Female gamers abandoning Outlast Trials over ‘disturbing’ sexually violent update

It's messed up.

Mother Gooseberry standing outside a door with her hand puppet in The Outlast Trials.

Outlast and The Outlast Trials is known for its disturbing and horrific scenes—and that’s exactly why female gamers are abandoning the horror title, after a new September update added highly disturbing sexual violence and degradation against women.

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In the latest gameplay update for The Outlast Trials, which went live on Sept. 11, players get to experience new events and challenges. While it sounds harmless enough, it’s anything but: So much so that one player took to Reddit to share a warning with fellow gamers about the triggering and gross content, which includes the torture, forced impregnation, and rape of the female characters. Players are calling this “peak levels of disturbing.”

A dark room with cages in the outlast trials
Poison the Cattle is the second MK Challenge. Image via Red Barrels.

The Outlast Trials challenges with the most disturbing content involve the new MK-Challenges: Empty the Vault and Poison the Cattle. In the first challenge, you must steal from a vault, and in the second, you must poison cattle to spoil their milk.

What these challenges don’t tell you that you’ll see is that there’s a box filled with baby bottles in the vault where the bottles have plastic teats replaced with women’s nipples that have seemingly been ripped away. On the other level, the “cattle” you’re tasked with poisoning are two women who are being milked into a large vat, which implies they were either fed drugs to be able to lactate or they were raped and forcibly impregnated. Both of these options are horrific, and the shocking discovery across the two Outlast Trials maps has led players to call this update “vile.”

Seeing as The Outlast Trials is a horror game, it was bound to have awful content, like blood and gore; everything expected in a game in its genre. This is a step too far though, players are saying today, with many suggesting the developers are including such disturbing content for the shock value and that they’re just glorifying violence.

The Outlast Trials is disturbing and the violence (against men and women) is nauseating. So it’s not surprising to see many players will be avoiding the game entirely, me included.

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Hayley Andrews
Hayley Andrews is a staff writer for Dot Esports with a dual degree in business and human resource management. After discovering her passion for creative writing and gaming, she now writes about MOBAs, MMOs, and cozy games.