Look Outside: A Game That Punishes Your Curiosity

Eyeballs, teeth, social media, and rat people all join together as the most terrifying cosmic horror experience in Look Outside.

Developed by Francis Coulombe and released in March of 2025, Look Outside is a single-player turn-based horror game that punishes your curiosity. It's available to play on Steam and Windows and takes roughly ten hours to play. 

Carmella Vitel and Elizabeth May- video game and horror enthusiasts- join forces to venture into the darkness of Look Outside. A game that gives introverts a reason to stay inside.

Look Outside combines two styles of games that we’ve never seen combined before: survival horror and turn-based role-playing game (RPG). 

The player is trapped in an apartment complex, with limited supplies, monstrous enemies they must confront, and strange inhabitants to encounter (or not, your choice). It's the player’s job to try and uncover the mystery of what’s happening and what’s the source of why they can’t look outside. They have 15 days to do so.

Look Outside centers around a wide-eyed character named Sam by default- the player can change the name if they wish. Sam wakes one morning to his curtains drawn and an eerie glow coming from outside. His neighbor (Sybil) urges him to look outside, before quickly changing their mind and telling him not to. This game only has one rule- don’t look outside. 

If you’re an achievement hunter or want to get an early glimpse at what exactly happens when you do look outside before you face the horrors indoors, feel free to take a peek beyond your bedroom curtains.

Much like real life, Sam tries to consult social media or the news to learn what is happening, only for there to be no concrete evidence. Doing so gives Sam a hilarious change to his stats that increases his anxiety levels. Anxiety isn’t a skill that directly affects your gameplay, but it’s an accurate representation of social media nonetheless. 

Look Outside is pretty much confined to the floors of the apartment complex, but the strange occurrences are happening at a global scale. We would recommend going into Look Outside blind so you can experience the mysteries firsthand. Look Outside focuses its horror on cosmic horror and body horror.

Sam learns that whatever is outside is causing horrific changes to the people inside, but who’s to say you’re being told the truth? The uncertainty of what’s true or not is played on the whole game, leaving the player unsure of who to trust or what facts to believe. The game hardly ever offers guidance when deciding if another character is friendly or not. The choices the player makes determine whether they live or see that glorious game-over screen. 

For many, the first time they see that game-over screen is when they listen to the title and look outside. The game-over screen showcases how beautiful pixelated art can be with a splash of color that contrasts the dark environments.  

The game builds most of its narrative through dialogue and the writings you can discover in rooms, meaning you only learn as much as you dare to. Every character and enemy brings something new to the table, and nearly every location in the apartment building has something to add to the narrative. 

Each section of the game has differently themed enemies. When you first load in, you encounter a lot of eyeball monsters, and then later on, you encounter teeth and rodent-based enemies. Even further on, you encounter an artist and his beautifully terrifying personifications of emotions. 

Eyeball horror seems to be coming to the spotlight again, especially with games like Mouthwashing. Which initially led us to believe this game wouldn’t be anything special, or bring new scares to the table. But Look Outside proved us wrong.

Look Outside has a lot of impressive new concepts that embody traditional video game horror while putting a fresh spin on things to stand out from other recent releases.

It's important to manage your supplies and use them wisely, because they are limited. You can purchase food and healing items from other survivors or loot them from new locations. Like most games of the survival horror genre, supplies dwindle fast. Healing items never stay in your inventory long. 

The only truly safe place in Look Outside is Sam’s apartment. The apartment offers the ability to save your progress. It’s also the place where you can craft items for your adventures, cook food to recover your health points (HP) and stamina for battles, play games on your TV to learn hidden skills, or maintain Sam’s happiness and hygiene to avoid negative effects from being too sad or stinky.

You’re only allowed to save your game after a certain amount of in-game time has passed, adding an additional reason to leave your apartment and explore. The longer you explore outside of your apartment, the more experience you get, which allows you to level up Sam and party members, which could be compared to Pokémon.

There’s a large cast of companions to accompany Sam on his worst two weeks ever. From residents who glanced outside and turned into monsters yet maintain a shred of their humanity, other survivors, and a rodent that the game affectionately calls Rat Baby Thing, there’s something lurking around every corner. 

The pacing of Look Outside is one of the reasons we kept playing; it felt as though we were always being presented with a new monster, environment, scare, or story beat.

There are eight different endings, which encourage you to play again, as well as different choices and dialogue you can choose throughout the game. Which makes replaying a must.

A downside to Look Outside is that the battles are kind of basic (as we find some turn-based games to be) and get boring after a few of them. There was an attempt made to make it more interesting by having party members have different, unique abilities.

The creature design makes up for the boring battles. Whatever is outside has warped the inhabitants into gross and interesting creatures. One person has scissors growing from their face, and Joel, one of the companions you can get, has three rows of teeth.

The audio design brings the environments to life. From ambient hallway noise to footsteps in the distance, it's perfect. The soundtrack isn’t afraid to shine and take all your focus, but then knows when to fade back and suit the atmosphere. 

Look Outside is a relatively short game that manages to accomplish a lot. From grotesque creatures to psychological trickery, Look Outside crawls under your skin and latches onto your darkest fears.

Our Rating: