Outliver: Tribulation Review – A fascinating mess

Outliver: Tribulation is a mixed bag of a game that plays a weird tug of war with your expectations. It is seeped in amateurish development, simultaneously being frustrating to play yet difficult to put down. While by no means the best game ever, Outliver: Tribulation is perhaps the most interesting game I’ve ever reviewed and one that I personally find hard to score.

Outliver: Tribulation is a story-driven survival horror action game created by GBROSSOFT using the Unreal Engine. The team that worked on the game is incredibly small, with no more than a handful of names present in the game’s end credits. Unfortunately, this amateurishness certainly shows in the game itself.

One of the most noticeable areas where this is evident is the underwhelming user interface. The interface is incredibly basic and lacks polish. The map is a bit confusing at first, but eventually becomes serviceable once you come to understand it, though it still isn’t great. Overall, the UI is unexciting, if useable, with objects such as ancient text carved into stone displayed on screen as a white box with solid black text.

Whether it’s the character movements or the enemy behaviors, the animations can feel clunky and unnatural. This lack of fluidity detracts from the immersive experience the game aims to provide. In boss fights specifically, these issues become even more problematic. Readability in boss attacks is generally fine, but actions such as dodging become a hazard as the animations simply have too many frames of build-up before they actually go through. The worst is picking up ammo during a fight, which should be a simple action, but becomes a hazard due to the animations’ duration and the way it freezes you in place, resulting in unexpected deaths.

It is essential for players to have clear audio cues to anticipate and react to incoming boss attacks. Unfortunately, due to a lack of proper implementation, these warnings sometimes fail to play when you attack the boss. This oversight can lead to you being caught off guard easily, failing to dodge an attack that otherwise would have been telegraphed.

Every survival horror game provides you with the tools to defeat bosses, even when they have stringent ammo restrictions that require you to be stingy with every bullet. However, boss fights in Outliver: Tribulation don’t always spawn with enough ammo – meaning you can find yourself totally unable to beat a boss if you miss some shots. This happened to me twice.

Poorly mixed audio elements can be distracting, taking you out of the game’s atmosphere. Certain audio cues are hard on the ears, which can lead to discomfort and negatively impact the overall experience. This was especially evident when picking up certain objects, or the screaming sound of an early boss, which for some reason had an ear-ringing sound tacked on to the end of it that really bothered me.

All of that could be enough to dissuade most players from picking up the game. Heck, if you’re already clicking off the review, I don’t blame you. However, despite all of the game’s problems being super apparent, there was something about Outliver that made it hard to put the game down and kept me playing way longer than many other games with the same issues would have.

Despite its problems, lackluster features, and amateurish design, Outliver: Tribulation has a strong sense of passion put into its development that you don’t feel in many games these days. I was initially super off-put by a lot of the game’s problems and presentation, but as I kept playing the problems began to bother me less and the amateurish design felt more like charm. I actually had fun.

One of the places where Outliver: Tributations managed to capture me was with the game’s setting.

The story follows Bolanle Gboyega, a soldier in the Nigerian armed forces tracking a group of Boko Haram when she finds herself trapped in a cave-in. As she ventures deeper into the cave, she finds herself mysteriously transported to the Realm of Tribulation, a mystical place of the Yoruba people. Here, she finds she must prove herself as a warrior through harrowing trials if she wants to return home.

In what other game have you seen a plot like that? Outliver: Tribulation is seeped in African culture, and while I’m admittedly no expert on the subject, it all feels authentic and presented with a great amount of care and interest from the developers. The unique setting and lore give the game a truly unique and creative feeling that sucked me in past my initial problems with the game.

The writing is far from bad, with interesting pieces of lore to discover as you trek through the admittedly nice-looking ancient temple. This game is a monument to the power of the Unreal Engine, as the whole thing looks incredibly nice despite the small team behind it. I was especially fond of the boss stages, where the walls of the underground temple opened up into a starry night’s sky, reminding you that you are in a mystical and strange place where the laws of men don’t apply.

As I got sucked into the game, it became easier to ignore the problems and I became more engrossed in the lore and the gameplay, which is sort of like a Resident Evil type game with a dodge system. The feeling I got beating a boss after a bunch of tries was amazing. This may be because I felt an extra sense of accomplishment some of the game’s bugs put on the encounter.

More than anything, I think Outliver: Tribulation shows that a good idea can take you incredibly far with the tools available to indie developers now. If the game just had a little more time in development, I think a lot, if not all of my problems with it would completely disappear. I’m not sure why it was released in the state it is, perhaps due to time or budget constraints, but a little more time in the oven could easily take this game from a 5 to a 7. Another year or two in development, and Outliver could probably contend with some triple-A titles.

Outliver: Tribulation was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Outliver: Tribulation is available on Steam and Epic Games.