Look Outside

The most powerful status effect you can ever have is to be Unemployed

[b]Look Outside[/b] [b]Developer[/b]: Francis Coulombe [b]Publisher[/b]: Devolver Digital [b]Introduction[/b] ========== This game surprised me like no other game ever has. I found it randomly on Bluesky, from a post by the developer. I have no idea how that post got onto my feed (maybe a repost by a follower?) but I'm glad it did. I think it was some pixel art the dev had made, and the style and incredible detail of it drew my eye. Looking at his profile I found a Steam Store link to the game, and at the price it was asking I couldn't say no. $10 is an absolute steal for this. Look Outside is a horror RPG, where you play as Sam - a normal guy in an apartment building just trying to live his life. At the beginning of the game, Sam wakes up and is greeted by his neighbor from a hole in the wall. Apparently this building is in a state of much disrepair. The neighbor suggests you go look outside your window. You can go look if you want, but that's the quickest ending you can get (and an achievement). If you wait a bit though, the voice will finally say "wait...no, don't look" as crazy things have been going on outside of the building. Your neighbor goes on to say that they heard that whatever's going on should pass in about 15 days, so your major goal is to survive inside the building for 15 days, without looking outside for any reason. Okay, cool. Neat premise that presents a huge mystery that piques your curiosity. It drives you to WANT to know what's outside, and if you did look and catch that fast ending, you'll definitely want to learn more. For the remainder of this review, I will do my best to not spoil anything. [b]Gameplay[/b] ========== Look Outside features a pretty simple gameplay loop. Sam wakes up every morning and is presented with several choices. He can cook food, play video games, do crossword puzzles, or muster up his courage and explore the building. You're free to do whatever you please, even if you just want to stay in the apartment. But you won't learn anything that way. Occasionally while in your apartment, you'll hear a knock at your door. Looking through the peephole will give you a little preview of who is at the door, but it's greyed out, ambiguous. As a general rule I'll advise you to exercise caution with answering your door, however this is one way to recruit new characters to live with you and join your party, which makes exploring the building easier. Stepping out of your apartment is where things get interesting. As the days pass, more and more rooms in the building become available to access, and you are free to go explore. Each room has a general theme, and you'll quickly figure it out. You'll meet interesting characters as well as enemies. You'll find items and equipment to help you survive. You'll find food and other items to help keep Sam's spirits up, which do have an effect on his overall well being. When you're done exploring, you should return to your apartment to rest and get a chunk of EXP based on how long you were out. This is shown with a gauge at the bottom of the screen as you're exploring. The longer you're out, the more danger your in, and the more EXP you get. Stay out too long, and powerful terrifying enemies begin to appear. Be careful!! When you finally engage in combat, you'll find it's a very simple turn-based system. You choose actions for your party, and then those actions (as well as your opponent's) play out. Each character you recruit has their own special abilities that makes them stand out, but not all are created equal. However, a full party is better than Sam being alone to face the horrors of what awaits him. Depending on your choices, you'll end up at one of several endings. If you paid attention during the game and explored everything you could get to, you may have deduced what's going on outside, and that revelation is at the center of every ending. Therefore, I will not say here and spoil it for you. You'll have to play and discover it for yourself! [b]Graphics[/b] ========== I've watched some of the dev's streams, where he works on the art of this game and one of his other projects, and I have to say he's one of the best pixel artists I've ever seen. He nails the vibe of the game perfectly with everything he draws. The designs are interesting and creative, and they just ooze charm. I was super impressed with the work he did on this game, and the attention to detail and dedication he's shown really shines in this game. Bosses are where you'll be impressed the most. Also terrified. Very terrified. And maybe grossed out, as there is a lot of body horror in this game. It's extremely well done though. [b]Sound and Music[/b] ========== I absolutely love the soundtrack for this game. It's perfect. It easily sets the tone and vibes for everywhere you go in the apartment building. Whether that's making the player uneasy or cautious, or trying to invoke fear, anxiety, or even panic. It's top-notch. I always say that the soundtrack of a game is more than half of the immersion. One of my favorite tracks is "Vacant". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtPScDUKO-o Another is "Ride to Hell", which is actually a boss theme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV7aw2irkFI Speaking of, that boss was the most amazing and memorable experience!!! I'll never forget how that fight, this music, and the writing for it made me feel. [b]Performance[/b] ========== I had zero issues with this game, and it ran perfectly. No crashes, no frame loss, no input lag, nothing. I played full screen and with a controller, which was plug n play and worked perfectly without any tedious setup. Being an RPG Maker game, I don't foresee anyone really having any issues running Look Outside. [b]Final Thoughts[/b] ========== I am SO glad I stumbled upon this game. It was one of the best gaming experiences I had in 2025. I'd rank it in the Top 5 of games I played last year, alongside Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Kingdoms of the Dump (which Francis also worked on!!!), Expedition 33, and Visions of Mana. If you like RPGs, or horror games, you need to try out Look Outside. For the price it goes for, you really have nothing to lose! [b]Final Verdict:[/b] ========== A Must Play

I tried to love this game. I really did. I loved the idea behind the plot but the gameplay is just unbearable. Why can’t I save? I play for an hour, then lose all my progress because there’s no save option. So you start over, play another two hours and then you suddenly die for some random nonsensical reason and the devs make you start all over again. They respect neither your time nor your sanity. I like the atmosphere but I’m not going to waste countless hours just to lose everything and start from scratch. That’s not fun. And on top of that the game is really boring. The fanbase doesn’t help either. They always jump in to defend it like fanatics.

Fantastic RPG with sometimes frustrating level design, but all its positives make up for it. To get the criticism out of the way: I don't like the progression path of Floor 1 -> Landlord's Apartment -> Sewers -> Meat World, it is a wild chain of labyrinthine map designs, each progressively more annoying to fully clear than the one before it. I understand having one map that is a pain to navigate but four of them back to back, that's too much. Everything else about them -like art direction, sound design, enemies, rewarding exploration- that's all fine, I am talking strictly about level design. With that said, that's my only real criticism of LO, everything else could be considered a nitpick. The atmosphere is incredible. Interesting set pieces, scripted and random events, and sound design all blend together to create many creepy scenarios. I do wish the initial sense of mystery you start with -where you don't have a concrete idea of what is going on- could last longer than an hour at most. As it is, the game makes it abundantly clear very early on that what you see is what you get. The art design is fantastic. Lovely pixel art and body horror that is often mixed with goofy elements to lighten the vibe, that makes running into new enemies so much fun. I was so surprised with just how many unique designs there are, it would've been so easy for the devs to just recolor existing assets, bump their stats a bit and call them "new content" like all RPGs do but no, there's a constant stream of unique encounters all the way to the end of the game and I appreciate that. Lots of variety in how you can play, NPCs to interact with and combat that can often be skipped to unlock new companions. immersive features like needs like Hunger and Sleep, there is time management and many different playstyles and goals you can pursue, most of which lead to different quirky endings. You can straight up ignore the apocalypse by waiting out the 15 days in your apartment - just eat, sleep, play video games, do crossword challenges, meet people through door encounters and more. Speaking of variety, here comes my favorite thing about Look Outside - the "fake" endings. Game over screens in Look Outside are quite elaborate, with neat ending slides and narration. There are so many of them that you can run into, even as early as the start of a playthrough. Being a little too curious, giving hugs to questionable individuals, messing with photographers, being taken for a car ride, enjoying crosswords a bit too much, reading things you shouldn't and just so much variety in how your journey can end. The combat is very standard turn-based stuff although I will say, it can be annoying at times. The "Stunned" affliction doesn't even work most of the time, enemies attack and cast skills even through it, especially bosses. It feels kind of cheesy at times when your characters can't do the same. Still, the overall experience is fun. The soundtrack is amazing. Eric Shumaker and Noncollision Obj have done an outstanding job, so much so that I had to look up their other works - for anyone interested, unfortunately Noncollision seems to be a fake alias, the composer opted for anonymity. While I can appreciate Eric Shumaker's bops, Non's tracks lean heavily into theming - Iron Crown, Beautiful but Wrong, Dissociation etc. all have such a unique sound to them that somehow fits their encounters perfectly, very impressive work. All in all amazing game with level design that can be fairly frustrating at times but everything else more than makes up for it. At 10€ this bad boy is a steal, this could easily be double the price and still be worth it.

This game is beautiful in every sense. The art direction is beautiful. The writing is beautiful. The music is beautiful. The sound effects are beautiful. The gameplay is simple, yet contextually beautiful. Please, do yourself a favor and play Look Outside. Experience this beautiful, lovecraftian, yet deeply human game.

Since I am only 2 achivements away from 100%-ing this game I thought I'd finally leave a review. If you are in any way on the fence about giving this game a try, I cannot express enough how much you should absolutely go for it. The art, the story, the characters, the dialogue, the game mechanics, are all just perfect. I've been playing this game non-stop since I got it and I am going to be genuinely upset when I have completed everything (which will be very soon...) because this game has filled every gap of spare time I've had for the last however long it's been since I bought it. A 10/10 Gem, you'd be a fool to skip this game.

I beat Look Outside last night. I think it's excellent, and it's so full of clever ideas that I think junior RPG devs should really take a close look at it First, it's a bottle game. The whole thing takes place in one apartment building. Immediately gives the game a contained framework for everything that's going to happen that plays right into the (fantastic) story that's unfolding around you. There are five floors, and access to each is unlocked as the player explores. Each floor has several rooms, and these rooms have been mutated so that there's a wide range of "biomes" within the apartment. These rooms are like mini-dungeons, with their own unique monsters, items, and sometimes puzzle gimmicks to figure out. There's a room that's overgrown with plants, a room that is full of frozen blocks, a room that's flooded, a room that's populated by sentient paintings, a room full of teeth, a room of taxidermy creations. These aren't single screen rooms, they're elaborate but not exhausting layouts. The story, which entails a mysterious force outside that transforms anything that perceives it, leads to creative monsters and equally creative party members. There's about 12 recruitable party members, and they are all unique in interesting ways. Each one has a unique way of talking (not in the Chrono Cross way, in a Chrono Trigger way) so they build character every time they talk. They bring their uniqueness into battle, with each member usually having a mechanic specific to them. My final party consisted of the main character Sam (who learns abilities by playing video games), Joel (8 year old teeth monster who gains max HP by landing the killing blow on enemies), Dan (video game streamer who switches between calm (healing) and irate (damage) modes, and gains bonuses based on his current viewers), and Morton (a junk seller with a large vocabulary that I hooked up with a book of spells). That junk seller was more of a character than Amarant from FFIX was. I followed a guide for the "good" ending, and I left a ton of meat on this bone. Several rooms I just never explored because I got filtered by the first encounter and I didn't need what was inside. Areas called "Rat Hell" and "Meat Hell" that I didn't discover or didn't explore. Bosses I walked around. Party members I never saw, and companion quests I never triggered. I got an S rank at the end, but it's really interesting to know that I could play this again and have a different enough experience that it wouldn't be a waste of time I’m really glad I pushed through the first few hours where I didn’t know anything and everything was scary.

I'll be honest, I've had an unfair bias against RPG Maker games. I always felt they were a cheaper product in some regard, and didn't have the potential to be great. whether it was reused sprite/textures or GUI, they all felt so same-y to me. This game has proved me very wrong. The amount of detail and effort put into every aspect of this game is honestly unbelievable. All of the custom sprites and textures look perfect for the theme of the game. The soundtrack for the game is one of my all time favorites. (I even purchased it on steam, not to just listen to, but as a way to throw more money at the developer.) The story is one of the most compelling I have experienced probably since expedition 33. (I'm serious.) After playing through all 13 endings, I just wish I could experience it for the first time again. This game can come off as a pretty goofy, light hearted horror game at times, but the deeper story and concept leads to a much darker place. The short of it; It's Cosmic Horror. You're Sam. You're an average gamer dude. Everything outside is nuts. You live in a 3(4) story apartment. You have 15 days to survive and work towards an ending. Plenty of interesting party members to recruit. Maintain your hunger, social skills, hygiene, and morale. Craft items. Play more video games. Answer the door. SAVE YOUR GAME. I don't want to spoil anything so I won't say anymore. Anyways, if any of this sounds interesting to you; Buy this game. You won't regret it.