Review: Outbreak Endless Nightmares – PS5, PS4

Outbreak Endless Nightmares is supposed to be a Resident Evil style horror game with a fixed camera, awkward controls, and supernatural enemies. Sadly, Outbreak Endless Nightmares does not get a single thing right. It’s awful and I’m honestly surprised that the game has been released in this state.

To be clear – I got nowhere in this game. And by nowhere, I literally mean nowhere. I got into the game, mooched around the opening courtyard and managed to somehow shuffle myself inside the building before warping to another area (via a grand piano?) with spikes and monsters, but I didn’t make anything resembling progress. After ten minutes, I put the controller down and put my head in my hands and wondered aloud “how the hell am I supposed to review this?”

I can’t even play the bloody thing, so awful that it is. I fumbled around with the controls for a little while, trying to figure out how to make my poorly animated plastic doll character move around. I accidentally changed the perspective from a fixed camera to a more familiar over the shoulder and then to first-person. Neither mode could save the game because the controls are stuck in 1994.

Game Information
Release Date: May 19th, 2021
Developer: Dead Drop Studios LLC
Publisher: Dead Drop Studios LLC
Availability: PSN – Digital Only

Rather than putting the look controls on the right stick and the movement controls on the left stick, the game puts it all on the left stick, meaning that moving around is a massive pain in the arse and against everything we players have been taught over the last 20 years of third-person and first-person games. Oh, and should you actually get far enough to encounter a monster, good luck killing the thing because the aiming is, as you can probably imagine, atrocious.

I managed to get through about an hour of Outbreak Endless Nightmares before throwing in the towel. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, mind you, but after coming off the excellent Resident Evil Village, this was truly painful, and I know a lost cause when I see one.

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The game has some promise, mind you, and it is important to remember that this is coming from a solo developer. The graphics are halfway decent, so long as you don’t look at any characters and blink at the right time to avoid the horrendous screen-tearing. The horror setting is not original but it’s obvious the developer has put a lot of thought into the game’s story; it’s just a shame that it’s trapped behind a borderline unplayable mess of a game.

There are far better horror games that do what Outbreak wants to do, but better, and without the frustration. The game gets so many of the basics wrong, it would be funny if I didn’t feel bad for the guy behind it who is just trying to make a living doing what he loves. That said, there’s no way that I can recommend this game and unfortunately, it’s probably going to go down as one of – if not the worst game that I’ve played in recent memory

Review Disclaimer: This review was carried out using a copy of the game provided by the publisher. For more information, please read our Review Policy.

Primary version tested: PS5. Reviewed using PS5.