
CONS
As commendable as Drop Dead Studios’ ambition is, there’s no getting around the fact that this game is broken. Performance-wise the game consistently struggled with dropped frames, screen tearing, and a multitude of frustrating bugs. Initially, I thought this might be a Switch-specific problem but from a little online research, these problems seem to be consistent across platforms.
Even when the game is running as intended, its mechanics never really click together in a cohesive way. The ability to switch between perspectives is novel, but the restricted controls make first and third-person gameplay unbearable. The first-person perspective is additionally plagued by blinding muzzle flash and a consistent bug where getting too close to a wall instantly shifts the player into a third-person perspective. Combat is also very tedious as the result of repetitive enemies and a limited variety of weapons.
The roguelike elements hinder the game more than they add to the experience. The procedurally generated levels are half-baked and repetitive. Fixed-camera horror works by controlling what the player can see and using that to design specific encounters, something that can’t be done with a procedurally generated environment. Adding progression between runs also removes the tension at the center of survival horror. The result is a game that’s unsatisfying both as a horror game and as a roguelike.
VERDICT
Outbreak: Endless Nightmares attempts to tread new ground but fails spectacularly. With seven games in five years the Outbreak series as a whole – and this game in particular – would benefit from a healthy dose of refinement. There are interesting ideas at play, but the actual product is a truly dreadful experience.
