The Outlast Trials screenshot
Image: Red Barrels

Despite it being a volatile, much-maligned side of the industry, it's nice to see a live-service game done right, and few have been as consistently successful as The Outlast Trials. The grimy, gore-slick co-op stalker horror game has only grown in scope and intensity since its early access debut in 2023. Not bad at all for what seemed like a throwaway spinoff from Red Barrels' series of single-player chillers.

For those fashionably late to the murder-party, The Outlast Trials is a 1-4 player co-op horror game set in a nightmarish Cold War-era psychological research and 'treatment' facility. Players are thrown into surreal, dramatic scenarios (think halfway between Saw and Scooby Doo), forced to complete tasks that will help them become more productive, obedient citizens. Bad enough, but this is all while being stalked by an assortment of mentally and physically altered 'pets' of the mad Dr Easterman, administrator of the facility.

Yesterday, the game began its seventh season, adding a new environment (The Prison Farm), a new main mission, several new side-missions and challenges, and a new basic enemy type: a human guard-dog known as The Biter. The patch notes for this update are lengthy and well worth a read if you're a halfway regular player. A little disappointingly, this is the first season in a while to not introduce a new major villain, with the cattle-prod-wielding Sergeant Coyle returning, albeit with some new voice-lines and behaviors.

Beyond the new content, they've overhauled two major game modes. Escalation Therapy (a series of increasingly tough back-to-back challenges that continue until you finally drop) now has weekly leaderboards built around static challenges. Invasion (the game's relatively recent PvP mode) shifts the impostor players' goal towards disrupting the team rather than outright murdering them. The patch removed their default disguise in favor of making it an optional perk and gives players a better chance to resist the extra troublemaker.

Season 7 for The Outlast Trials is live now, and the normally £33.50/$40 game is currently going cheap with a 70% discount running until July 21st. As good a time to start as any! I also feel I should mention that all of the DLC for The Outlast Trials is purely cosmetic, with plenty unlockable through normal play.