I remembered crying children being dragged away to the principal for praying wrong. I remembered being struck by teachers for not saying "God bless you" instead of "bless you" in Catholic school. Suddenly, it rushed back in fits and starts. Until I was forced to contend with teachers that abuse children and lie to their parents under the pretense of religion. Until I found myself back in the halls of a Catholic school. those were buried until I played this game. But the specific memories, the root of it all. It was the sort of stuff that had always been kicking around in my subconscious, leading me down routes of addiction, self-harm, and extreme depression. You see, playing Outlast 2 reawakened much of the trauma I had from my stint in Catholic school and my years in church. At least, it didn't to me, because everything this game has to say about how organized religion gaslights, exploits, and sometimes kills kids. However, while the game is undeniably filled with some gnarly imagery and grim thematic content, Outlast 2 doesn't ever feel exploitative. It's bleak stuff - to the point where many critics balked at the subject matter. Jessica's death is made to look like a suicide, with the whole world never knowing the real story behind her death. Loutermilch threatens Blake, and makes him promise to not speak a word of it. Blake, having heard her screams as he left, rushes to the scene, only the find the corpse of his best friend and implied crush. In the struggle, she tumbles down the staircase and breaks her neck. Father Loutermilch is taking Jessica upstairs to sexually abuse her, and she resists. This culminates in one of the game's most disturbing sequences. Meanwhile, Blake can only watch from the sidelines, knowing that the abuse is happening, but unable to actually do anything about. As players discover throughout the game, Loutermilch is taking advantage of the abused and exploited girl in private, then playing her off as a weak, touchy child. Related: At Its Best, The Last Of Us Part II Is A Chilling Depiction Of The Cycle Of Abuseīut that library study is overseen by one of Jessica's biggest sources of trauma - a teacher by the name of Father Loutermilch. She tries to escape her abusive father through online Christian support groups, but the people there tell her to "talk to her teachers." Those same teachers exclude her from field trips and gym classes because she's "too sensitive," due to the copious amounts of trauma inflicted on her, and force her into mandatory library study. Through these recollections, players begin to witness the slow mental unraveling of Jessica as her parents and teachers fail her repeatedly. In these flashbacks, the protagonist relives his memories of spending time with his childhood friend, Jessica Gray, in Catholic school. This is why, three years later, I still hold Outlast 2 in the highest regard.īreaking up the narrative are a series of flashbacks to Blake's upbringing. Catholicism becomes goofy cults with hokey leaders that trade in ambiguous non-speak that don't accurately depict the things about it that are actually damaging. When religion is presented as an evil thing, it's often turned into some hokey approximation of the actual thing. Unfortunately, this particular type of psychological damage isn't dealt with enough in media. Most of the time, people just repress it and put it on their own kids. By the time they're old enough to forget it, they've been taught self-destructive methods of thought that take years and years of therapy to unearth and grapple with - if they even get that far. That's the terror of making children active participants in certain branches of organized Christianity, isn't it? You're taking a still-forming brain and exposing it to all sorts of negative ideas about guilt, shame, penance, what have you.
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