Content Warning: Sexual Assault, Child Abuse.
This article contains spoilers for Outlast II.
I grew up Christian.
Every night, I’d recite the Lord’s Prayer in fear of divine retribution.
I went to a private Catholic school where I was gaslit and physically abused by the teachers.
I lived in constant terror.
(WB/Red Barrels)
That’s the terror of making children active participants in certain branches of organized Christianity, isn’t it?
Most of the time, people just repress it and put it on their own kids.
The world keeps turning.
(WB/Red Barrels)
Unfortunately, this particular punch in of psychological damage isn’t dealt with enough in media.
This is why, three years later, I still holdOutlast 2in the highest regard.
Breaking up the narrative are a series of flashbacks to Blake’s upbringing.
(WB/Red Barrels)
This culminates in one of the game’s most disturbing sequences.
Father Loutermilch is taking Jessica upstairs to sexually abuse her, and she resists.
In the struggle, she tumbles down the staircase and breaks her neck.
Loutermilch threatens Blake, and makes him promise to not speak a word of it.
It’s bleak stuff - to the point where many critics balked at the subject matter.
But the specific memories, the root of it all… those were buried until I played this game.
Until I found myself back in the halls of a Catholic school.
Suddenly, it rushed back in fits and starts.
I remembered crying children being dragged away to the principal for praying wrong.
But these memories came back as snapshots - short, decontextualized bursts of trauma.
Those bursts, however, soon gave way to more vivid, coherent memories.
I was eight years old again, and I was talking to my church friend, Zachary.
I wanted to be there for him… as much as an eight-year-old can be.
In retrospect, I kinda had a crush on him.
But I was a boy at the time, and that was wrong.
That was a sin.
But when we rounded the corner into a dark, dead-end hall, he stopped us.
He looked around, nervous, then leaned in and whispered in my ear.
“Have you ever sucked a man’s penis?”
I felt ice run through my chest.
“Uh, y’know.
Like if a man asks you to put your mouth on him.”
I’m not gay."
“I-I’m not either!
I was just asking.”
“Have you?”
He looked around again.
“Someone around here.”
Zachary never brought it up again.
Outlast 2 brought this memory roaring back to life.
I realized that I had been in the same position as Blake.
I knew something bad was happening, but I didn’t ask enough - and I couldn’t.
I was a kid.
How are children supposed to process being told something like that, let alone having it happen to them?
Still, to this day, it sticks in my craw that I didn’t tell anyone anything.
That shame stood in the way of potentially getting somebody out of an abusive situation.
If you don’t listen to your preacher, then you’re not fearing God enough.
And if you’re not fearing God enough, you’re a sinner.
And if you’re a sinner, then you’re going to hell.
There’s no grey area, no comfortable middle ground.
Because he’s sinned.
And sinners go to hell.
This is precisely why Outlast 2 is a fantastic representation of religious abuse.
When the credits rolled on Outlast 2, I was shaken because I’d known a Jessica.
But watching Blake try and fail to tell the truth filled me with a new kind of resolve.
No matter what, I would never doubt a victim again.
I would never push them away when they were confiding in me.
And I would never hesitate to call out abuse for what it is.
Years of concentrated abuse in the church taught me to be quiet and look the other way.
To accept the word of my elders and never question them.
Now, I spend every single day trying to unlearn that programming.
I want to throw my weight behind them, to support and protect them.
Because if we do that, maybe there can be less Jessica Grays in the world.
Next:Thanks To Squadrons, I Have Forsaken The Flesh World And Ascended Into The Datasphere
