How far is too far for a horror game? It is the question every studio in the genre eventually faces, and for Red Barrels — the Montreal team behind the Outlast series — it arrived in the most uncomfortable way possible: as an internal argument about a single, notorious scene in the first game.
Speaking to PC Gamer, co-founder Philippe Morin revealed which moment in Outlast’s grim asylum nearly didn’t survive development, and how the studio decides where the line sits.
The Scene That Started the Arguments
“The first thing that got us debating was the necrophiliac scene in the first Outlast,” Morin said. “We had a lot of conversations about do we do it? Are we going too far with this? And how does it make sense in this environment? That was a heated conversation.”
Players who made it through 2013’s debut know the moment well. Deep inside the abandoned Mount Massive Asylum, investigative journalist Miles Upshur stumbles upon an inmate engaged in an act of necrophilia. It is brief, awful and impossible to forget — and according to Morin, that shock was precisely the point. “We felt like we needed something that’s going to make people think that anything can happen in this game,” he explained.
The Line That Turned the Scene Around
What rescued the moment from pure provocation, in the team’s eyes, was a writing decision by lead writer J.T. Petty: letting the inmate turn on the player with the words “You like to watch? You’re fucked up!”
“That was a really nice spin because it turned things around. Because obviously, yes, the player is making the choice to watch.” — Philippe Morin, Red Barrels
The accusation lands on the person holding the controller, not just the character on screen — a trick that converts a gratuitous shock into a comment on why any of us watch horror at all.
Where the Studio Finally Drew the Line
Morin could recall only one other scene that generated comparable debate, and it happened far more recently, during development of live-service sequel The Outlast Trials. The question: what to do with children in trials like Grind the Bad Apples and Punish the Miscreants.
“Do we make them mannequins, or do we have actual characters? At the end of the day it’s a bunch of polygons moving. But you know, in the player’s mind, it’s not the same thing,” Morin said. “That was probably where we found our limit. Like, no, let’s stick with mannequin kids, and not go too far with that.”
It says something about the medium that the two most debated scenes in Outlast history are not the ones players quote most. The finger amputation and Whistleblower’s Groom sequence are the moments burned into memory — yet neither triggered the kind of soul-searching the necrophilia scene and the mannequin children did. The line, for Red Barrels, is not about gore volume. It is about implication.
Conversations That Would End in HR
The studio’s method is deliberately social. Ideas get thrown around until the team’s own reaction signals the edge. “Sometimes if people feel like it’s alright, let’s keep pushing in that direction until maybe the reaction becomes a little too strong,” Morin explained. As Red Barrels grew from 20 people to 30 or 40 — most of them newcomers who never worked on the first two games — the studio had to formalise those instincts, holding frank conversations about what making this kind of content actually requires.
“There are many conversations that would take you to an HR office in other studios, but here it’s just part of our daily routine,” he joked. And the material does have a history of overwhelming even insiders: Morin has previously described a playtester who ran out of the studio in tears and never returned, and one new hire who resigned on their fourth day because the religious themes, rather than the gore, proved too much.
The philosophy is not new. Back in 2014, Morin told GamingBolt that “there’s only one way to find the limit and that’s by testing it” — a decade later, the necrophiliac scene and the mannequin children mark the two ends of exactly that experiment. One pushed through after the hardest argument in the studio’s history; the other stopped cold. Horror’s most uncomfortable moments, it turns out, are not accidents. They are negotiations.
