DreadOut 2

My first hour with DreadOut 2 felt like discovering a handwritten letter from a culture that doesn't usually get to tell its own ghost stories in this medium. Digital Happiness, a small studio out of Bandung, Indonesia, built this sequel around the specific weight of Southeast Asian urban legend, and that cultural grain runs through every enemy design and every shadowed corridor. The Kuntilanak, the Gore Surgeon, the possessing spirits that haunt the game's 'Lil Town hub - these aren't reskins of Western horror tropes. They arrive with their own rhythm, their own rules, and a quiet confidence that comes from a team depicting their own folklore rather than borrowing someone else's. The core loop inherits the Fatal Frame DNA of its predecessor but pushes outward in several directions at once. Linda's IrisPhone remains her primary tool against intangible spirits: raise it, hold the shutter for a charged blast, use the flash to stun and reposition. But the sequel introduces a second ghost type entirely. Physical, corpse-like enemies are immune to photography and force Linda into melee combat, grabbing whatever weapon the environment offers, whether a fire axe or thrown projectile. Stun one with the camera first and a high-damage finisher opens up, a small but satisfying rhythm. Between the horror set-pieces sits a semi-open hub town that operates almost like a breath of air: talk to the landlady, pick up side quests from Professor Mona's urban legend documentation project, or just wander through the quiet streets before the next nightmare pulls you back in. That structure, quiet town followed by contained horror act, genuinely works. Each act shifts its setting and survival logic enough that you are rarely doing the same thing twice. One chapter punishes combat and rewards hiding inside a pile of corpses. Another opens into a Silent Hill-style world-flip where the same classroom becomes a gore-drenched nightmare version of itself. Where DreadOut 2 frays is in the gap between its ambition and its budget. Enemy AI clips through doorways with enough frequency to block progression, and a forced checkpoint reload is baked into the pause menu as the apparent fix. The spirit photography targeting window is tighter than it should be. Some areas of the hub feel underpopulated, as if the team ran out of time to finish filling them. The ending arrives abruptly, leaving narrative threads unresolved in a way that feels less like intentional mystery and more like a hard stop at the edge of the available funds. Rock Paper Shotgun called it "the best game you missed in February 2020" and there's truth in that backhanded compliment. It was underseen and it is imperfect. That said, the Steam user score sitting at 74% positive across nearly 1,800 reviews reflects something accurate: a game made with genuine care that punches above its weight class on atmosphere and creature design, held back by technical roughness rather than creative failure. If you play horror primarily for the feeling of encountering something unfamiliar, for the specific dread of not knowing what the next room's rules will be, DreadOut 2 delivers that in concentrated form across its six-to-eight hour runtime. It knows what it is. It just needed a larger safety net to finish the job cleanly.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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