Never underestimate the frightening powers of grainy grayscale images and ethereal sounds. Outdoor parties asks: “What if I spybut in an alien hell dimension?”, and it’s incredibly confusing despite the fact that nothing is really happening at any given moment. It emphasizes atmosphere, to great effect. It’s the Playdate horror game I’ve been waiting for.
Adams Immersive Outdoor parties is a sort of treasure hunt through a massive image of a realm called the Outer, which can only be visited by astral travel, according to tradition. There are many unknowns about what and where it actually is, although explorers have mapped it quite extensively through out-of-body excursions and have encountered thousands of different entities there, including the spirits of the dead. As a player, you’ve come across a Hellscryer K5 – the communications device, psychic camera and recorder used for these journeys – and now you’re looking through the mission logs, getting drawn into the mystery of it all. Think of the K5 as your Playdate, except it’s powered by blood and runes.
In the center of Outdoor parties is a 1.44 gigapixel 360-degree panoramic HDR image that contains dozens of strange hidden scenes: skeletons of human, animal and paranormal origin; figures in frightening robes and occult symbols carved all around; what appear to be fountains and rivers of blood; a Stonehenge of teeth. These are the targets you’re meant to track down, and as you refine them and check them off your list, the voice cues attached to each one will reveal more and more of the explorer’s haunting story.
But this is by no means a simple “find the object” puzzle game. When you first look at the enlarged photo, it looks like a static television strip with heavily shaded areas. You can zoom in up to 64x magnification to see specific areas better, but you also need to adjust the image brightness using the crank to improve the clarity of objects. Making it lighter or darker will reveal more objects in some places while obscuring others. There are 150 targets according to the developer, which should take players between 10 and 20 hours to complete. I’ve been working on this for hours and I still have a lot left to find. (If you are stuck, you can turn to the helpful service target search page, which provides advice with varying degrees of specificity.)
Meanwhile, as you’re hunched over your Playdate, laser-focused on the screen to find targets buried in a sea of fluff, unsettling audio transmissions come in and out, disturbing images flash on the screen at random, and a constant atmospheric hiss plays in your ear. The sound design in this game is seriously awesome – it’s worth playing for that alone, not to mention all the other cool stuff. From the start page, to the menus where you’ll find snippets of a background story, to the creepy clips of people crying and reciting numbers in a menacing manner, the sounds of Outdoor parties It’s a truly immersive and mind-blowing experience that I wouldn’t have previously thought possible during a Playdate. It really is something special.
Outdoor parties also comes with a screensaver which once again makes me want the Playdate Stereo Dock. Access the Void Monitor, sit back and enjoy the horrific sights and sounds from outside.
