Red Barrels has a new villain, map, trials, and rig for players brave enough to re-enrol in The Outlast Trials.
As part of the first major update to the chaotic cooperative horror since it released in full earlier this year, new enemy Franco “II Bambino” Barbi is “the perverse son of New Orleans mafia don Salvatore Barbi, driven by craven entitlement, greed, and psychosexual violence fueled by his impotence and insecurities” (yikes) and “a freakish big baby obsessed with his Pacifier”.
To mark Barbi’s arrival, the Bambino Special Event will run for the first four weeks following the update. You’ll find Franco Barbi pop up in certain Trials and MK-Challenges, alongside Mother Gooseberry or Sergeant Coyle, and in Trials and MK-Challenges set in The Docks map.
Talking of which: new map The Docks – which is Franco’s drug manufacturing domain – is also on the way. It features deadly puzzles during which you’ll come face-to-face with Franco in a new trial, Poison the Medicine.
There’s also a new game mode, too. Escalation Therapy is a rogue-lite mode which pits players “against a never-ending series of randomised Trials with variators until they succumb to a Permadeath or begin anew”. Reagents spawn with nothing, and will have to build their loadouts as they unlock upgrades along the way.
The Barricade is a new rig you can use to, unsurprisingly, create barricades, blocking pathways to give you the chance to get an objective completed or make your escape.
Last but certainly not least, there’s a new maddening-sounding lobby mini-game, Stroop Effect Test, which asks you to correctly select the colour of a word when the word it spells out is in a different colour.
The new content will drop next week on PC, PS5, and Xbox on 16th July, 2024.
Red Barrels says “Project Lupara” is simply the first of a number of upcoming major updates for the “growing live service game, which has sold over 2 million copies to date”.
In a Q&A posted to YouTube, director Alex Charbonneau and community manager Rosie Sarno explore how the game has changed between its early access release in May 2023 and the 1.0 update, which rolled out earlier this year, as well as field questions from the Outlast community.
“The Outlast Trials is excessive and frantically enjoyable – but can occasionally tip over into frustration more than fear,” I wrote when I reviewed The Outlast Trials back when it was released in early access last year, awarding it three out of five stars.