Look Outside is a brand new horror RPG venture all about channelling dread. Controlling a player locked away in an apartment complex during a supernatural horror epidemic and unable to go outside (in fact even discouraged from merely glancing out your window or else some unspeakable illness will befall you), its setting is incredibly effective in putting the player on edge. You anticipate what’s around every corner, scared of what’s to come. You’re assured by Government orders that this will only last fifteen days. However, there’s a sinking feeling inside of you that knows it’s not that simple. It is unbelievably apparent how inspired this is by the peak COVID era, but it is incredibly effective in exploring that anxiety of the unknown.

Braving the outside of your small apartment and trepidatiously walking through the halls of the complex, weird monsters, horrors and the like await.

Your call to action is finding out what horrid mysteries await the multi-level apartment complex. These are depicted hauntingly in a way players won’t soon forget. Talking to you through a hole in the wall, your neighbour will wax on about some of the ongoings and rumblings that they have overhead to be occurring throughout the building. They do this while the pixel art pervasively depicts a bulging eye staring at you through the hole. Go into the hero’s bathroom, look at their mirror and you have your own funny and vividly twisted version of the ‘despite everything it’s still you,’ moment in Undertale, watching a figure with wiry hair and the baggiest eyes you’ve ever seen staring back at you, declaring that all in all they’re ‘not doing too badly.’

The depth that’s hiding under the hood becomes more apparent when you step out into the halls. Sporting an isometric perspective, wandering the halls is akin to beloved horror games made in RPG Maker like Ib. It plays akin to these likenesses as well; you’re wandering about picking up items and solving puzzles, working towards slowly unpacking and unwinding the broad escape room you’ve found yourself in. It’s here that Look Outside will lose some players. Like many survival horror indies, they live and die by the strength of their level design and how navigable they are. You don’t want to guide the players too much and have the experience and exploration be trivial. There needs to be ample breadcrumbs. Of the same notion, even with little nods as to where to go, you don’t want the world to be so labyrinthian that you often can’t remember where you even are. Look Outside falls more into the latter.

This issue is most prevalent on the first floor of the complex where the building shifts and changes. Hallways begin repeating. You can’t remember where you came in on the floor or where the exit is. This is alluring the first time you navigate said level but is frustrating when it comes to the final third of the game and you’re trying to find that one object or room you need to progress. You don’t even have a map that can alleviate this stress and help you navigate; you’re having to hug walls, hoping you find that familiar scratch on a wall that reminds you you’re near x room. It sure would be fun to say, place the required disc item I recently found in the slot I saw three hours ago. If only I could work out just where that was!

If all else Look Outside is a good ‘one of those’ RPGs. Featuring turn-based combat, the encounters are incredibly stylistic, reminiscent of Earthbound where you see an overexposed monster taking up a majority of the screen and small action button prompts at the bottom. Party members that you gather along the way have their own unique abilities and can be dolled out with a wide array of gear and weapons that in turn must be managed so they do not break. NPCs that are allies can turn hostile without a moment’s warning and you’re also at the risk of making a brash decision, killing someone that could’ve been very beneficial to making your way through the adventure.

It’s the little touches that make this feel like a fleshed-out RPG, even with its roughly 10-hour runtime. At home, you can cook and share meals with your party that’ll restore food and special points used for abilities. You can play video games to get ‘inspiration’ and also possibly unlock abilities because of the types of games you’re playing (my favourite of this being learning a super jump ability where you stomp on foes from the Mario-like game). Time only passes when you’re doing actions in your apartment or when you return from an outing. The longer you’re away from your apartment the more experience you’ll earn. Saves are only possible at the start of a day or when you’re returning from an expedition that the game has deemed sufficiently long enough. This is an effective way of encouraging you to be daring with your outward ventures and work against the early difficulty.

If I’m honest, the game gets a little too trivial too quickly. Before long you’re overequipped with gear and items and fights can be won too quickly. Even if you, say, break a weapon, the damage output isn’t so significantly lesser that you feel compelled to swap out to another tool under your belt. The statuses that the game is constantly warning you about in stress, boredom and the like don’t have all that much bearing on the combat difficulty or plot. All of this is during the game’s ‘normal’ difficulty, of which there isn’t even a higher difficulty to opt into in your first run. This leads to the game not having its best possible foot forward when you boot it up. You either get ‘very easy’ or ‘mostly easy’ difficulty options.

I say all of this, but I can’t stress enough that it’s clear as day how devoted to their craft developer Francis Coulombe is. Having already contributed quality pixel art to other Devolver Digital title Katana Zero and also uploading their own games on itch.io, this is an exciting graduation for the indie developer. In fact, this itself is the fully-fledged version of his prior smaller game jam project of the same name. Here you get to experience it in its realised potential: unbelievable beasties made from teeth or membrane, a dark and foreboding tone and plenty of exploration goodness.